Ed Gulley says I am his best friend, and perhaps he says this just to rattle me, he knows what makes me uneasy.

I have had such poor luck with best friends, from drama to suicide to the usual male stupidities and avoidance of feeling.

Ed is a good best friend, as far as they go, which is not always far.

He has a wicked and quick sense of humor, we can both get the other to laugh almost anytime, even when others might break down and cry, or when there are at least ten tumors running around in his brain.

Ed understands the importance of friendship, and celebrates it. He is not afraid to say what people mean to him. Actually, he is not afraid to say anything.

When I am in trouble – as when a bear is rampaging through our pasture, or the growth is too thick to walk to our woods – Ed appears, the gentle giant, hauling enormous equipment on his shoulders or in one hand, spreading calm. “You’ll be fine,” is his credo, to injured animals or terrified people.

Our farm is littered with the totems of Ed’s friendship.

The Gulley Memorial Bench out in the woods (he can’t wait to rib me about the name I gave it), the Gulley sculptures all over the yard, the Gulley wind chimes in the garden, the Gulley Tin Man by the back porch. There is even a Gulley path chopped out of dense brush in the woods by his chainsaw, which I couldn’t hold in both hands, but which he wields like a toothpick.

You don’t ever need to ask Ed Gulley for help, he is just there.

He is a kind of freakish figure, a hybrid kind of man. There is no one like him.

Part artist, part dairy farmer, part husband and father and grandfather, part hoarder and collector, part sculptor.

He is a philosopher and a windbag, and laughs out loud when I tell him so. He loves to lecture people about the price of milk or the state of the world, or the foibles of government, or the self-destructiveness of farmers, or the incompetence and corruption of government regulators and milk producers.

Ed is gregarious, he  truly loves people and these days, thinks absolutely nothing of walking up to a complete stranger and saying, “hello, I have brain cancer. I’d love to talk with you about it.”

If I did this, someone would call the police. When Ed does it, there is much hugging, back slapping and name exchanging. New friendships are born.

Ed is what they had in mind when they came up the term “larger than life.” I most often feel I am smaller than life, Ed is a giant. Almost every day someone comes up to me in the street and says, “if you are a friend of Ed Gulleys’, you are okay.”

I don’t know how he ever had time to milk a cow, he was out helping so many farmers cut hay, get their crops in, round-up their stray cows, fix their tractors. I know milk truck drivers who go an  hour out of their way just to visit Ed and talk with him.

He is a master storyteller and can BS me right into the ground.

Neighbors come by in a stream to offer to help and thank him for the time he saved their fences or their animals or their roof in a storm.

Farm kids who went off to college years ago stop by to thank him for what he taught them.

Ed laughs at the world all of the time, but the mark of a truly humble man is that he never hesitates to laugh at himself.

Today, in the midst of an emotional discussion he and Maria were having about cancer, I focused my moody art lens in my camera, and waited patiently (or impatiently, i am not the most patient person in the world)  and finally said “God damn it,” Ed, “i’m trying to get a portrait, can you stop talking about your f—– brain cancer for a minute and looking right at Maria and look at me and smile?”

Ed thought this was the funniest thing he had ever heard and turned his head to me and cracked up and gave me the most natural and real and unposed smile. “This is why I love you,” he said.

And I thought about that later, and thought to myself, this is why almost nobody loves me but Ed and my wife.

I guess we are best friends at that.