The pond was at the end of a half-mile gravel road, hidden in wooded acreage sitting on the Mason Dixon Line. But somehow the boy got it into his head that he was fishing in the Great North Woods.

The lake’s owner Mae sold daily passes, gear and bait out of a cabin. Mae had candy and made a hamburger that tasted good after you had been handling night crawlers. She might sell you a knife, she might not.

Mae taught the boy and his friends that squeamishness wasn’t attractive in men. She showed them how to set lines using worms, minnows, insects. The boys would learn how to remove hooks, when to throw a fish back and when to put an animal out of its misery.

The boys liked to think they were fishing for food and that grateful mothers would fix their catches for dinner, but they never caught much. Mae was careless about oxygenation levels and her restocking budget was undercapitalized.

Fast forward forty years: the man and his family is away for a weekend with another clan. It is decided that the children would have a Genuine By-God Outdoors Experience.

They head to a picturesque causeway over a lake well-known to anglers. The four kids share two rods. Almost as quickly as the man can bait the hooks, the worms are stripped clean by shoreline fish.

It becomes clear they’re catching the same tiny perch over and over again — to the point where it can no longer survive in the water.

Reflexively the man performs the act of mercy he had been taught as a boy. He stomps the fish out of its agony. The children are devastated.

During every meal that weekend the man tries to explain the thing to them. The youngest of the three girls, the one who will later go to Indonesia to teach, tells him that she understands.

It wasn’t unusual that a newborn as dangerously premature as he was would receive massive medical attention.

What was extraordinary was the religious intervention he received along with it. Within moments of birth the infant had been set on a path of his own.

The boy once went into an altered state during a formal ceremony. Maybe it was a trance. Maybe it was a sign. It might have been blood sugar. It was something.

The boy filled cigar boxes with holy cards showing saints and Bible stories. His favorite was the Love-Thy-Neighbor card. But one that disturbed him showed Abraham ready to kill his son before a beautiful angel happened by. The boy prayed he could be forgiven for not believing that card.

After reading about Hester and Dimmesdale in high school, he decided to keep his distance from fancy praying and from the very pious, He wondered how so many religions could be the “one true” religion.

He came to think of that quiet voice, the one that only he could hear, as a special gift he had been given in the delivery room.

He had received his first Christian sacrament at the hands of the attending physician on duty that night. The neonatologist who baptized him happened to be of an entirely different faith. The boy had been baptized by a Jew, who performed the ritual flawlessly.

His friend Dave gave it him straight out.

“My mother doesn’t approve of you,” Dave said. “She told me not to bring you around the house anymore. She never wants to see you again.”

It came as a shock to the thirteen-year-old. He never did anything worse than the usual stuff. He was okay.

The thing that set Dave’s mother off — what she couldn’t bring herself to forgive in her son’s friend— was the fact that he hadn’t said thank you after they took him to the lake that day to keep their only child, their Dave, company.

It wasn’t like the boy came from sour or ungrateful people. It was true they sometimes used a smile or an attitude instead of words to say thank you. If someone offered you something and you accepted it, you were automatically showing gratitude. It worked for them.

The boy didn’t particularly care what Dave’s mother (she who insisted on ruining sandwiches with lettuce) thought of him. What worried him was that he wasn’t up to speed on something as basic as saying thank you. Why was that? He couldn’t very well ask his parents to explain.

He was getting ready to start high school that fall and began to obsess that there were other traps that would make him look stupid in front of kids who knew better.

He decided he would keep his eyes open and his mouth shut, even though that was what tripped him up in the first place.

It was the easiest of friendships. They didn’t have to work at it. They never bothered to acknowledge it. Things just clicked.

What first brought them together was plane geometry. They spent hours on the phone working through the logic of it all. By the winter of their freshman year they had a friendship, including nicknames used only between themselves.

Growth came late to both boys so they weren’t special at a boys’ school where teams went to State. Their great talent was mocking the absurdity of the adult world. Nothing was sacred.

It wasn’t long before they traded their phones for cars. They cruised out of boredom — tuned to the Top Forty — in search for girls.

Both boys’ fathers were absent, but in different ways. One was simply out of the picture; the other had problems. By coincidence their mothers were both grocery-store cashiers. If the two women had ever talked, it would have been at the funeral.

After graduation things began to change. They piled into cars one night, and raced. One of their close buddies lost his life, another lost the use of his leg. They all lost something.

The two young men headed in different directions. One went to work and started a family. The other went to trade school. Both moved away. Neither was at the other’s wedding.

They hadn’t had a falling out. They were simply careless and thought friendships like theirs would come along every few years.

The two of them meet some fifty years later and ordered sandwiches. It turned out they both had homework to do and they wondered if they might be able to work on some of it together.