PORTLAND — At 7 a.m. sharp, Gregg Adams sat down on the bench outside Pat’s Meat Market, his Yeti tumbler filled with coffee from the Quality Shop across the street. He spotted Steve DiMillo on the other side of Stevens Avenue.

“There’s the mayor right there,” he yelled to his friend.

DiMillo had come early with his trash picker and 5-gallon bucket, as he does once a week, collecting food wrappers, bottles and anything else that “doesn’t belong” around Deering Center.

“I’m a little fastidious,” said DiMillo, who runs the eponymous floating restaurant in Portland Harbor that his father founded.

It was a Thursday, so Dave Coppersmith would be there a few minutes late. He stays up playing poker with a group of friends on Wednesday nights, which always leads to barbs about his gambling problem.

The three friends meet by the bench six mornings a week, every day but Sunday, all year round. They joke about having Pat’s install an air conditioner to blow out onto them when it gets too hot and a heater for the winter. But that morning last summer, with their sunglasses on, it was pretty perfect.

HOW IT STARTED

The men have lived in the neighborhood most, if not all, their lives.

“I did move two and a half miles away one time, but I had to move back,” Coppersmith said.

Ask them where they went to school, and they’ll start at kindergarten. They overlapped at Deering High, where they bonded over a love of cars and dirt bikes.

“All motorheads,” said Adams, who owns an auto glass shop on Warren Avenue, while Coppersmith has a car repair business on Forest. “And we still do the same thing.”

They weren’t in the same class, however, and they remind each other often.

“Dave’s younger than us. He’ll tell you that,” said DiMillo, who at 65 is two years Coppersmith’s senior.

They like to poke Adams, 67, about his closer proximity to the grave.

Sometimes, though, the subject of mortality gets more serious. The day before, they had heard someone else they knew from school had died.

“Losing a lot of classmates,” Adams said.

Always looming, too, is the absence of Jamie Vacchiano, the late owner of Pat’s and the reason they started coming in the first place, whenever that was. His sons run the market now.

On the morning of Thanksgiving, their gathering swells to several dozen, all people who knew Vacchiano, and they raise a Baileys and coffee in his memory.

THEN AND NOW

The past comes up a lot on the bench.

The men point out what different buildings around Deering Center used to be, like the gas station on the corner of Clinton Street “back when gas was 25, 30 cents a gallon,” Adams said. There was the Rexall drugstore with a soda fountain, where a stationery shop opened in September. Their favorite was the bakery, where they’d cut class to go get a cream horn or glazed doughnut.

“We cover all the businesses that don’t exist anymore, the streets that don’t exist anymore,” DiMillo said.

Every couple minutes, one or all of them will wave to a passing truck, bicyclist or jogger. Longtime friends who happen to be in the neighborhood will join them on the bench for a bit, and they’ll show each other pictures of their grandkids on their phones. Those with cigarettes know to sit on the bench on other side of the door to Pat’s — the smoking section, they call it.

Others they’ve met sitting there will stop, too: the parents bringing their kids to school down the street, the woman who walks 18 miles a day, the dogs that can always count on Adams for a treat.

Adams knows all the passersby by their habits and backstories.

“That guy’s a world-class guitar player,” he said, when Sean Mencher came by with Luca, the black lab that he’d been walking since his mother died.

DiMillo makes sure to introduce different people who end up by the bench together and, when they spill out onto the street, keeps an eye out for cars and pedestrians coming through.

“Watch out: runners,” he said, as two young women bounded down the sidewalk, chatting with each other as they passed.

Coppersmith is the quickest to rib them both, always followed by a flash of his bright white smile.

And then, a half hour and however many conversations later, they’re gone.

ONE FALL MORNING

On a morning in October, Adams and Coppersmith grabbed free newspapers from the Quality Shop when they got their coffee, so they wouldn’t get wet sitting on the bench, still soaked from rain the night before.

DiMillo was sitting on a paper bag, eating a banana, when they walked over with their other high school friend, Dave Cruz, who was visiting from North Carolina.

“Every time I come up, I make sure to make coffee 30,” he said.

They’d had some cool mornings so far that fall, one where Coppersmith brought out his heated cushion, but this Tuesday was mild, even though the sun hadn’t quite come up yet.

“60s today,” Coppersmith said. “Heat wave.”

A Portland police officer waved from a marked SUV, and a pickup truck behind him honked.

The men, in sweatshirts and jeans, raised their hands in return.

“Even the police wave at us,” Coppersmith said.

“We’re not misbehaving today,” said Adams.

A WINTER COATING

On a Wednesday in February, DiMillo was just finishing his banana when Coppersmith was getting out of his loader. A couple inches of snow had fallen overnight, but it was supposed to be more.

Coppersmith clears driveways for properties he owns, along with a few others, and Adams has commercial plowing accounts — on top of the favors for friends.

“Did the end of my driveway this morning,” DiMillo said.

He didn’t expect to see Adams come back for coffee, but sure enough, he showed up just as one of his favorite neighborhood dogs, Percy, was walking by.

Adams was the only one who brought his heated cushion, so they all ended up standing with their coffees from Quality Shop.

The first one who arrives usually buys the others, but Coppersmith got his for free for helping with snow removal, and they realized none of them had paid.

“We’re going to try the same thing in here with the steaks,” DiMillo said, pointing his thumb back at Pat’s.

SPRING ARRIVES

On the Friday morning before Memorial Day, it was quieter than usual in Deering Center.

A heat wave had hit earlier in the week, but the temperature had come back down — to 46 degrees according to the digital thermometer on the Quality Shop’s Coca-Cola sign, where the clock is sometimes off an hour, sometimes not.

“This morning, I almost put gloves on,” DiMillo said.

“You are kind of delicate,” said Coppersmith.

Their numbers had grown since the winter. Scott Merrill, who was in Adams’ class at Deering, had been coming on Saturdays for a while but, since retiring from Hammond Lumber, started showing up on weekdays, too.

Coppersmith and Adams have been cutting back on work themselves, so they hung around longer that morning, holding the door for delivery people dropping off paper bags and bread at Pat’s.

They’re not ready to step back entirely yet. Coppersmith says working on cars keeps him healthy.

“I don’t want to be old like these guys,” he said.

They might miss each other some mornings in the coming months: DiMillo, if he stays out at his place on Great Diamond Island; Adams, if he’s off antiquing in Pennsylvania; Coppersmith, when he goes to Las Vegas in the fall.

Otherwise, they can’t think of a reason they wouldn’t be there.