Eight months ago, I walked into a coffee shop and saw a group of men sitting together, completely at ease.
I remember thinking: how does this happen?
My producer brain kicked in.
What do I need to build to make this happen for me?
So I started a Facebook group.
White Rock 55+ Men's Group.
No mission statement.
No complicated structure.
Just a place and a reason to show up.
It started with Friday morning coffee.
A dozen men came to the first one.
Within a few weeks, that number had doubled.
At the time, I thought I was creating a place to have coffee with a few guys.
I did not think I was solving a bigger problem.
I was just trying to solve my problem.
After I left my career, I noticed how much of my social life had been carried by work.
Not deep friendships necessarily, but contact.
Familiar faces.
Casual conversations.
People who knew my name.
A reason to leave the house and be somewhere at a specific time.
When the work stopped, a lot of that disappeared.
No bad intent.
Just life.
We had been held together by the orbit of the job.
When the job was gone, the contact went with it.
I thought I'd find men my age.
Guys also freshly out of careers, figuring out what Tuesday looks like now.
Turns out, not many men my age are retired yet.
What I got instead was something I didn't plan for.
The men who showed up on day one were mostly in their late sixties and seventies.
Accomplished men.
Capable men.
Men who had built careers, raised families, carried real weight.
And many of them kept coming back.
I went looking for peers.
I sit across from men who are five, ten, fifteen years ahead of me in this chapter.
There are conversations I sometimes listen to more than I join.
Life stages I haven't reached yet.
Losses, adjustments, health realities, family decisions that are still ahead of me.
I don't experience that as distance.
I experience it as a preview.
I'm watching how men who are further along decide to live now.
Who they still make time for.
Where they keep showing up.
What gives shape to a week when the job no longer does.
Some of them are widowed.
Some are dealing with health issues.
Some are navigating adult children, grandchildren, aging friends, or the slow narrowing of old routines.
Some are still active and busy.
Some are quieter.
Some say very little at first, then slowly begin to settle into the room.
It sounds strange to say it, but there is a kind of education in all of that.
Not the formal kind.
The human kind.
The kind you get from sitting across from someone who has already crossed a bridge you can see coming in the distance.
That wasn't what I set out to build.
But it may be the most valuable thing that came from it.
Three hundred and five men have joined the group.
Thirty to forty show up regularly.
That gap is what I keep thinking about.
Not because it's a failure.
It isn't.
Every one of those 305 men raised his hand.
Maybe quietly.
Maybe from the safety of his phone on a Sunday night.
Maybe on a day when something felt a little looser than usual and the idea of a table full of men sounded like exactly what he needed.
And I'm genuinely curious about the 250.
I don't know their stories.
I know they exist.
Some are still working.
Some aren't ready.
Some clicked on a hard day and then talked themselves out of it by morning.
Some joined because it felt good just knowing the group was there.
Some are watching from the edge, waiting for the right event, the right mood, the right moment.
Some will walk through the door eventually.
Some won't.
I understand that too.
The first step into a room can be harder than it looks from the outside.
Especially when everyone else appears to know what they are doing.
Especially when you are no longer walking into a workplace where your role is already understood.
What I do know is that showing up sounds simple until it isn't.
Until it's raining.
Until you don't know anyone.
Until you're not sure where to sit.
Until everyone else looks like they already belong and you're the only one who doesn't.
In retirement, that friction matters more than it used to.
When you were working, the calendar filled itself.
You saw people because the day required it.
Contact happened as a side effect of obligation.
Then work ends.
The side effects go with it.
No one assigns you a table.
No one puts you in the room.
And drift can become easy when nothing is pulling you out the door.
What I've learned is that most men don't respond to the direct emotional ask.
Come and connect doesn't move many men.
It sounds too exposed.
Too heavy.
But an invitation to come for a walk, or a bike ride, or Friday morning coffee, that works.
That gives a man a way in without making the entrance feel too big.
He can just say he's going for a ride.
That's enough of a reason.
The rest can begin at a human speed.
Two men show up for a ride and end up talking in the parking lot for half an hour after.
A man comes to coffee once, then again, then again, until the table starts to feel familiar.
Someone pulls out a chair.
Someone notices when he's gone a week.
That's how belonging starts.
Not with a declaration.
With repetition.
With proximity.
With a reason to be in the same place until a new orbit begins to form.
The table is still there on Monday.
The walk is still Wednesday.
The bike ride is still Thursday, weather depending.
For the thirty-plus who keep coming back, it's just the week now.
It doesn't feel profound.
It just feels like theirs.
That may be the point.
Belonging is not always obvious while it is happening.
Sometimes it looks like a cup of coffee.
Sometimes it sounds like someone asking where you were last week.
Sometimes it is just a familiar face at the far end of the table.
And for the 250?
The door is open.
It was open the day you joined.
It'll be open whenever you're ready.
It was not that long ago that I was the guy walking into the coffee shop, wondering how men found their way to a table like that.
Now, every week, I get to sit at one.
Jim O'Grady writes The Post Game, a newsletter about life in the GoGo years. He lives in White Rock, BC.