Recently I watched the movie Driveways , about a woman and her young son who travel to her sister's house in upstate New York. The sister has passed away, and the woman must sort through the belongings in her house and get it ready to go on the market. An old man lives next door, a Korean War vet (Brian Dennehy, in one of his last roles), and he and the boy befriend each other. That is much of the heart of the movie, and it reminded me of me when I was a kid. My knee-jerk recollection of childhood is that it was friendless, though that isn't accurate. There were Derrick, and Kyle (more than one), and a handful of others who I hung out with, rode bikes around town with, played outside with until the streetlights came on, etc. We had our fun. Those relationships weren't constant, however. I'm not sure if childhood friendships ever really are? The long stretches of loneliness in between friends, filled with self-doubt and the uncertainty of whether there would be another c...