Finally, after fantasies of all those books I’d write dissolved, after the pride in a squeamishness overcome fell away, this was all that any of us managed. Caretaking could only take care of itself. There was a whole pack of us, mongrels, defrocked priests, unwed, with time to spare because we made time, with secret missionary temperaments. The tendency to want to think well of others—certain evidence not withstanding; this tireless try at, if not happiness, then not constant screaming either. The will to do the best ourselves. For ourselves. So, if we lived, we could live with ourselves. Even alone.

One day on the subway, I stood reading how Reinhold Niebuhr, asked to define Sainthood, answered, “The spouses of saints.”

I laughed aloud. People moved away at once. It’d gotten rarer, laughing aloud when alone. I so welcomed the sound, I barely noticed the fear it always stirred in fellow New York strangers. Happy=crazy.

Angie and I worked split-shift. She lunged at saving our friends in just the way she labored at the play of making art. Her toughness, I aspired to. It out-butched and outclassed us all. That she might be around to catch me when I fell, that kept me standing.

Finally, our Robert and Gideon and Marco were not just those we loved but what we did. Not as a rehearsal for some Walt Whitman story ahead, Walter nursing fallen pretty boys, becoming indispensable and then learning from it all.

Partly, my friends’ quiet bravery pushed me, teaching me, beyond my own peevishness, my own inherited hotheadedness, my cheery bogus “goals,” my early selfish self.

One day, filing through the piles of insurance forms that now littered a desk where I once wrote dog stories, my hand hit something cold. It was glass in a picture frame. Increase Hartley, his somber face had once seemed comically forlorn during my smiley youth. I now recalled Mosby’s praise, the Colonel’s concern about blankets and bacon for his “boys.” They called him “Saint Hen” and the name was truly affectionate. I remembered my own early snobbery at having a kinsman praised solely as a good provider, not as Terror of the Yankees. I had known so little two years back. “They taught us to provide, provide, son,” Dad had told me that last day.

Now, resemblance meeting resemblance, I pulled the oval frame against my lips. Glass now felt all grimed with New York’s dust-grease. I kissed the great grandfatherly image, pulled it off a ways to study. My mouth pursed, I touched the lip. Blood. I’d cut myself on him, too. Then I coughed back a sob, put my head down amid Blue Cross-Blue Shield forms and knowing I might might might cry. Did. Oh, but a good cry, at the right time, is like shitting when you really really need to. A good cry is so good.

Regrets, second thoughts, career frustrations?—you could either deal with those, or this.

This, of course, meant:

Them. Meant: Mine. My Boys.