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 with raising children then: kiddie parties with pin the tail on the donkey - no Chuck E. Cheese then - new plaid outfits for the first day of school, outside play time that lasted all day. 

Mom and Dolores also shared grief, not least of which was that the latter was widowed in her 30s. But they don't talk about that much now. They reflect on the happy times, like girls-only trips to the Poconos: a single mother, a mother of (eventually) five and a divorcee who subsisted on chocolate and coffee and always let my parents hide our Christmas gifts in her garage across the street.

They loved to dance, and if my mother wasn't pregnant, had a hi-ball or two. They still laugh over the time they asked a man playing ping-pong in the activity room of their hotel where he got his balls.  

Today, they are toddling monuments to perseverance and strength. One just turned 90, the other is two months away, but I still see them the way I did as a newsy kid, when I would sneak halfway down the stairs, peer through the wrought iron and try to hear what they were talking about at our kitchen table. 

One was from Brooklyn, the other Philly, and both came from exuberant Italian families. So to say they had the gift of gab is an understatement. And Dolores was company for my mom when my dad was on night work.

What I remember most is the swirl of smoke over their heads from Dolores' Salem cigarette, a hazy, menthol cloud out of which flowed stories and tears, laughter and neighborhood gossip. If those kitchen walls had talked, they would have coughed up the details.

And so now, when I see them together, it's like opening a long-buried time capsule, then realizing how many years it's been since you filled it with an old love letter, a dried prom flower or an old LIFE magazine.

Had I thought of burying a time capsule with mementoes of my mother's longest friendship, it would be brimming with some of what I heard on the stairway those long years ago: maybe my birth certificate to remember how they met, a paper donkey that's had its tailed pinned on for decades, photos from the Poconos.

And a pack of Salems.