My friend and I have known each other for decades, we both live in the city, and we are both writers, but since he is a roving correspondent we meet only once in a supermoon. Dinner, Italian. A street of short brick buildings, a corner with large old trees. The night was mild enough that the floor-to-ceiling windows were open. The best Italian restaurants — and isn’t each one the best? — make you feel like a commendatore. They have a cultural and institutional appreciation of the value of esteem, even if the staff is from India and Colombia. Pepper, for example, must be stored in mills, which must not be placed on the table for our use, but offered to us. It makes the dispensing of pepper less than efficient, but the dispensing of honor wondrously so.
Catch-up talk. He blogs, we tweet, so we know a lot of it already, but nothing is more intimate than face to face (which is one reason people spend so much effort making masks). I had been reading about John Marshall, he about Gore Vidal; I have had the easier time.
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