I had not sent a card, or made a call, or offered a single thing that the world would recognize as maintaining a friendship.

By every ordinary measure, we were strangers now, men who had once known each other and drifted, as people do, into separate lives.

And I made one phone call, in the middle of the night, after two decades of silence, and every single one of them dropped everything and came, from across the country, without asking a single question about what it might cost them.

That is a kind of bond most people never get to have, and I am not sure I did anything to deserve having kept it.