It's been weighing on me that we're entering a new decade, the "teen years" of the 21st century. Soon, we'll be solidly entrenched in this new millennium and the "1900s" will be ancient history, especially in my children's minds.

The changes my grandparents saw during the 20th century - from farm wagons to interstate and transcontinental highways, from transatlantic ships to transatlantic flights and the space shuttle, and from home gardens to microwavable dinners - seem impossible to top. Yet this morning I heard on NPR how Solaren is set to market solar energy from space by the year 2016. And yesterday the news from Britain was that checks (those pieces of paper that some of us still use to pay our bills) will be phased out by U.K. banks by the year 2018.

I could start to panic, wondering if my hard-earned wisdom and skills will be irrelevant in this new decade, but my parents' example is keeping me optimistic.

My mom has retired from architecture and construction management but has continued editing articles, helping manage our family business, and taking classes and learning new skills, including computers.

An engineer, architect and science journalist, my dad knows more about science than anyone I know. He's to scientific journalism what Clint Eastwood is to movie directing, a senior statesman doing cutting-edge work. About to turn 80, my dad just signed a contract with Telefonica (Latin America's Ma Bell) and launched a new science education Web site and blog, tomasenlinea.com where he explains scientific concepts and discoveries. (Unfortunately for most of my readers, it's in Spanish.) My dad has not become obsolete. On the contrary, he is using his experience learning from books and in hands-on classes to help a technologically savvy but theoretically ignorant generation understand how things work.

Apart from being a scientist, my dad is an excellent portrait artist. For several decades he sketched the family Christmas card, drawing each of us and sending family and friends an update of our growth and whereabouts. I have memories of being called to my dad's study to pose so he would get me just right when I was only 5 or 6 years old, way back in the 1960s.

In this new millennium the Unger family Tarjeta de Navidad (Christmas card) is assembled electronically from three continents. Where a '60s card might show a sketch of my brothers and me piled into the station wagon waving in front of our home, the current cards have pictures, including children and grandchildren sometimes travelling in what in our childhood we thought were mythical places. This Christmas my parents might be waving from a resort in Cuba, my youngest brother and his family from Ottawa or Newfoundland, the oldest from Spain, the Palmer-Ungers from Chapel Hill and Asheville and nephews and nieces from Peru, Germany and Ghana. All the pictures will be accompanied by e-mail addresses so friends and family can respond instantly to the news that the Unger-Palmer-Lafourcade-King-Avila family is still thriving.

In looking through the more than 40 years of the now inter-continental Unger Tarjeta de Navidad, I can see how fortunate I am. I'm a branch in a strong tree that has expanded boldly, sending shoots of optimistic immigrant-colonizers all over the world.

We do occasionally look back and retell the old stories that make us laugh and cry and wonder how our grandparents and parents survived us and the 20th century. But in the 21st century we also boldly go where no relative has gone before, into cyberspace and beyond.