����Sometimes love just tiptoes up from behind and whaps you over the head with a bat when you're least expecting it, know what I mean?

����No, I'm not talking about the "let's do the horizontal tango" kind of love here, although it can happen with that, too, but I am talking about friendship.

����I have many, many acquaintances, but the number of people outside family I've loved you can number on one hand. Believe me, that statistic doesn't give me any happiness, it's something of a reminder that I have a dried up raisin of a heart in many ways.

����And it had been many years since I'd made the effort to form a new friendship because I couldn't muster the courage or energy to share the stories you have to share to build a friendship. It all just seemed like too much of an effort, somehow, my current friends enough. Am I making any sense here? Probably not.

����So why am I rambling on like this? Well, because yesterday I wandered down to Vermont for the first time in a week to get my mail at my U.S. address and there waiting for me was a birthday card and gift from a precious friend.

����Neither of us was looking for a friendship, but somehow it tiptoed up on us. We are a most unlikely pair, truly.

����Our orbits crossed just over five years ago through my work, when he hired me to finish up some research for him. Although my work is about piecing together family details, I don't form anything of a personal relationship with clients. I dig up the facts they want, ship them out, they pay me.

����But there was something about his correspondence ... and he conveyed a real sense of urgency about the work. When I asked why the need for such a rush, he told me he'd been diagnosed with prostate cancer, the chemo hadn't worked and the doctors didn't think the radiation would work either, but they would try.

����They told him to get his affairs in order, he didn't have a big plenty of time left.��He had been chipping away at his family tree for decades and decided to try to wrap it up before he died.

����So I began a paper chase, combing archives, opening dusty boxes of land deeds, legal records, and piece by piece I found the information he needed. And over the weeks that I did this, he gradually began to tell me his stories. There are a lot of them, because he was 75 back then.

����We both had interesting childhoods, and we both try to be as emotionally self-sufficient as possible. A lifetime in the U.S. military, rising up from enlisted man to commander of a destroyer, had reinforced his tendency to keep his feelings locked down. Except he had been told he was dying. And he just couldn't do it anymore.

����I did not want to get involved, I did not want to care about someone who was dying. It seemed a gratuitous dose of pain. But like I said, sometimes love just sneaks up on you. Obviously, the radiation worked because he's still here, turned 80 a few months ago.

����We couldn't be more unlikely as friends--he's a generation and a gender away from me, right wing, red white and blue, tough as nails and still has his military posture and hair cut to match.

����I'm a flaming liberal, had a knee jerk antipathy to the U.S. military because of Vietnam, a feminista--I kept my maiden name when I married, which ain't unusual now but created a stink when I did it 25 years ago.

����To look at us, we should have nothing in common. Yet we can talk about anything, even the great taboo of our culture, dying. I get three, four e-mails a week from him. Some are short and funny, others run on for pages as we argue something out.

����Sometimes he feels badly because he knows his time is finite and he knows how much the loss of a good friend hurts. And I tell him that gratitude does not begin to cover how happy I am to have known him, to have my assumptions challenged so well, to share whatever time he might have left. I won't have the person forever, but I will have the memory of him.

����This sounds so sappy and sentimental, it doesn't really convey the texture of our friendship. There's a lot of silliness happening, believe me. The bat rastard gave me George Bush's collected letters for my birthday gift because he KNOWS what I feel about the Bush presidency. But I will read this book *shudder* and maybe even *shudder* come to look at the G.H.W. Bush with a little less contempt. Who knows?

����Oh, and did I mention my gift came with a birthday card that made rude jokes about what time and gravity do to the chestal areas of middle-aged women? Hmmmph!

����But then I gave him the chick read to end all chick reads, "Larry's Party" for his birthday, knowing full well that if it isn't history or a murder mystery, then he wouldn't normally read it. Mwahahahahahaha. And did I mention the condom with a hand painted Christmas tree on the top? Talk about rolling out your Yule Log, eh. His wife thought that was pretty rude, I hear, but it cracked him up.

����When I was in my last year of high school, for my French class, we had to read de Saint-Exup�ry's Le Petit Prince. *YAWN*. Bet you had to read it, too, huh? 'Member the famous section with the fox and the prince, when they talk about friendship? 'Member?