20 feet from my front door for over three years and regretfully, I just now met my neighbor.

We’d casually greeted one another namelessly with our pups in passing to and from wherever our very private lives had taken us all these many seasons, but I never really knew him until today when by what seemed like chance, we shared a pizza, two equally sordid pasts, and one very long embrace.

Our busy comings and goings had navigated us to and from others we’d deemed either critical or unnecessary to our routines until today when, quite serendipitously, we stumbled upon each other unencumbered, petless, and without excuse for a just another bland hello.

In an exchange that went from zero to sixty inside the first five minutes, two single men who live alone, neither with much of a social life, found a friend. Our dogs, both the same breed and size and also of different colors, found the same.

Amazing–a word I seldom use–would be an the best description of the similarities we found in most experiences and outlooks of our mutual lives.

Add in our recovered pasts and redeemed presents, odds for a future developing friendship were becoming better than even.

Funny, we spend our lives in search of people we like and are like, and they end up sleeping twenty feet and one welcome mat away all along.

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46Susan Pierce, Debbie Moyer Wallace and 44 others