Once upon a time, believe it or not, we lived in a world that granted rare access to things considered special.

Once a year, my parents would take me and my brothers out for Chinese and my mother would wear her good coat and my father a tie, and the kids sat on one side of that booth on our best behavior, because eating at a table other than our own was a big deal. And everyone knew it.

A pack of gum at the checkout line? A big deal, or running to be first in line at an ice cream truck? Yes, a big deal, and so was a family vacation. That was the rarest treat of all.

No one bought a lot of stuff in my once upon a time. Kids got a few presents at Christmas and they were thrilled with them, and we’d sit playing with those Lincoln Logs or Easy Bake Ovens for an entire year, because it was incredibly novel to have something different in our lineup of things to do. We’d play with one toy until it was worn at the edges or stopped lighting up when we plugged it in.

My husband got a used bike when he was a kid, and his father sat up all night shining it up and putting a bell and streamers on the handlebars.

My husband loved that bike.

Three channels, one car, one coat, one TV: That’s the world I grew up in.

Which is why, when I visit my grandsons, I feel like I’ve run away to the land of plenty when the wheels on the plane touch down in Fort Lauderdale.

And it’s no slight to their incredible parents, because this is just the way the world is now, but it can’t be a good thing that there’s no such thing as special anymore.

My grandsons, like all their friends, have so many toys that they couldn’t possibly play with them all in one childhood. I picture the smokestacks heaving and choking in China just to create the things that fill their playroom.

“You are feeding a whole neighborhood in China,” I told my daughter, “maybe a whole town.”

The boys have to dig through tubs and tubs of parts just to find one thing, and most of the time, they give up.

“It’s lost,” one will say, looking up at me with big, round eyes, because in this world, they’re used to feeling overwhelmed. It might take forever to find one certain LEGO piece, or a hockey puck, or the Yellow Matchbox car with the blue stripe.

Like any modern family, there’s the ease of dining out and the family does it often, or if they’re tired of that, they take out and dine in.

I roasted a chicken while I was there and you’d think I’d pulled out a recipe from 1914. I didn’t serve it with little packets of ketchup and a toy for the end of the meal, so serving meat with a starch and a vegetable was akin to pulling up in a 1954 Chevrolet with an ashtray on the dashboard and no seatbelts.

In a child’s world in 2018 everyday and everything is special. I brought them each a Rocky Road candy apple, double dipped in chocolate and then adorned with nuts and fudge and marshmallow.

But when everyday feels like a candy apple to you, when someone actually brings you a candy apple it’s a big yawn.

“My other grandma gave me a $100 bill,” my seven-year-old grandson told me, not in an unappreciative tone, but because he couldn’t believe it himself.

My daughter and I spent one day making a gummy forest for the boys’ Halloween party. I tried to picture my mother doing the same thing for me 45 years ago, but my imagination failed me.

“What, prey tell, is a gummy forest?” I asked her.

That was after we went to the kids’ school where the day of treats began, and after an adorable parade down the hallways of the preschool wing, my attention fell on one single cupcake on a tray in the classroom.

In my day, no one would have left that cupcake sitting there-not when you only had a cupcake three, maybe four times a year. There would have been a gang of boys tackling one another for that cupcake, or a smart girl, absconding with it to a corner.

That cupcake got thrown away, just one cupcake in a long line of cupcakes those kids had had this month, at any number of skating parties, or bouncy house parties, or picnics at the zoo.

It was just another cupcake.

I suppose when there are actual cupcake shops everywhere you look, or the TV in your house is the size of a Winnebago, or you have so many Legos you could build a guesthouse out back for your grandmother…what’s so great about a cupcake?

The world is a different world than the one that we remember, ladies and gentleman.

A cupcake is like giving a kid a nickel.

And a nickel is now a $100 bill.