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In case you doubt that oldsters and youngsters inhabit separate planets, please walk a mile in my shoes at a recent family gathering.

A 30-something dad was careening around the living room, trying to catch up to his very young, newly mobile kids. Grandpa Bob was exerting himself by slumping on the couch and watching.

Young Dad deposited the kids with their mother and began to clean up scattered dirty dishes. I noticed a child’s empty bottle by my feet. I picked it up and tossed it to him.

“Air mail!,” I shouted.

As he caught it, he replied: “Air mail?”

He had never heard the expression. He had never known the distinction between surface mail and mail that travelled much faster through the skies.

For him, all mail is air mail, because planes had long ago outperformed trains and trucks throughout his lifetime.

But between 1925 and 1975, air mail was a gee-whiz product of innovation.

The first mail shipped by air was handled by private companies. No less than Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart were early pilots.

But this effort was hampered by two severe problems. One, planes kept crashing. Two, customers were reluctant to use air mail because it cost somewhere between twice and three times as much.

But once the U.S. Postal Service entered the air mail market, life got better for all concerned.

By the 1950s, planes crashed less often, and citizen mailers began to see that seven cents for an air mail stamp was a much faster option than three cents for a truck or a train.

Jokes about letters being delivered by Pony Express began to get stale. Letters were suddenly getting from East Coast to West in fewer than three days. Normal time: at least five.

In approximately the same era, international mail was surging, much of it in the form of aerograms.

These were ultra-thin, crinkly, fold-over-themselves blue sheets of paper. You couldn’t enclose anything in aerograms, but you could scrawl a whole bunch of words onto one 8-by-10 surface.

Aerograms, too, became more popular as they became more reliable.

When my mother lived in Africa in the 1960s, the choice was a zillion dollars for a scratchy phone call or a quarter for an aerogram. No choice at all.

But air mail had another massive benefit for former kids of my vintage. If we were stamp collectors — and I was a passionate one — the seven-cent air mail stamp from the 1950s was a treasure.

You could buy it in stunning red or bright blue. Either model showed a multi-engine jet, as viewed from the underside. I can recall being utterly captivated by the idea that these big birds covered the continent — with my thank-you notes to distant relatives safely aboard.

Although passenger travel by jet had become close to commonplace in the U.S. by 1965, the post office didn’t abandon air mail stamps — or surcharges — for another decade. As it did so, it promised that all mail would now travel for the lower, established rate — even mail that traveled by airplane. The postal people even promised that mail sent for three cents might get there more quickly than seven-cent mail once did.

Family gatherings can be difficult for many reasons. Political arguments. Kids who won’t stop whining. Dogs who demand to be walked just as dinner is coming out of the oven.

But I discovered a new way to be irritating.

I expounded to the harried 30-something father about how air mail was wind-in-the-hair exciting, how it promised more efficiency in the same way that V-8 car engines did, that I can well recall my first stamp collecting book, which had a seven-center right there on the first page.

Young Dad blinked at me a couple of times and said:

“I don’t know why you didn’t just send a text.”

It took me several seconds, jaw dropped open, to realize that he was kidding. It was his way of wanting to change the subject. Fair enough.

And yet …

Memo to the younger generation: Go ahead. Try to put a text message in a leather-bound album that you’ll keep and admire for ages.

I didn’t think so.

Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.