Siting.
I saw a girl wearing a Hanson tee-shirt yesterday, walking past my car in the Shaws parking lot in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. It was a simple, oldschool shirt, rust red with orange MON lettering on the chest, and it made me so simultaneously happy and sad that I almost exploded. I wanted to get out of the car, walk up to the girl, and say hello. "Isn't it strange that I understand you, even though I'm ten years older than you are?" I would have said. "I've never died my hair muddy pink or pierced my eyebrow, but we're still the same. I could read a thousand-page biography of your eighteen-ish years on the planet, but it couldn't tell me anything that I don't already know about you, anything that your shirt didn't already tell me."
Seeing that girl made me miss Hanson fans, the whole rowdy, crazy, fanatic mess of us. It made me miss standing in the 21-plus section of some dive bar, looking down at a crush of neuroses all launched by the same three boys that I think about during the odd moments of my day, when I'm climbing the stairs at work or brushing my hair before bed. I'm so different from those girls pushed up against the stage, the ones with the homemade Hanson t-shirts and the copy of MOE1 that they want to have signed. But I'm so the same as them, too.
Hanson fanhood, I think, is like being a citizen of the weirdest country in the world. It doesn't have geographical borders, but it has passports in the form of CDs, currency in the form of Hanson-symbol necklaces and battered ticket stubs kept in a wallet's secret pocket for years and years. Without ever knowing how or why, they've marked us, those boys. They've made us lovers of underdogs, of hard work and of passion and of grandpa glasses and of goofy smiles when nobody is looking.
I miss them. And I miss us.
Seeing that girl made me miss Hanson fans, the whole rowdy, crazy, fanatic mess of us. It made me miss standing in the 21-plus section of some dive bar, looking down at a crush of neuroses all launched by the same three boys that I think about during the odd moments of my day, when I'm climbing the stairs at work or brushing my hair before bed. I'm so different from those girls pushed up against the stage, the ones with the homemade Hanson t-shirts and the copy of MOE1 that they want to have signed. But I'm so the same as them, too.
Hanson fanhood, I think, is like being a citizen of the weirdest country in the world. It doesn't have geographical borders, but it has passports in the form of CDs, currency in the form of Hanson-symbol necklaces and battered ticket stubs kept in a wallet's secret pocket for years and years. Without ever knowing how or why, they've marked us, those boys. They've made us lovers of underdogs, of hard work and of passion and of grandpa glasses and of goofy smiles when nobody is looking.
I miss them. And I miss us.