Best Of Youth

A co-worker, whose probably about 30 or 31, noted that his sister was about 5 years younger, which would put her at 25. When you are an older brother, and your younger sibling is younger by that many years, there's, I'm sure, a perception that she's your baby sister, someone much younger. When you go to school, you note she's 5 grades back, and that's a lot of years.

He was telling this to another co-worker, just out of college, and figuring that
he is 7 years older. This, of course, means his sister is two years older than the recent college graduate. It's just that, after you reach about your mid 20s, then you look about the same age for some ten years, provided you don't lose your hair.

I've long since gone through that phase with my own brother who is less than two years younger. Given that I'm pretty old, my brother is likewise old, and so this exercise in age difference is even further pronounced. I'm starting to be in the neighborhood of twice the age of the college kid, so I don't even make the comparisons to my brother's age as this is now starting to be trivially different from my age.

I've been watching tennis since I was just a teen, which is now around 30 years of tennis. New players come around all the time, even surprisingly good players. The new player of last year was one Novak Djokovic.

Djokovic (pronounced, as best I can muster, as Joe-ka-vitch) looks pretty mature. Mature game, a bit of a joker, but ready to handle the pressures of being number 3 player in the world.

He's also 20.

Twenty!

I am pretty much twice his age. In some weird alternate universe, where I have some affair mid-college, and had a kid, that kid might be Djokovic's age now!

These days, I don't think about that age thing. I don't think about those college football players who seemed so old when I was an early teen are all about half my age.

And obviously, with these sports being a young man's game, it's only going to be more pronounced as I get older. But there's something that happens when you're closer to my age than 30, which is you start not to care. They are merely young, and you are merely old, and life goes on.

But damn, they're young.