Despite the facts that I have this strange obsession with wrestling and that this seems--from time to time, at least--to suggest my having a different sexuality than any that would be strictly or loosely called "normal," I'm a relatively regular 48-year-old man. I have family--immediate and extended. I have an extensive but not a fancy education. I have a career I love and in which I struggle to go through the normal steps of progressing "up the ladder." I generally like people, and they seem, generally, to like me.

This week I'm losing a friend. Actually, I think I lost him a long time ago, but this week he's moving away. Having lost him before really losing him doesn't mean, however, that we've not been friendly. We have. It's just that the depth of friendship we might have had never developed, and when it didn't, it stopped growing and progressing altogether. So, we've been friends but more of the acquaintance side of this reality than on the intimate side.

Sure, I always wanted to wrestle him. He's thick and strong--at least 275 pounds, I'd say--and his coloring is such that he'd look beautiful in a pair of red wrestling trunks. And it's true that I've met few men in my life that I just feel like pouncing on and holding (wrestling or otherwise). I've always suspected that he would be interested in me this way too, if certain restrictions and taboos were done away with.

That aside, I always thought that we were kindred in a lot of other ways. We have similar educational experiences in our fields. We have philosophical and spiritual similarities. We have families.

Not long after we met, we spent a year having lunch together almost every Wednesday. These lunches ran long, as we ate (something we both love to do) and talked about this and that and everything else. (We even talked about wrestling on more than one occasion.) I had him on my calendar for infinity, and I thought he had me on his.

But then the lunches stopped. He couldn't make it one week. He couldn't make it the next week. Gradually I came to the realization that he couldn't--wouldn't--have lunch with me again. I took him off my calendar and told him, jokingly, that I was doing so. He said, jokingly, that he didn't want to "break up." But the lunches never resumed on a regular basis, and now, although we've seen each other at least once a week, it's been well over a year since we at lunch together and really talked.

He and his wife blame his background. As a child, he lived in a situation in which he moved ever three or four years and never formed deep friendships. Maybe that's the case. And yet he can talk a good game of friendship and make a good sermon about loving and caring for one another. So, I've never trusted this explanation.

But without accepting that that is the case, how am I to explain why "[w]e keep the wall between us as we go"? I have wanted to blame his wife, to believe that she was jealous of our friendship. Even though she and I have a friendship of our own, I don't completely discount the possibility of her being behind all this. I have wanted not to believe that he simply went far enough with me to discover that he didn't really like me or that he didn't really want to spend any more time with me. But without an explanation as to why everything stopped--more or less--what else am I to believe?

So, he's loading the truck today. I offered my help, but he never responded. Maybe he has professional help, maybe not. I'll see him one last time tomorrow, and then I expect that to be it unless, as he's not moving that far away, we meet by chance at some place or other. He says we'll keep in touch, say a lot of good places for lunch are along the way between where I live and where he's going. Past experience and my need to protect myself emotionally won't allow me to believe him.

I try to rationalize all this by telling myself that married adults, men who have wives and children, can't have the kinds of friendships we did when we were young or when we were not so young but still unmarried. Maybe that's the case. But it seems to me that I see friendships like this might have been--friendships between men in full-blown adulthood--among others with whom I'm acquainted. So that rationalization provides little comfort. And so ultimately, I think, the failure of this friendship to become what it might have been lies with the two of us as individuals. Maybe both didn't want it to an equal degree. Maybe neither was capable to an equal degree. We've come to lump-in-the-throat time--for the past we've had, for the past we didn't have, for the future we might have had, for the future we won't have.

Who was it who said--is it somewhere in Lewis Carroll?--something to the effect that it's a poor memory that works only backwards?

So, goodbye. Goodbye, friend.