Seeking Youth, Amid BlackBerrys & Balance Boards

Katie is 7 1/2 years old. She’s still young and innocent enough to find immense pleasure in a picture book, a crayon, and a G-rated movie. The highlight of her day is still the time she gets to spend with her parents, grandparents and sister. She’s willing to do a split in the middle of a doctor’s office, as she did today, if she thinks someone might be interested in paying attention to her. She still ranks the boys in her class based on how well they play tag, and she’s still young enough to sleep with a stuffed Cookie Monster.

Lately, though, Katie has been telling me how much she really, really wants to be a teen-ager. She keeps asking me about cars, and says she wants to buy a convertible one day and drive it around. (I hope she’s planning on finding a lucrative summer job to pay for that one.) Katie stares at our cell phones, and at the ones she sees in stores, and nearly drools over them. “When I get a cell phone,” she told me yesterday, “I’m going to buy a BlackBerry.” (See the previous parenthetical aside for my parental response.)

The girl has watched one too many High School Musical films, and seen one too many Disney Channel sitcoms, and Dad knows he has to do something about that. But, as I told her tonight, she is experiencing a common element of human nature – to want what you don’t have. There are very few people in the world who would pass up a chance to be 7 years old again. But here she is, at that gorgeous age, and she wants those years to go more quickly. Katie, please. You have it all right now, kid. Savor the moments.

Katie likes to poke fun at her dad because he’s approaching an age that he doesn’t like to talk about much. “Daddy, you’re almost 40,” she says. I tell her, with stiff upper lip, that I’m only 38 years old. But she knows she’s got me going just with the mention of it. I always liked the fact that I could watch baseball games and see whole teams made up of players who were older than me. Sometime in my early 30s, that changed to about half the players. Now, as I stand just a mere 18 months from my fourth decade, I search around for a player or two on each team who might be my age or older. On the Yankees right now, there is no one, although Jorge Posada is just seven months younger than me. Pitchers tend to hang on a bit longer, so I watch with comfort as men like Tim Wakefield, Jamie Moyer and Randy Johnson continue playing ball well into their 40s.

But while Jamie Moyer’s ability to defy the normal retirement age feels good to me, it doesn’t mean I’m any younger. The other night, my wife asked me to try the Wii Fit, which we’d picked up recently. When you first start off with this exercise gaming system, the Wii Fit software asks you to step on the Wii Fit balance board. It takes in your age, weight, center of balance and body-mass index in order to know what programs it should give you for developing balance, strength, aerobic health and yoga. Near the end of this testing session, the program asks you to do some balancing exercises, shifting your weight in certain ways as requested on the screen. I more or less sucked at this, as my balance has always been bad. So bad, in fact, that I once tripped over first base while trying to leg out a single back in Little League. (At home, this was par for the course, so while the other parents in the stands tried to show restraint, my mom and grandmother howled with laughter.)

So I’m a bit clumsy; I know that. But I also run and work out and keep myself active. So I didn’t care about this stupid Wii test. But then the software, in its gentle, robotic voice, had the nerve to tell me what my “Wii Fit” age is, based on my overall testing. I felt my pulse quicken, and my eyes narrow on the screen.

“Your Wii Fit age is … 42.”

To summarize, the scene that ensued involved a 38-year-old, physically unbalanced man becoming quite mentally unbalanced as he stood on a plastic balance board in the middle of his living room. I think a lot of the words I said rhymed with “duck” (Katie’s first word, by the way), and were directed toward a machine that could not hear me. My wife (whose Wii age is like eight years younger than her f-----n’ real age, was in hysterics.)

The girls were asleep at this point. But if Katie had been awake, and if she’d seen her dad flip out on this video game over the issue of age, she would have (a) started spending less time with Dad and (b) ceased all discussion of convertibles and BlackBerrys and anything else related to growing older. She would have grabbed hold of her stuffed Cookie Monster, trudged back upstairs, and cuddled up in the soft glow of her night light.