Peace, Love & Potluck

• One fine spring morning, we packed a U-Haul truck and left the inner city for the suburbs. The ground was still patchy with leftover snow and we drove with care through the downtown streets, feeling a little sad to be leaving but optimistic about a new neighborhood, about moving up in the world.
  
  The new apartment was over a dentist's office, three full rooms with lots of windows, sidewalks with trees, carpeting. We were walking distance from the city square. a diverse and colorful collage of small shops, delicatessens, bookstores and tiny markets specializing in ethnic food, vintage clothing, greeting cards and used furniture. We explored them all that spring, walking hand in hand on Saturday afternoons and sometimes ducking into the small movie theatre for a double feature. We discovered a fondue restaurant and spent hours at a cozy sidewalk cafe, making plans for the future and drinking white wine. Nights we walked to the sawdust floored seafood place and ate sweet fried clams and lobster rolls off paper plates on checked tablecloths with candles in Chianti bottles. Sunday mornings were for hot chocolate and bagels spread with cream cheese - we ate with the newspaper spread out over the bed and the Kingston Trio singing in the background. Friends were in and out at all hours to play scrabble or borrow money or just visit and drink the every present homemade sangria. Some spent the night, sleeping on the burnt orange carpet in the living room and waking to the cautious investigations of our three curious cats. Convinced that no young people ate a proper diet, Mrs. Levin, the good dentist's mother who had her own small apartment across the hall, frequently dropped in with baskets of warm challah, knishes and Jewish apple cake, all made with her own hands with fresh ingredients from the deli in the square. She was a tiny slip of a woman and never left the house without her bandana and cane and her shopping bag over one arm. She spoke broken English and made her points with extravagant hand gestures and a wide smile, carrying her teeth in one apron pocket and her change purse in the other. She was a formidable cook and something of a gentle natured dictator about nutrition and food, believing that chicken soup and a good Jewish prayer could cure all the ills of the world. When she fell on the stairs one January and broke her hip, she refused to stay in the hospital and all through the winter an endless parade of caregivers came and went daily with newspapers, laundry, baskets of food, books. They cleaned and cooked for her, read to her, ran errands and did chores, kept her company and in good spirits and she recovered in record time. You're never too young or too old to be looked after.