You cannot sit two sixty-year-old men in chairs facing each other and expect them to say anything true.

But stand them at a workbench with a carburetor between them and their hands busy, and somehow, over the months, everything comes out — the marriages, the regrets, the kids they worry about, the fathers they’re still angry at, the whole freight of a life — sideways, in the pauses, while pretending to look for a ten-millimeter socket.

I have wondered why it works that way, why the shoulder-to-shoulder is so much easier for men than the face-to-face, and I think it’s about permission.

A conversation where you’re looking right at each other is a conversation that announces itself, that says we are now Having A Talk, and that announcement alone is enough to freeze a man of my kind solid.

But a conversation that happens sideways, over a task, doesn’t announce anything.

It can be denied.