It started with the truck, the way these things start with something practical, because men of our generation cannot simply say we’d like to spend time together; we have to have a reason, a task, a pretext.

Del had an old Ford, a ’72, that he’d been meaning to get running for a decade and never had, and somewhere in those first weeks he learned that I’d spent my whole career as a mechanical engineer, and his eyes lit up, and he said, “You any good with an engine?” and I said I supposed I was, and that was that.

We had our pretext.

Every Saturday, and then every Saturday and Wednesday, I’d walk the six blocks to Del’s place and we’d stand in his garage with the hood up on that truck, and we’d work on it, and the working was real — we genuinely rebuilt that engine over the better part of a year — but the working was never the point, and both of us knew it and neither of us would have said it under torture.

The truck was the thing we did while we became friends.

It gave us a place to stand, side by side, not looking at each other, which it turns out is the only way men our age can talk.