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Opinion: At the age of 66 I have more friends now than I’ve ever had. Some of it is luck, but some of it comes from the wisdom we hope arrives with age
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I’m 66 years old, and my favourite sport is boxing. Not to watch, but to take part in and enjoy. Trust me, no one could be more surprised by that admission than I.
For years I thought my body ended at my neck, but in my 40s I decided that even I needed exercise, so I joined a gym where I met someone who thought I would enjoy boxing. I thought he was nuts, but decided to indulge his fantasy just long enough to prove how ludicrously wrong he was. Twenty years later, I’m still amazed.
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My current coach is a man named Paul. In high school I would have hated him because he was everything I wasn’t and never could be. Charming, popular, a natural athlete with a body like Hercules and a face like Apollo. Even in my early 50s I was intimidated, which goes to show how high school never really leaves us.
It also didn’t help that despite his fine coaching, I was predictably terrible. As graceless and uncoordinated as a supposedly able-bodied body could be. But even then I had to admit it was fun. Part of it was its unlikeliness, part was the joy of movement — any movement — but most of it was Paul. He not only lied endlessly and gallantly about my athletic prowess; he made me laugh. I made him laugh too. We talked and laughed as much as I tried, but failed, to throw a decent punch, but thanks to Paul’s interminable and generous patience, the day finally came when I decided I was ready to spar.
Afraid doesn’t begin to describe my feelings, and again I was awful. Once, I actually punched myself in the face. But common sense was never a factor, so after literally years of trying, I’ve finally improved to the point where I’m occasionally able to disturb, however briefly, Paul’s perfect face.
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We don’t hit each other hard. I’m 66, after all, and he’s still Hercules. But we do hit hard enough for me to know when a blow has landed and that I don’t want it to land again. More important, I now know the rare pleasure of actually breaking through Paul’s nearly impregnable defence and connecting with his jaw, cheek or chest. It almost makes me feel manly.
However, despite all the evidence to the contrary, this column isn’t about boxing.
It’s about prejudice. Prejudice in the sense that when I met Paul, I prejudged him as someone too different from me — too good for me — to ever feel comfortable around or connect with. So never the twain, I thought — if I thought of it at all. Not that there aren’t and always will be differences between us. I love to read, he has no time for it. He’s married with children, I take my orders from a cat.
Yet somehow and against all odds, conversation, time and the expression of controlled aggression in the ring has made us the best of friends.
I’m lucky because, at the age of 66, I have more friends now than I’ve ever had before. Some of it is luck, but some of it comes from the wisdom we hope arrives with age. We learn that despite what we see in the mirror and what we came to believe in school, university and the first, trying years of adulthood, we’re not as awful as we thought. And that being different can actually make us appealing. Not to everyone. Far from it. But why be friends with someone put off by the very things that make us us?
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If only the price of that wisdom weren’t uncooperative muscles, silver hair and an inability to remember why we entered a particular room.
Then there’s that cliché. The one that says if we look past the differences, we might find some similarities too. (Or we might not. Cliché notwithstanding, let’s be real about that.) Paul is proof that sometimes adages can be right.
Yes, admittedly, ours is a friendship as inherently improbable as a 66-year-old man who takes pleasure from wearing gloves on his fists and harbouring delusions of youth — twice a week. But that doesn’t make it any less genuine. And they do say life is full of surprises.
Nicholas Read is the author of 12 children’s books about animals and nature, and a former Vancouver Sun reporter.
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