When did this happen?

I have been thinking about old people a lot lately. I think it was this grandmother and granddaughter on the train a few weeks ago that got me thinking. I started thinking about my grandmothers and how much they did in their lives. How brave and independent they were for their time, how I think I got the wanderlust in me from both of them, since they both traveled the world, getting on planes well into their 80s.

I am feeling older but definitely in a good way. I guess that is how aging goes; you live life, and then realize time has passed. It’s a little bit like new shoes. Even after the laces have yellowed a bit and the leather turns grey, I always think they look white until I finally see them next to really new shoes. Seeing myself now next to my teammates has confirmed the fact that I am officially mature or at least older. Man, that sounds boring. I hadn’t realized I had moved into a new age group really until recently and now it seems like it’s so obvious. Everywhere I look is examples of how I have moved on.

The average age on my team is 19 and despite the fact that many of these girls have lived on their own for years, they aren’t exactly mature for their age. Most of the team is 18 or younger, with me, soon approaching the old age of 27, being the oldest by 3 years. How did this happen? I’m much more drawn to talk with my coaches, managers and trainer than to all but one of my teammates.

I started noticing a few years ago that I needed less socializing and more Lindsey time but now I feel like an old grouch sometimes when the whole bus is screaming and giggling and shrieking and I have to tell everyone ‘children please be quiet!”. I feel like I went back to my high school team sometimes. I’m sure they wonder how I can have my nose in a book all the time while they watch animated movies or why I am perfectly content to settle into my hotel room instead of running down the halls to check out everyone else’s identical room.

At first there were just little signs like when I stayed at a hostel in Bratislava with Dita, my Latvian teammate, and I started noticing that almost everyone there was in college, traveling through Europe with their backpack on school breaks. When I told them I was 26 they immediately said, ‘Really? Oh well you don’t look 26’; as if 26 is something you don’t want to look like.

Then I was getting into the back seat of a car with my teammates, which is something you get used to when you are the point guard. My teammates are always taller than me. I tell our 6’4” player to go ahead and get in the front because ‘ you are tall’. To which she replies, ‘yes but you are old’. Haha, wow!

The differences are pretty obvious to me now and never more so than when we hit the clubs. And I use that term very loosely. I live in a mountain town so the ‘clubs’ consist of one that looks like someone rented a room and put up some lights and threw a DJ behind a desk. I walked through there hoping no one would touch me and vowed never to go again. The second club is the basement of a hotel in town and is the size of a small restaurant. Neither are the kind of places that I look forward to hanging out at. They are more like the kind of places that I get pleaded into going, avoid every single guy on the dance floor, and go home while most people are arriving.

I had a party at my house with my teammates one weekend and although it was fun, realized that I’ve mentally moved on from house parties to dinner parties. Instead of sampling wine with outstretched pinkies and eating hor’doevrs with fancy names and fatty cheeses we were taking shots of bitter Slovakian brandy and eating pretzels. I’m not sure when the change happened within me but I’d much prefer the former these days. The night continued as we walked down the main street, my teammates stumbling the whole way and apparently peeing in my bathtub on their way out. In college, might have thought it was funny, but now, the guilty ones got banned from my house.

We made it to the club and since I was mostly sober and completely older, I became the team mom, babysitting the young uns as they got trashed and made out with every possible man in the whole bar and then turned on each other. I had to keep the 40-year-old men away from my 16-year-old teammate and then drag her back inside when I finally found her straddling some random guy on the front steps of the hotel. I’m pretty sure every guy in there hated me.

Anyway, needless to say, I don’t go out much. It is interesting though since none of my teammates have gone through their college crazy days. I get impatient with the age difference sometimes but then remember I wasn’t exactly a saint in college. There was a time in my life when peeing in an alley outside a football party was an entirely normal part of a weekend and although I didn’t make out with any of my teammates, I also wasn’t in a small mountain town with no tall men around. I am realizing that most of what they do is just out of boredom and I might be going crazy here too if I hadn’t gotten it all out of my system in Ames.

Its not that I am totally old and boring yet. I still love to go out, I just like a little more class I guess and don't feel the need to get crazy drunk so I don't notice how bad the music is. My teammates here are still in the keg stand period of their life while I’m onto the drinks and socializing time with little patience for old men taking off their shirts, gyrating their hips under florescent lights. That was my cue to leave the bar last night.