I recently got back in touch with a childhood friend of mine with whom I stopped corresponding with for about 15 years for reasons I've spent 15 years trying and failing to explain to myself.

Actually, he got in touch with me. If it were left to me, I may or may not have ever gotten back in touch. Another mystery.

I spent a night and a day with him and his family in Ohio. I was terribly nervous about going there—why? oh, I suppose meeting with a childhood friend after so long promised/threatened some kind of referrendum on the integrity of my soul, or some small matter like that—and after I left, needed a few hours to calm down.

I don't know how he felt about the reunion, which was a lifelike jumble of happiness and sadness and regret and what-can-we-do-about-any-of-it-now.

But we shared one moment on equal terms.

We went to the golf course—the crummy old public course where I played, with him, my first round of golf 26 years ago as a seventh-grader. Since then, millions have been invested in the course and everything is different—most of the holes were in new places.

But as we walked through the threshold of the rearranged clubhouse there was a smell—it was the smell of that clubhouse, an odor we hadn't smelled since we were kids, an odor whose source I cannot tell you. The second that smell hit my brain I looked at my old friend, and he looked at me with eyes just as wide ... and if we weren't well-trained men, we would have burst into tears on spot and we might have cried until the police were called.