> So, if you're in my boat, or you were, tell me:
> are these the best years?
>
> Hoping someday I'll learn to be shorter-winded, but it's not likely,
> Chris

I spent most of the day babysitting a 20-month-old
who is 29 pounds of energy. He's my grandson. I don't know how old you have to be to escape babysitting, so I just enjoy it.
The best years? Chris, they are ALL the best years. There will be some great things every year and some years will have horrible things. (Like when my mother died. I was only 42.) But we survive and remember it all. When I was your age, my family sold out everything and moved from Kentucky to Florida. I left all my friends behind. End of the world? Yeah, for about a week. Then I started making new friends and I discovered that Florida was a great place to be 15. We stayed there three years and I loved it.
Then we moved to Tennessee and it was the end of the world again for a couple weeks. Nashville was the first big city I'd ever lived in and I learned to like it almost as much as Florida.
Don't waste your time wishing you were older. Don't waste your time wishing you were somewhere else. Or somebody else. Enjoy yourself here and now.
Do I have any regrets? Well, maybe one. I wish I'd kept journals of all the places I've been. It scares me to think I might forget one.
One more thing. You think you couldn't take care of yourself, but you could. I hope it will be a while before it's necessary, but if you had to, you could take care of yourself. At 14, I went to a boarding school 60 miles from home. They provided classes, 3 squares a day and a place to sleep. After that we were on our own. I learned to do laundry, travel by train or bus, make a bed,
outsmart bullies, sew, fish, and even how to climb out a window and go to the store after lights-out. But I survived and grew up a lot. It was one of those best years.
Howard