Some writers used to drink when the words didn't come. Now we have the internet. Whenever I get stuck writing, instead of sliding open the bottom drawer with the whiskey bottle, I load up The New York Times or Politico, check my email, or, when all else fails, start Googling old acquaintances. Most of us have done it. What ever happened to that bucktoothed kid from third grade? There he is, grinning at you from the computer screen—balding, paunchy, mustachioed—and you're reading about his lake cottage, his wood-turning hobby, his Danube cruise, his grandchildren, his cats.

A few months ago, as I was staring at a wretched chapter I was trying to write, I idly Googled the name “Peter Anderson” and “New Jersey.” Petey was my best friend growing up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, until he moved to New Jersey in seventh grade. But his was a common name, and it returned tens of thousands of hits. Slumped in my chair, continuing to waste time, I tried his mother's name, his father's, and his brother's. There were just too many Andersons, though, and nothing of note surfaced, beyond an old article in The Times of Trenton about a murder. This obviously wasn't my friend Petey: Dozens of other Peter Andersons in New Jersey were probably alive and well and going about their business.

Petey lived across the brook from me in a white stucco house overlooking a golf course owned by Wellesley College. He was a droll kid with pale orange hair and papery skin through which you could see blue veins. He had a cheerful mother and a silent, raddle-faced alcoholic father. After work, his father parked himself in a wing chair in the living room, shook out the afternoon Boston Herald, and read it while gripping a scotch on the rocks. When he wanted another, he jiggled the empty glass and Mrs. Anderson hurried in with fresh ice and the bottle.

In those days before the curated childhood, Petey and I ran wild, concerning ourselves with knocking on doors and running away, getting chased off the golf course by greenskeepers, playing stickball, making crank calls, and hunting for buried treasure. We dug holes in the woods behind the golf course, hoping to unearth a sack of pine tree shillings from colonial days or gold doubloons from the time when Captain Kidd (so we fantasized) sailed his ship up the Charles River.

One fall day, my mother gave me an empty cookie tin with a picture of a great ship plowing through waves, surrounded by gulls. Petey came over, and I said, “Let's fill this with treasure and bury it.” We decided to leave it in the ground for 10 years and dig it up when we were 18. The year was 1964.

Petey and I spent hours debating what to put in the tin. The treasure had to be something valuable enough that our grown-up selves would be glad to have it back. We gathered our best things and laid them out on my bed for inspection. Most of them struck us as childish junk, but a few stood out as objects with adult gravitas. I chose a Morgan silver dollar, a coiled-up trilobite fossil, and my finest arrowhead—an ancient beauty flaked out of petrified wood in which you could still see the tree rings. Among Petey's treasures were a squirrel skull, a miniature brass cannon from the USS Constitution's gift shop, and an intricate blob of lead he had made by melting fishing sinkers on the stove and pouring the molten metal into water. It was a method of telling the future, he said. The blob predicted that his life would be one of wealth, success, and happiness.