Oh, To Be Young Again

Sometimes the hypothetical question comes up "if you could be any age again, how old would you want to be?" And every time I answer the same way "8, that was a very good year."
The year I was 20, I lived in the Kliq and started dating Mrs. Poop, and that was the most fun year, and in retrospect the most important.
The year I was 29, Chase was born, and that was the most exciting, amazing, life-changing year.
But both of those have something that age 8 did not, worry.
When you're 8 nothing matters. Girls were still icky so who cared if they didn't think I was cute. I didn't have a job or any bills to pay. Sure I had homework but I was the smartest kid in the class so the spelling and vocabulary words and math problems that taxed the brains of the mere mortals in my class were a breeze for me.
Here's how good things were for me when I was 8, when I got in trouble in school, which was often, my punishment was that I had to go sit in another teacher's classroom.
That other teacher was The Concierge's (and Nails's) mom.
The most important thing to me when I was 8 was the New York Mets.
I loved the Mets. I worshipped the Mets. I played outside and pretended I was the Mets, all of them. I pitched like Dwight Gooden, hit like Darryl Strawberry, and so intense was my devotion that I even pretended to field like Rafael Santana. You're never too young to appreciate the value of a slick-fielding shortstop.
I wrote the lineup in my notebook. I memorized the stats, which in those days were only printed in the newspaper, and the boxscores didn't have current batting averages or RBI totals you had to wait for Sunday to see that (unless there was a light day and Mets and Yankees totals were printed).
And on October 25, 1986 I stayed up late into the night to see the ball roll through Bill Buckner's legs.
And when it did, I jumped up and down on my parents bed and was the happiest kid in the whole world.
The fact that I was all-consumed with a team full of drug users, criminals and all around bad guys demonstrates the innocence I had at that age, and lost along the way.

I bring this up because currently there are young girls all across the country who are as consumed with something as deeply as I loved those Mets. The object of their affection is Hannah Montana.
They are sleeping on Hannah Montana sheets, they are listening to Miley Cyrus songs (they are catchy), they are wearing Hannah Montana wigs and they are watching youtube clips of Billy Ray Cyrus doing the achy-breaky (ok, no illogical hero worship extends that far), but they love Hannah and Miley.



They beg their parents to take them to Hannah concerts, tickets to which are impossible to get and incredibly expensive on the seconday market.
They scream when someone so much as mentions the name Hannah Montana.
And they stay kids just a little bit longer because of it.
In an age when young girls are looking up to sluts like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton (who is best known for having sex), the admiration of Miley is downright refreshing to me.
And these girls will all grow up and out of the Miley Cyrus phase and they'll still become teenage sluts in high school in a few years. And Miley will be forgotten about until 20 years from now when people will ask "what happened to Miley? Why wasn't she a bigger star?" the same way we ask now why the Mets didn't win more than one World Series in the 80s.
But for now I think the young girls and their idol worship is endearing and I hope that Miley doesn't end up in drug rehab like Gooden and Strawberry.