Because most men my age are like I was, not like Del.

We are perfectly capable of kindness, of loyalty, of love even; what we have lost is the ability to initiate, to be the one who says let’s get coffee, to risk the small exposure of wanting company and saying so.

Somewhere back in our boyhoods we learned that a man who needs is a man who’s weak, and we carried that lesson so faithfully into old age that it left us marooned, each of us alone in his own house, each perfectly willing to be a friend if only someone else would do the terrifying work of asking first.

It is a standoff that lasts, for a lot of men, until they die — two lonely fellows who’d have been glad of each other, living three streets apart for twenty years, each waiting for the other to make a move neither was raised to make.

I was in that standoff.

I’d have stayed in it.