He replied, "Oh, but I do expect him to win!"
What I miss most about youth — what I miss even more than the vigor and the energy and the excitement of getting up each day (and feeling good when you do!) — is that sunny optimism in the face of impossible odds. Life has a way of beating that out of you as it delivers one disappointment after another. The older you get, the less you expect from life. As The Gambler in the old Kenny Rogers song put it, "the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep".
But growing older is not without its compensations. With age comes wisdom, and with wisdom comes something that is even better than optimism: the ability to see the good that can come out of even the worst that life throws at you. As The Gambler said in the line just before the one quoted above, "every hand's a winner, and every hand's a loser".
