I have a friend who just moved to Valparaiso, Chile-a beautifully-situated stutter of city teeming with feral dogs and nefarious purse snatchers. It's sad for me that this friend, a Best Friend if ever there was one, will be spending the last glimmering twitches of this decade in a place so thief-ridden and faraway, because we spent the first early ticks of it together, freezing and sick in the Boston Common. It was actually the night that we first became real friends, not just two kids working on a play together, not just two people who occasionally passed each other in the same lazy social orbit. We bonded that night, [...]