A rchive Date
[ 13-05-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Feminism ]
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[Certain things are just better with the guys
By Peter Desbarats -- For the London Free Press
April 29, 2000
One of the best things about joining the over-65s is rediscovering the pleasure of just being with the guys.
Most of us guys learn about this at a very early age, that there are differences between girls and boys and certain things are better with boys. But in recent decades it's been the fashion to minimize the differences between the sexes.
When I was growing up, it was exactly the opposite. In my Montreal elementary school we boys were separated from the girls in Grade 5 and didn't see them again until university. From Grade 5 onward, all our teachers were men while women taught girls somewhere else in the building. Far from resenting this segregation, we all regarded it as a welcome first step toward manhood.
One or two mornings a week we would get up earlier than usual and serve Mass at the parish church. There was no such thing as an altar girl. One night a week we would go to Boy Scouts and to Boy Scout camp every summer at a lake where, it was rumoured, there was a Girl Guide camp on the opposite shore but it was too far away to see, even with binoculars.
Most of us went from elementary school to a boys-only high school run by the Jesuits. Although the good fathers liked to advertise the intellectual character of the school - intensive Latin throughout and Greek as an option in the second year -- we boys soon discovered that the important criteria were thoroughly "jock." Social standing in this boys' world depended entirely on whether you made the school's competitive sports teams.
The only disadvantage of this segregated upbringing was a tendency as young adults to regard women as if they were creatures from another planet.
When you are trained to think of all women as lineal descendants of the Blessed Virgin, it is a little difficult in later life to grasp the essential fact that they are really just the same as your own confused and sometimes rather nasty self.
On the other hand, this long period of isolation from girls extended the boys-only world of childhood right through adolescence. The friendships made during these years were closer than any acquired in later years, at least in my own experience.
I still have vivid, golden memories of driving from Montreal to Cape Cod one summer with three friends from high school days in a battered Studebaker owned by Scotty, the first of our group to achieve the impossible and actually own a car. We rented a cottage, cooked Whatever we felt like eating, lazed on the beach, kept our eyes open for girls without much success and drank as much beer as we wanted. I also remember discovering, in my last year of high school, that another student shared my growing interest in classical music. Michael and I would regularly cut classes to hang out in the school's record library and explore its collection of LPs with the connivance of an ancient Jesuit who knew perfectly well that we were playing hooky.
But most of these high school friends had been lost and largely forgotten by the time we were all in our mid-20s, married and starting to raise families. Attempts to make contact with them in later years were sporadic and largely frustrating.
I remember looking up Michael in New York in the 1970s. He was divorced, trying to eke out a living as a part-time English professor and sharing a crummy basement apartment with one of his former students and their baby. We seemed to have almost nothing to talk about.
Some years ago, Scotty came to Western to visit one of his children and we had lunch together and promised to do it again, for sure, but it never happened.
I'm not saying that this experience is common to all men. I've always assumed that men who take annual fishing, golfing or hunting trips with other men have managed to extend the boys' society of their adolescence into middle age and beyond. But I've never done any of these things, partly because I found my work over the years to be interesting, fun and almost totally absorbing. In the course of this work, I made friends and still keep in touch with some of them, but it was never the same as in those early years when just hanging around with the guys was so much fun.
Now, unexpectedly, since I passed the dreaded 65 mark more than a year ago, I've re-entered this lost world of boyhood friendships.
It started last summer when Gerry asked me if I wanted to go hiking. The idea was to pick one of the many trails in the region and head off for three or four hours. When I was still working full-time I would have rejected the notion of goofing off like this on a weekday but now, freelancing on my own schedule, I had the luxury of saying yes. Then Ian and Tom, also retired, decided to come along. Last summer we managed to get together a quorum for four hikes and we're now planning to do the same this summer.
I can't even tell you what we usually talk about as we hike through the woods, stop to enjoy the views or have a coffee and a sandwich before we head home. All I know is that on the first hike I suddenly flashed back more than 50 years in my own mind to understand why I was enjoying myself so much. It had been that long since I'd just hung around with the guys.
Peter Desbarats is an author, journalist and former journalism dean at UWO.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]]
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