A woman once emailed to invite me to join her book club for lunch at a country club in Malibu. She offered to reserve a parking spot for me near the front door. It was a lovely gesture, but it would have been a 2,100-mile drive.

The trip would have taken four days, maybe five. I stop a lot for Diet Cokes.

Another reader wrote expressing surprise to learn I lived near her in Idaho.

I was surprised, too, because I do not live in Idaho. I know this for sure because another reader wrote to say she was glad to know I lived in upstate New York.

I do not.

A woman once recognized me in a grocery store, introduced herself, named the neighborhood where she thought I lived and the church she thought I attended. When I told her where I lived and that I had never been to that church, she looked disappointed and said, “Well, that’s not what I heard.”

Mistaken identity and misinformation can grow tangled on my end as well. A reader once sent an email and mentioned aging, losing her spouse, living alone and having to downsize. She also noted that tomorrow would be 102.

I marveled to the husband that a woman about to turn 102 was writing thoughtful emails and navigating life online. Then I reread the email, noted she lived in Arizona and realized she would not be 102, the temperature would be 102.

It is humbling when readers take time to shoot an email into cyberspace just to say hello or to inquire as to whether we might be neighbors. I try to answer all the emails but sometimes fall behind and miss a few.

For the record, we live in Indianapolis and, what’s more, nobody we live next to gets all that excited about us. But then, most of us have known one another for years, or decades, and in several cases 40 years.

We’ve shared life through kids, graduations, weddings, deaths of parents and the arrival of grandbabies.

We’ve shared extension ladders, snowblowers, garden produce and chatter about the house down the street now on the market.

If you have been fortunate to have good neighbors, you know that good neighbors often become good friends and good friends become like family.

We stay in touch with the neighbors we had as newlyweds in Oregon in the late ‘70s. They lived in one half of the duplex, and we lived in the other. Their two adorable little girls were the inspiration for starting our own family.

We saw them on a trip to the Pacific Northwest last year and drove to the duplex where our friendship began. The place was a trainwreck that elicited gasps of shock and bursts of laughter. Cars were parked in the front yard, the siding was layered in moss and mold, and a rusted grill and mostly empty bag of charcoal sat on the front step.

Times and places may change, but the good memories last forever.

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