This afternoon, I took my oldest friend in the world out to lunch. It was a quiet celebration of his seventy ninth birthday. If, when we were thrown together as roommates at boarding school more than sixty years ago, we had been told that such a thing would happen, we would have rolled our eyes at the vanity of fortune tellers, for we were not friends back then. (And neither of us dreamed of living as long as we have done.) Friendship was something that stole over us with continued familiarity. The conversation at lunch was as peppery as usual, but not just peppery. I find that, if you know somebody long enough, you can actually be nice to him, at least some of the time.

We talked for a moment about the latest email from our class secretary, announcing the death of a classmate. I could say, “yet another classmate,” because that’s what notes from the class secretary usually announce: we are of an age to be dying off. I had only one memory of the fellow. By the time my old friend and I arrived at school, he and his twin brother were no longer boarding, but lived on a farm nearby. One day, they showed up at class with a coffee can, and in the coffee can were the testicles of a horse that they had gelded first thing that morning. Yesterday’s email told us that the twins had (and have) continued their love of horses throughout their lives.

My oldest friend mentioned a friend of his who has just returned to the United States from ten months of travel, and who insists that he loved living out of a suitcase all that time, visiting Turkey and Vietnam and a number of other places. It was something that he had always wanted to do. Having lunch with my oldest friend, in contrast, marked the first time that I crossed Central Park since I spent last New Year’s Eve with him. I am not sure that I own a suitcase.

There are people who manage to talk about interests that they don’t share, and would probably never share, without sounding patronizing. I’m not one of them. And it is not always agreeable even to hear about those interests from third parties who require no real response from me, or who won’t mind if I roll my eyes and mutter, “living out of a suitcase….!” The narcissism of small difference can overpower me. Nevertheless, I find that, quite aside from the relief of not having to do them myself, I feel pleasantly stretched to have heard about the things that other people get up to for pleasure, and to have it brought home once again that the world is richly strange — something that, like liking my oldest friend, I’ve recognized with the passage of a great deal of time.