Old Friends

    Simon and Garfunkel had a song called "Old Friends" many years ago, on their "Bookends" album. It was a bit of a sad, yet beautiful, homage to the aging process. I was a young man in my early twenties when I heard it for the first time. 
   I had it running through my mind the other day after I left the restaurant I had just had breakfast in. I had been sitting near a table which had six elderly men, eating breakfast and generally being convivial. I'm not sure whether they were just a group of friends getting together or whether it was perhaps a "meeting" of some kind (a couple of the gentlemen seemed new to each other) but I found myself somehow or other enjoying being in their proximity. 
   Now, I did say elderly, didn't I? 

   Well, the fact of the matter was that they all were either balding or had white and/or graying hair, they were wrinkled in the usual spots, jowls were present, and they all wore eye glasses and short-sleeved dress shirts. And, wouldn't you know it, I just described....me!
   So, yes, I am an old man, by pretty well any definition you use. I am eligible for all the Tuesday Night Senior Specials and I get called "Sir" on a fairly regular basis. Dinner at 4:30 or 5 o'clock doesn't seem like that foreign of a concept. The eyesight's occasionally blurry and the hearing requires electronic assistance (although I am holding out on that one) and middle-of-the-night trips to the bathroom occur pretty well every middle-of-the-night.
   The accouterments of old age are all there and yet, somehow, I still feel removed from it.
   The adage goes You are only as old as you feel and I pretty well put full faith in it. For the most part, I have not stopped doing the things I have always enjoyed doing and this has always involved keeping the body and mind active. The body is active with running, hiking, golf and, occasionally, ball hockey. The mind is active with poetry, writing, crosswords and blogging.
   Because of all this, as I sat there in the restaurant the other day, it was hard to feel true kinship with all the gents at the next table. It kind of felt like watching my dad, perhaps sitting there with a bunch of my friends' dads---it wasn't like spying on a group of my peers.
   Sometimes I wonder if this is problematic, if maybe I should spend a little more time "acting my age". Of course "acting" would be just that---acting. There is no sense in attempting to be other than what you actually are, whatever that is. I suppose I'll just continue to do what I have always done until my passion for that thing has dissipated.
   Of course, it could very well be that every gentleman sitting at that restaurant table is as active and young-feeling as I am! Because I don't really know any of them, I am going to try and avoid the trap of making assumptions, based on their appearance. I think this has occasionally been done to me---because the trappings of old age apparently hang from my shoulders I have been conveniently placed in a niche, deposited on a mantle and only occasionally dusted off. This, of course, by people who don't know what I know.
   At one point in "Old Friends", Paul Simon says
                         Can you imagine us
                         Years from today,
                         Sharing a park bench
                         Quietly?
                         How terribly strange
                         To be seventy.
   Well, I may accidentally be sitting on a park bench someday with a friend when I'm seventy but it won't be terribly strange and the people around us are going to be wondering why those two old geezers are raising such a commotion with all laughing and giggling! And if it's not a park bench it just as likely may be a players' bench in a hockey arena or a participants' bench at a track meet!
   

Although it is quite easy to, I try not to judge people by what other people tell me. Generally, I prefer to react to people based on mutual shared experiences. What this means is that if you are a person in their sixties who acts like a person in their thirties then I am going to treat you like a person in their thirties, until given reason to do otherwise.
   I would only hope that people do the same for me---treat me as you know me to be. We will get along fine if you do!