The letter was written in pencil. It began with the greeting “Old Friend,” and the first sentence reminded me of myself. I’ve been meaning to write for some time, but I’ve always postponed it. It then went on to say that he often thought about the good times they had had together when they both lived in the same neighborhood. It had __1__ to things that probably meant something to the driver, such as the time Tim Shea broke the window, the Halloween that we tied Old Mr. Parker’s gate, and when Mrs. Culver used to __2__us after school. “You must have __3__ a lot of time together,” I said to him. “Like it says there,” he answered, “about all we had to spend in those days was __4__.” He shook his head: “Time.” I thought the next paragraph of the letter was a little sad: I began the letter with “Old Friend” because that’s what we’ve become over the years — old friends. And there aren’t many of us left. “You know,” I said to him, “When it says here that there aren’t many of us left, that’s absolutely right. Every time I go to a class __5__, for example, there are fewer and fewer still around.” “Time __6__,” the driver said. “Did you two work at the same place?” I asked him. “No, but we __7__ out on the same corner when we were __8__. And then, when we were married, we used to go to each other’s house every __9__. But for the last 20 or 30 years it’s been mostly just Christmas cards. Of course there’d be always a note we’d each __10__ to the cards — usually some news about our families, you know, what the kids were doing, who moved where, a new grandchild, things like that — but never a real letter or anything like that.”