Because I watch hundreds of movies each year, people are often surprised to learn that my favorite movie is the 1986 coming-of-age film “Stand By Me.”

“That’s it?” they say. “That’s your favorite movie?”

Based on the Stephen King novella “The Body,” “Stand By Me” is the nostalgia-drenched account of what happens when four 12-year-old boys set out to find a missing teenager’s body in the woods of Oregon.

I wasn’t much older than 12 myself the first time I saw “Stand By Me,” and I found it easy to relate to. The friendship of the boys is genuine and true, which is how my friendships seemed to me, and although my friends and I never did anything quite as exciting as the boys in the movie, I always believed that we, too, were destined for great adventures.

For the most part, “Stand By Me” manages to make being 12 look like a tremendously good time. The movie has its frightening moments, but if there was any part of the film I found troubling, it was the end, when one of the boys, now an adult, describes the tragic fates of his three companions. But that wasn’t what I found distressing. Rather, I was disturbed to learn that the boys had drifted apart as they’d gotten older, and gradually lost touch. I vowed that nothing like this would ever happen to me, because my friends were the best in the world, and nobody could replace them.

Of course, you can’t anticipate everything that’s going to happen to you at the age of 12. By the end of eighth grade, my family had moved to another town, and I was forced to make a whole new set of friends. And these friends are great people, and I like them a whole lot, so no regrets there. But I’ve never been able to forget the friends I had when I was 12, which is why I’ve never lost touch with them, and why, on a recent swing through Hillsboro, N.H., I found myself visiting my old friend Sadie, who I first met in the third or fourth grade.

Visits with Sadie are always highly entertaining. She’s a good storyteller, with a quick wit, and she never tires of filling me in on old classmates and various happenings. But if all we talked about was the past, our conversations wouldn’t be very interesting. Sadie and I have a lot to say to each other about life right now — about our hopes, and fears, and successes and failures. Sometimes it occurs to me that Sadie and I don’t necessarily have a lot in common anymore, other than a fondness for making sarcastic remarks, but I always dismiss this thought, because our differences don’t really seem to matter. Maybe because having been friends with somebody when I was 12 is a whole lot more than I have in common with most people.

I’ve always believed that we become friends with people who share our interests, but also with people who share our experiences, and although these things are sometimes one and the same, sometimes they are not. I have more in common with my friends from college and high school than the friends I had when I was 12, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy spending time with the people who remember all the weird things I did in middle school. Middle school was sort of a creative peak, a time of endless invention and limitless imagination. There was some pressure to conform, but it wasn’t so great that my friends and I couldn’t ignore it, and so we cheerfully devoted our energies to zany projects.

We created a newspaper similar in style to The Onion, and recorded the goofy songs we wrote in Aaron’s basement after school, and spent much of eighth-grade biology writing a story called “Richard is Skinny,” which we worked on covertly, while our teacher was lecturing. These experiences weren’t especially exciting — we never spent the weekend searching for a dead body — but I view them as formative, because I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t hung out with all those weird kids when I was 12, and losing touch with them would be a little bit like losing touch with a part of myself. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

I’ve still got a tattered copy of “Richard is Skinny,” as does my friend Cindy. “I should throw it away,” I once remarked. “It’s disgusting and juvenile.” “Yes, it is,” Cindy agreed. “But, you know, some of it is great.” Which is true. The best parts of “Richard is Skinny” still make me laugh out loud. Although maybe that says more about me than “Richard is Skinny” — it’s hard to be certain.

I’m much more certain about “Stand By Me.”

As movies go, it’s pretty great.

I particularly enjoy the film’s final line, uttered by a wistful Richard Dreyfuss, who plays the film’s narrator.

“I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12,” he says. “Jesus, does anybody?”

Foss Forward makes a weekly appearance in print, in The Gazette’s Saturday Lifestyles section.