Turning Gay After 40

“Push harder, the wheels are digging in deeper,” Chris shouted at me through his driver’s-side window.
“I’m pushing as hard as I can! Maybe we should try rocking it a bit,” I replied, the mud from his spinning tires already splattered up my left pant-leg and half way up my shirt.
Chris slammed the Subaru’s shifter back and forth between R and D, and with my help, we finally did get the car un-stuck from the most treacherous spot of the long driveway to his cabin that forked off the forest service road. The rest of the road up here wasn’t much better. The ruts from the snow-melt higher up the mountain this time of year made passage difficult, and this spring was no exception. Thank God we were on the home-stretch – the whole drive up here had been treacherous with all of the snowmelt this year.
I climbed back into the passenger side, doing my best to prevent the caked debris on my clothes from contaminating Chris’s wife’s car.
“Sorry about your clothes,” he said, his sympathies unconvincing.
We’d always brought his jeep when we came up here in the past, but his college-aged son had taken it ‘crop-touring’ that weekend with his buddies. He was more confident than I that the car would make it just fine. And more often that not, he was right; he always seemed to land on his feet, no matter what crazy decisions he’d made in life.
~.~
We’d been buddies since starting school, now going on forty years. Chris was an only child, as was I, and we were like brothers.
I didn’t see him near as much any more, now that we lived three hundred miles apart and had very different lives.
Chris was one of the smartest people I had ever met – always top of his class. He...