I just realized I am old enough to have been one of Josh Holloway's babysitters when I was young.
It's just a little sad to think that Holloway is ten years younger than I. And that the character he plays on Lost - the character I find most attractive (Sawyer)- really, if you were honest about it - is way too young for me. Had I lived up the street from him many years ago, when I was thirteen years old and he was three, I could have been reading him books, helping his mom get him potty-trained, or doing other useful "mother's helper" kind of tasks, and earning a dollar an hour to do it.
That's the weird thing about age. I guarantee you not one of us imagines getting older every single day - not to mention every single year - but we do. We tend to think of ourselves in some kind of perpetual state of suspended animation; where the rest of the world changes but we're pretty much the same as we were when we were 32 years old.
I mean, short of actually doing the math, what would ever possess me to imagine I'm too old for Sawyer? (I'm of course leaving out the fact that I would never have the opportunity to get to know Josh Holloway in any personal way for the rest of my life. Or that I've been married for twenty years and have three sons. Or that he's married - maybe he has kids. Or that I've never been to Hawaii and have no plans to go to Hawaii where I would have zero chance of runing into him in a 7-11 as he heads to the studio one morning anyway. We're talking imagination here, not reality.)
There must be some "sweet spot" for age - where we think we live and how we think the rest of the world sees us - that we choose for ourselves and never adjust as time passes by. It's the Glory Days Springsteen sings about - those days where we are at our best, with just about everything good in life to look forward to, where we and everything around us, can only get better.
Thing is, even when the Glory Days can arguably be called "behind us," we still think we're in 'em; or even that they're just ahead. I know I couldn't really function at my best if I didn't believe on some level that the best was yet to come in my life, as Sinatra (?) sang many years ago.
But that can't really be true - or it can't be true for a lot of us. I suppose there is that Grandma Moses kind of stuff that happens. You (and the rest of the world) can discover a whole new amazingly wonderful element about yourself after you've spent about seven decades just picking up around the house and balancing your checkbook.
This leaves me exactly no where with my revelation about Holloway and my old age. But I'd love to know what age most people believe they are - what is your imaginary age? We forget the limitations that come with youth - and rely on the standby theory that goes something like, "if I knew then what I know now"... then what? We'd all be brilliant twenty year olds? Doubt it. I'm not a brilliant almost 50 year old. We want to retain our collected "wisdom" (for lack of a better word) that our advancing years afford us. But we want to feel thirty-two. And have the world see us that way, too.
Maybe that's where friends and family come is. As you age together, you preserve the whole fantasy together on some level, right?
Which is exactly the reason I could never really hook up with Josh Holloway. We don't have a past - even a parallel past - to share. When he was playing Little League, I was writing my senior thesis on D. H. Lawrence for college. I can try for a very long time and I guarantee you there is just no way to connect those two events into anything really substantive.
Sorry Josh - I was born too late.
talk soon -
R
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