The kitchen table

I love to watch when my mother gets together with her best friend, and not just because they met on the day I was born in 1960. I was Mom's first child; Dolores had just had her second. Mom went through a difficult labor, Dolores sailed through hers. So she showed up at my worn-out mother's hospital bedside with a cigarette in her hand ready to chat. (You could smoke in hospitals then, and new mothers rested in maternity wards with long rows of beds.) As mom talked with Dolores, they realized they both lived on the same street of new rowhomes in Northeast Philadelphia: the 3300 block of Morning Glory Road, a future microcosm of the Baby Boom. She lived at 3333, we were at 3359. Existentially speaking, I don't think you can find a better example of the human condition than two friends who have known each other for 65 years. Who raised eight children between them, stretched a dollar like it was taffy, lived 26 houses apart and did all the things that went w...