I had it exactly backward.

The friendships of youth are made when you have all the time in the world, when loss is an abstraction, when you assume without thinking about it that the people you love will simply always be there.

A friendship made at sixty-two has no such illusion under it.

Del and I both knew, without saying it, that we had come to each other near the end, that whatever we built we were building in the last light of the day, with limited hours and no guarantees — and that knowledge did not make the bond lighter.

It made it unbearably precious.

Every Saturday over that truck was a Saturday I knew, somewhere, we would not get infinite numbers of.