If I was dyslexic, I might read the above as “Year Thirty Five Friendship”. What would immediately tweak my memory is Year 35. My mother was born in year 35; 1935. If she hadn’t been taken so soon (by whom and to where is open to question or argument), she would have lived longer than the 64 years we had with her.

In short, she died from cancer of the esophagus, because for the majority of her life, cigarettes were her best friend. I’m told she started her friendship with tobacco when she was young, 15 or so. Smoking was cool then, an entree into a different social strata that carried sophistication and urbanity.

My mother was 16 when she graduated from high school. She was bright. She possessed a quick and logical mind. She was a latin scholar. She was quick witted. She had a dream to become a pharmacist and so applied and was admitted to the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy. But my grandmother, in one of a very few mistakes (in my opinion) that she made in her life, told my mother she couldn’t go. That she was too young, that it would be better to work for a year.

My mother got a job as a telephone operator, you know the ones that wore a headset and pulled cords and pegged them in to advance communication. She had exceptional hand-eye coordination (excelling in high school sports enough to consider becoming a coach herself). She was an ace for the job.

She also was a natty dresser and exuded a strong flair for personal style. And she was beautiful. Not in the “everyone thinks their mother is beautiful” sense, but universally attractive. She was a part-time clothes model, as well. She was a platinum blond, short haired, blue eyed knock out. She had it going.

As she collected paychecks from her full time job, she realized some of the power that gave her: freedom to buy clothes and makeup and nights out and cigarettes. Not surprising to anyone, including herself, she never looked back to Pharmaceutical College. She was fully committed to Ma Bell and her new crowd of older friends.

She was hooked up on a blind date, by my uncle, her boss at the phone company, with his younger brother, an officer in the Military Sea Transportation Service. It was love at first sight (but this is a yarn for anther time).

They married when she was 21 in 1956, and she took on the role of housewife and then mother four years later when she had me. She did what all young women were expected to do: staying at home, raising children, keeping the house clean and tasteful and waiting for her husband’s shore leaves.

She grew distant from her friends who still worked, her mother worked full time, and the people in other two apartments in the triple decker were in-laws all, including the brother-in-law, the former boss who fixed her up with her now husband. She was lonely and wondering no doubt about her decisions and sense of purpose, as do all 20-somethings.

She did have one benevolent friend with whom she kept constant companionship: a pack of Pall Malls. Together they grew the friendship until the friend had no more time for her, and cut her off, literally.

What a price she and we who loved her paid for that friendship. They were besties for life. And death.