When I was 9, I met Jeff. He was my platonic friend. His family moved in next door to ours, one similar house to the west of us, and stayed long enough to become close neighbors before they took up the 2-year post in Okinawa. Most of the families in our tract-home neighborhood had the father-in-the-navy condition; it seemed like some household was always moving to Okinawa and returning, carrying numbers and words in Japanese and vague post-service ideas that usually resulted in the dad going to work in car sales.

We became closer when Jeff’s family moved back. They mostly matched ours. His parents were my parents’ age and got along well enough. The moms became best friends and the fathers were good sports. Jeff and I were in the same grade and his younger brother Stevie was approximately the age of my brother Steve. They didn’t have a match for Andy but they did have a spirited mutt named Murphy; Andy played with the dog and with us and with the parents too.

Jeff and I were very unlike. He was as athletic as I was sedentary. I was as bookish as he was active. He ate extensively to maintain extreme skinniness; I struggled with snacks and bulges. He longed to pitch baseball and I aimed to be a writer.

But we liked each other, we played well together, and we neither of us ever harbored even the slightest frisson of attraction toward the other.

The summer I was 14 we played Casino just about every night. We sat face to face on Jeff’s twin bed, dealing the cards on the smoothed bedspread between us, all the while listening to his AM transistor radio. Transistors were just then becoming popular, moving us away from fan-cooled vacuum tubes and toward portability. We listened to the same station with the same playlist every night (not the Wolfman – he was for late nights when his Tijuana signal made him impossible to ignore). Our evening peaked when we got to hear “Twist and Shout.”

As far as I can recall, we were about even for wins and losses. And the games didn’t continue after that summer. But the goodwill and friendship did, in a neighborly way.