Guys Weekend: Men Becoming Better Boys
Boyhood is our own private neighborhood of life, a great place to visit. It's where our best friends live and the place we've hidden all our secret joys. Tweet
Highlights
Men over fifty live a downhill existence anyway...
We might as well make it risky enough to be fun.
Friendship is one of life’s greatest joys.
I’m flying home from a long ski weekend with a couple of buddies. I had not been on the slopes for well north of a decade — and prior to that, it was a while.
Nothing like watching grown men in their natural, sophomoric habitat.
Happy to say that Guy’s return to skiing was as I had hoped, “like ridding a bike”—well, okay, an old man riding a bike. Nothing like reacquainting your muscle memory and knees with moguls in your fifties. Skiing was a mix of liberation—“I can still do this!”—and a sense of mortality—“but not for too much longer!”
The big show: the friends—decoupled from the significant others in our lives— and just being adult boys for few days. Nothing like watching grown men in their natural, sophomoric habitat.
What’s the difference between adult boys and boys?
The quality of the digs, snacks and libations certainly. We all had a couple of great meals up our sleeves, and we all pitched in on everything. For a couple of days, we lived the dream. A reality sadly allusive and the major cause of men calling it quits on the single life and getting married.
I’m sure we would have enjoyed a hot tub time-machine rendition of the weekend—particularly with those damn moguls—but only if we could take our adult souls with us. Otherwise, we would be a fraction of the men we are now. This is what old men mean when they look back saying, “Youth is wasted on the young.” In the beginning, young men are more the promise of potential. Grown men having a boys’ weekend is a return to the joys of male camaraderie—but with the idea that is the adult you all worked out and made real.
We all were on our best worst behavior. I would share more details but my last attempt at cataloguing a weekend in the life of Guy (Vegas Diaries 1, 2, 3) resulted in couple of light-touch interventions. And as you might expect, generally, when wives discover that I’m in attendance, they expect that their husbands are going to come back a little scratched and dented.
When we show up at our respective doorsteps, our women will certainly greet us, slightly shaking their heads and giving us that “are you done living that the free-range life for while?” look. Doing our best to signal agreement with our tired eyes and lumbering gate, we will say, “Honey, It’s good to be home”—but thinking to ourselves, “Until next time, my friends.”
To reach Guy Shepherd contact: [email protected]
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