Ah, the Sweetness of Youth

They say youth is wasted on the young.

“They” are old people who are hugely offended by the beautiful carelessness of youth and its beautiful disrespect. Those qualities are beautiful in young people because they haven’t been broken to the saddle yet. They’re still frolicking in the green grass of the pasture, going everywhere at a run, long muscles stretching.

The rest of us (I’m 67), are ridden by the boss, bridled by deadlines, straddled by the mortgage, yoked to the plow, pulling hard and slow to the end of another row. A kid falls, she gets a bruise. I fall, I get a broken hip and three months in a rehab facility.

My gym, a corporate-owned gym, lets students 14-19 work out for free during the summer. The policy is either meant to encourage fitness or discourage youth crime. Crime itself encourages fitness. You get a couple years in the can, they lock you in a cell, you do 200 pushups a day to exercise the lust out of your system, and you come out with the upper body of a home run king. And I don’t go to Tough Guy Tony’s Boxing and Brain Damage Academy, either. Like I said, it’s a corporate gym. The room is filled with purple and yellow weight machines, and the colors make it look like you’re working out in the Lego room at the public library. There’s music playing through concealed speakers, and sometimes it’s Taylor Swift.

But the kids come, exploding through the door like skyrockets, bursting noisily in the middle of the room.

The chicken-chested boys bust each other’s chops over who can lift the least, and the girls wear false eyelashes to do preacher curls, and everybody speaks fluent hip-hop, and every now and then, someone calls me “sir.”

They’re little brats, which is what they are, loud, rude and inconsiderate. Four or five of them use the same machine in a group, one of them lifting, the others providing commentary and insult. A kid finishes the bench press and then sits on the bench with her phone in her hand, texting.

On a good day, a dozen or so of these teenage tweety birds can slow up my work out by maybe 16 minutes, and they’re so young and wonderful they nearly make me cry for paradise lost.

A lot of the middle-aged and older gym members hate the disruption and delay caused by these frisky young brats. They can’t wait until Aug. 31, when the free youth membership ends, and the “serious people” can take back the gym.

Not me. I spent most of my life working for serious people, and I still hate most of them very much. I watched them ruin businesses with the kind of mistakes you can only make if you’re shellacked with seriousness. The mistakes of youth are a quick flash of disaster, but it takes a serious adult to make a mistake, and then “implement” the mistake for eight months, and then refuse to back down from the mistake for a couple years.

Fifty years ago, I was 17, and I was a loud, rude, inconsiderate brat, and I had so much fun, I wouldn’t trade that year for 10 years of extra life as I approach 70. I’ve got the saddle on me now, and I have for a long time, and the next time I go out on the green grass, there’s going to be a hole waiting for me.

As for the girl sitting on the weight bench with her phone in her hand, she’s probably texting her boyfriend, and when you’re 16, what is more important than texting your boyfriend? Twenty years from now, she’ll be writing quarterly reports or working at the cash register at Dollar World. Let her have her brat years.