It seems each day of the year now commemorates something — teddy bears, safety pins, parents, lovers. This irritates many people. I, too, scoff at some days — the pieties of Mother’s Day make me a little nauseous. Still, if you ignore the marketing, it’s amazing what wildly diverse things humans consider valuable.

So, today is Friendship Day. Which, I love, because I love friendship, which I feel has made all my hardest choices easier. As teenagers, friendship was an intense business of blow-by-blow emotional reportage. At the time I thought it the domain of the young. I could not imagine older people having such a strong inner life as I could not see them outside their roles of mom or dad or aunt or grandparent. What a prison that would be for them if they had no friends!