On a recent visit to the home of a longtime friend, I observed something in him that astonished me. To my certain knowledge, I had never seen David react the way he did on this occasion.

Others who were present were almost certainly not struck as much by his reaction as I was. Perhaps it was being an age peer of David that made me notice something that was so subtle as to escape the attention of those others. In any event, they probably would not have attached much significance to it.

What happened was this. David told us the story of the novelist Richard Ford who, when he was a boy, was given a Christmas present by the assembled staff members of a hotel which his family owned. On receiving the gift, the boy looked up and said aloud: “Is that all?” As an adult, he came to understand and regret what he had said, and he has made continued efforts to make up for it.

In telling us about this novelist, whom he admired for his atonement, David choked up and his eyes became teary. Emotion took hold of him as he described the novelist’s efforts to make up for a mistake he had made as a child.

If it had been a friend other than David reacting this way, I might not have felt surprise. But this friend was very intellectual, brimming over with ideas and insights. In all the time of our friendship, I never remember seeing him close to tears.

But David had recently celebrated his 74th birthday and his emotional life seemed to have subtly changed. At least, that is the way I interpret it. To judge from my own experience of life in the seventies, and that of other friends, a delicate transformation of inner life was taking hold.

As if to provide confirmation of my theory, another David, a more recent friend, has surprised me by acting the same way. Against all expectation, he displayed emotion as I had never seen him do before. I dare say that no one of the other friends gathered with us had either.

This David is a widely published poet who told us of having recently celebrated his 70th birthday. For the occasion, he had arranged for some of his poems to be produced by hand press. At our lunch, a young woman from the press brought in the pages on which the poems were printed.

Then David read the poems aloud to us, his friends, much to our pleasure. All of these short works related to his recent birthdays and offered image-filled reflections on their meaning for him. His words were beautifully crafted and emotionally affecting.

What amazed me during this brief reading was seeing David choke up and his eyes watered by tears. Like the other David, he is very intellectual and not given to displays of tender emotions, at least in the company of us friends. Suddenly, he seemed to be acting out of character and advancing into unfamiliar territory.

Finally, I confess feeling this way myself now in my middle seventies the way I never did before. To cite a recent instance, I felt tears running down my cheeks at a recent concert. The occasion was the Boston Symphony’s performance of Wagner’s opera, The Flying Dutchman.

Toward the end of the second act, the Dutchman and his lady love sing a duet that ranks, for me, as the best aria in the opera. When Deborah Voight’s voice soared out over the audience and filled Symphony Hall, I was overcome at the beauty of the music.

This strong a response to an esthetic stimulus would not have happened in my younger days. In fact, as a young person, I was not particularly sensitive to artistic expression, although I have loved opera since my teenage years. An overly rationalistic schooling had knocked some of the emotional expressiveness out of me.

You could dismiss my experience and that of the two Davids as mere sentimentality, emotion outrunning stimulus. But that would be to shortchange the events.

Instead, the sudden emotion described here witnesses to the richness of the inner life in the later years. These are precious senior moments, responses to events that are full of meaning. They can be sparked by small happenings but these interior events suggest changes that enhance the passage to old age.

To see if my observations hold water, I checked with Wendy Lustbader, an esteemed colleague based in Seattle. By reason of her long experience as a social worker, Wendy has a much sharper sense than I of the emotional life of my age peers.

She thinks I’m on to something. For her, tears shed by men often signify the “transition to another emotional life.”

By expressing tender feelings, many men in later life are come closer to experience that has been long familiar to women. In laying hold of inner territory formerly closed off to them, these men can even be thought of as becoming all the more human.

Richard Griffin