I guess Scott is my best friend now, I haven’t had a best friend in decades, the shrinks would say I wasn’t available for that, or for love. The shrinks would be speaking truth. I’m not sure what “best friend” even means.

I think C.S. Lewis described it best for me, it is a feeling, not something definable. “Friendship,” Lewis wrote, “is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…” I think friends are people who truly know you well and still manage to love you.

Scott has many more friends than I do, and he may have others who are his best friends, I haven’t asked him and it isn’t my business. But we share many things. We get along with most people, but have real trouble with angry people, diddlers or phonies, people who tell you how much they love you while plunging daggers into your back. I have met a lot of those, and even lately.

We both seek creative lives, and live creative lives. We love our wives, who are partners and kindred spirits. Neither of us will ever have a lot of money. We do not live for security, but for meaning. We are both crazy in a number of ways, and barely survived our families, who have managed in general to never be there when we need them.

We are both Lost Boys, self-made men, living outside the conventional circles of tradition and work. I suppose you call us loners and dreamers. We both understand the nature of abuse, and the damage it does.

Scott always invites me to sit with him in his mystical sugar house, a medieval alchemic facility he built himself. Scott builds beautiful buildings, makes wonderful food, writes lovely music. He is struggling with various writing blocks, I am working with him to break through them.

He is one of those men who tends to be hard on himself, as I do. We trust one another completely, talk easily, understand the importance of boundaries. I took home bottle of freshly made maple syrup, I insisted on paying the $25 (he offered me a $5 discount, I refused it) he took the money. We talk once or twice a week, we are both busy the other days.

Friendships ought to be be nourishing and feel good. If you leave wondering what was said and what was meant, something is wrong. Run. Friends are there if you need them, but respect it when you don’t. Friendships are rare and  precious in men, I have had very few of them, and none that lasted too long. This one, I suspect is a keeper.

Scott and Lisa and Maria and I go out for dinner sometimes, sometimes to the movies. Time flies by when we are together, we have so much to talk about it. Scott is a spiritualist, a Tai Chi master. He has been trying to teach me Tai Chi for several years, I have been working on his writing. Lisa is a food artist, a creative, she and Maria have much in common.

We will get there with our teaching one another, each in our own way, in our own time. We spent two hours today in the sugar house, Scott loves Red and I always  bring him. We talked about love and pain and our hopes for our lives. We always share the things we are learning, we bring each other acquired wisdom and experience and share it as treasure.

There is no drama in our friendship, that is another reliable warning sign, there is often disagreement, but never anger. We are not seeking to save one another, we do not rush to each others house at the first sign of trouble. When I had my open heart surgery, Scott came by with food every day and dropped it by the back door. He never came inside. He knows me.

I believe we can say anything to one another and we will be understood and accepted. I love the sugar house, it was cold and pouring rain, the wind kept blowing open the door, Scott rushed around like a wizard, stirring, pouring, tossing logs into the fire. The sap is really running this year because it is so warm, Scott is struggling to keep up with it.

I hope we get to sit more in the sugar house, it is an incubator for friendship, especially for lost boys.

It took me all day to track down the Albert Camus quote I most loved about friendship, it captures friendship for me:

“Don’t walk in front of me…I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me..I may not lead. Walk beside me..Just be my friend.”