“Mother,” the man said, “Are we having a cocktail with lunch?”

I’d just been seated at the table across from them, waiting for my friend Laurie. I was early and she would be late. Maybe I should have a cocktail too.

The man appeared to be about my age, with oversized glasses and a gold pinky ring. She was that hard-to-guess-by-looking-age between 80 and 95.

I wondered why the man called his mom Mother.

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Dear Jeff,

I’ve just received my Whole Foods order for the week. Only a few weeks ago did I finally sign up for grocery delivery, and then only after the line at the store down the street began to stretch around the block, and only after the last time I shopped there in person and a woman with long gray stringy hair – not me but it could have been me – picked up and put back every single cremini mushroom before scavenging in the way back to make her choice. 

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In 1967, when I was nine, my parents sent me to sleepaway camp for a month to teach me independence. 

My father had gone to summer camp once in the Ozarks, and my mother not at all. They didn’t camp as adults, either. But they had spent a few years in Boston learning from wealthier, worldlier friends about what people did with their children during the summer: they sent them away, preferably somewhere in Maine

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