Marriott's Corporate Social Responsibility stunt - Pay low wages and ask customers to pay high tips

Corporations are not people, so don't let them guilt you into tipping the maid

Gratitude is a very good thing. It makes us happy. But this is what happens when Marriott and the corporate do-gooder police co-opt your feelings

• 
• • Oliver Burkeman
  •  
  • theguardian.com, Wednesday 17 September 2014 18.34 BST

The more you feel guilted into demonstrating gratitude, the less it makes sense to call it gratitude at all. Photograph: Pelle Sten / Flickr via Creative Commons

If I still somehow retained any capacity to be surprised by the tone-deafness of corporate America, I imagine I’d be pretty taken aback by the news that Marriott International has joined forces with a nonprofit called A Woman’s Nation to launch The Envelope Please, a campaign to encourage hotel guests to leave “tips and notes of thanks for hotel room attendants” in envelopes that Marriott will graciously provide. (You can contribute to Marriott’s marketing budget – sorry, I meant “donate to A Woman’s Nation”! – here.)

As New York magazine’s Annie Lowery and others have pointed out, tipping is a terrible way to try to improve the lot of hotel housekeepers, whose work is stressful, debilitating, unseen and badly paid. On the one hand, tipping is basically useless as a way of encouraging good work; on the other hand, it’s incredibly useful as an excuse for employers to avoid raising wages. In the words of the National Review – and how often does one quote the National Review approvingly when not under the influence of massive quantities of hallucinogenic drugs? – “how about just paying them more?”

Corporate do-gooding efforts, with their obvious potential for ulterior motives, frequently arouse this sort of scornful reaction. (If you’ve ever felt guiltily irritated by a request to donate to charity at the pharmacy or supermarket checkout, you’ll know what I mean.) But there’s something especially irritating about the way that Marriott and Maria Shriver, founder of A Woman’s Nation, have characterized the campaign as an opportunity for guests “to express their gratitude”. “I hope this gratitude initiative will make these women feel seen and validated,” Shriver was quoted as saying.

There’s no doubt about it: gratitude is a very, very, very good thing. The sheer weight of psychological research testifying to this truth isn’t really disputable at this point: it’s associated with increased happiness; increased savoring of positive experiences; better self-worth and self-esteem; more ethical behavior and the nurturing of social bonds. Gratitude journals, despite sounding like the pinnacle of Oprah-esque cheesiness, truly work, if you do them right, by briefly listing a small number of things for which you’re grateful in a notebook each day. And you should probably try keeping one. (You don’t need to tell anyone you’re doing it.)

Yet despite these many benefits – or more accurately, perhaps, because of them – the corporate co-opting of gratitude is something we should resist with every sinew. If you need persuading of this argument, just look at what happened to fun when it started getting used as a weapon in the arsenal of consultants who promised to transform company cultures for the better. Fun (by definition, I suppose) is great. “Fun” imposed by managers on employees, by contrast, is excruciating. It damages productivity, fosters resentment, and generally isn’t remotely fun.

It’s horribly easy to see gratitude heading in a similar direction. Take something good and selfless, then promote it for self-interested reasons, and you seem unavoidably to corrode or cheapen the thing itself. Gratitude has to be “authentic and autonomously derived” if it’s going to have beneficial effects, says the University of California psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, who’s led several of the most important studies on the topic so far. “There’s plenty of research showing that when you do something, you have to be the one who chose to do it” in order to reap the benefits. The more you feel guilted into demonstrating gratitude, the less it makes sense to call it gratitude at all.

New data that Lyubomirsky is preparing for publication, she adds, shows that gratitude can trigger negative emotions as well as positive ones. “Though it does make people happier and uplifted, it can also make people feel more guilty, more indebted, more embarrassed and uncomfortable.”

This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: gratitude belongs to the complex, messy world of real human relationships, where things often don’t conform to the monotone cheer that a branding effort – and that’s all The Envelope Please is, really – seeks to instil. Even if Marriott does succeed in generating waves of gratitude on the part of its customers, it may find they end up associating less-than-positive emotions with its brand.

Oh, by the way: Marriott International’s chief executive, Arne Sorensen, made about $7m in 2012. I just thought you might be grateful for that information.

How the super rich got richer: 10 shocking facts about inequality

The gap between the super rich and the rest of us is spiralling out of control, with Britain’s 1% grabbing more than their counterparts anywhere else in Europe

• 
• • Danny Dorling
  • The Guardian, Monday 15 September 2014 19.10 BST

Living the high life: the richest 1% have got richer at the expense of the rest of us. Photograph: Getty Images

1. The top 1% no longer includes most doctors and head teachers

To be in the top 1% of earners in Britain today, a couple with no children would need a minimum income of £160,000. A single person can enter the 1% with a little less, while a couple with children would need more.

Hardly any GPs are paid enough to take their place in the top 1% any longer, despite the last decade’s huge hike in their pay; their incomes have been far outstripped by those of the financiers above them. The best-paid head teachers, too, used to be within the top paid 1% in society. They have seen pay rises higher than most teachers, but, again, they have been overtaken in the rankings by financiers, managers, accountants and lawyers. The 1% can pay their children’s university fees upfront. For the rest of us, it is debt. And, in recent years, the top doctors and teachers have become increasingly like the rest of us. There has always been a top 1%, but in the past it contained a wider range of people, including many who were respected more for the jobs they did. And the 1% is taking more and more. When I was a child, the 1% took a third of the share of national income they do today. Nowhere in Europe do they take as much as in the UK.

2. London is the home of the 1%

Per head, there are more so-called ultra-high net-worth individuals (UHNWI) in London than anywhere else on the planet. These are defined as people with $30m (£21m) or more in assets apart from their main home. The estate agents Frank Knight recently reported that 4,224 “Ultra” families were living in London, with the number expected to reach 5,000 by 2024. The attraction is not just London’s history, nightlife or its convenient time zone; it is Britain’s lax tax regime. As Pippa Malmgren, one-time economic adviser to George Bush, put it: “The crackdown on tax havens in Switzerland has removed these old options for new capital. As a result, there has been a huge influx of global capital into the UK.”

London’s wealthy elite also includes the largest concentration of Russian millionaires found outside of Moscow – at least 2,000, many of whom are also “Ultras”. It is impossible to accurately assess their wealth because so much of it is hidden. But the donations from many of them to the Conservative party suggest that they have a direct interest in maintaining the low tax – especially wealth tax – policies of that party. It is not just property that the Russians are buying.

3. The super rich can view the lower classes as subhuman

It is very hard to justify your huge wealth unless you see people beneath you as less deserving. Once the wealth gaps become very large, it is easier to get through the day if you see them as less able, less special. When earlier this month the civil society minister Brooks Newmark told people involved in charities that they should “stick to their knitting” rather than concern themselves with what might be causing the problems they were trying to remedy, he was exhibiting just such a “don’t worry your pretty little head” attitude.

At the extreme, the less fortunate may not be seen as people at all. That was the finding of a study from Princeton University in which MRI scans were taken of several university students’ active brains while they viewed images of different people. Researchers saw that photographs of homeless people and drug addicts failed to stimulate areas of the brain that usually activate whenever people think about other people, or themselves. Instead, the (mostly affluent) students reacted to the images as if they “had stumbled on a pile of trash”.

The more economic inequality there is in a country, the more people are prone to instantly size up each others’ status upon meeting. Some quickly cast their eyes down; others look over the shoulders of those they don’t think they need to respect. Social psychologists from Berkeley and Amsterdam have studied strangers in situations where one told the other of a difficult personal experience, such as a death in the family. The larger the social gap, the less compassion was shown. Such behaviour, and the acceptance of it as normal, becomes much more prevalent in those places where the 1% have taken the most.

A homeless woman in London: research has shown that the larger the social gap, the less compassion is shown to those worse off. Photograph: Chris Helgren/Reuters

4. In the last 15 years, inequality has spiralled

If the national minimum wage had kept pace with FTSE 100 CEO salaries since 1999, it would now be £18.89 per hour instead of £6.50. However, for some reason broadcasters rarely ask CEOs about the gulf between their pay and that of the poorest staff in their organisations. The unstated implication is that the lowest-paid staff are lucky to have any job at all, and only have what they have thanks to the benevolence of the 1%, with their superior leadership skills.

If the top 1% actually created more jobs as they became wealthier, then ordinary people would be surrounded by employment opportunities in both the US and the UK. Instead, it is in Germany, where the wealthiest 1% receives in pay and bonuses half as much as their counterparts in the US, that unemployment is at a 20-year low. In countries that keep their top 1% in check, the highest earners work more effectively for the good of all, or at the very least create a little less misery.

5. Taxing more would cut down on greed

To reduce wealth inequalities, you introduce wealth taxes, as we did with inheritance tax a century ago. However, if you want to keep inequality under control, you need a high top rate of income tax. The top rate in Switzerland and Germany has not fallen for the past half century; in both countries the top 1% earners now take a slightly smaller share of total income than they did in the 1960s. In the US and the UK, the 1% have gained the most as top taxes have fallen the most.

Top taxes reduce income inequality not by raising revenue, but by deterring the greedy from asking for more money. When there is a tax rate of 60% or 70% on the slice of income above £200,000 or £250,000 a year, it makes little sense to pay employees much more than that.

By not paying a few people very high salaries, firms can save enormous amounts of money. If Barclays bank didn’t employ several hundred people on salaries of more than £1m, but on more reasonable, if still high incomes, it could employ several thousand more staff to work in local branches threatened with closure. Similarly, the BBC could make better programmes using more producers if a few celebrities at the top were paid less. It has already begun this process. A more equitable pay distribution allows far more people for the same cost, and the reward is greater productivity.

6. Maintaining inequality requires penalising the poor

The coalition government has already reduced the top rate of tax to 45%. Now it plans tougher benefit cuts for the poor. Under current financial plans, it will reward the top 1% even more in future, by cutting income taxes further. The rest of the top 20% can expect slight increases in their net income in the years up to 2016, while everyone else is impoverished. These figures are based on the Office for Budget Responsibility’s own projections. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has produced statistics showing that George Osborne’s plans will cut the proportion of GDP going to the state to the lowest level in western Europe by 2015, and for the first time below that in the US.

A gold Ferrari sitting in a London street. The UK capital has become a playground for the super-rich.Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

7. It is children who will suffer most from the spending cuts

The tax, benefit and spending changes now underway will hit households with children hardest. These make up a third of households, according to the children’s commissioner for England, but will suffer around two thirds of the cuts. On average, couples with no children will lose 4%, couples with children 9%, and lone parents 14% of their net income. Yet the 1% with children face no net cuts. Their loss of child benefit is more than outweighed by what they gain from tax cuts.

The 1% in the UK can afford to put money into a highly pressured education for their children. This does not necessarily make them happy. Many may prefer a normal family life to a boarding school, paid handsomely to squeeze the highest possible exam grades from them. They are expected to gain entry to some of the “best” universities and, in turn, to quickly secure a very highly paid job and do the same for their own children. They are not necessarily to be envied, but they come at a huge price, which others partly pay through austerity. One way of looking at the cost of the UK’s 1% is that it is equivalent to running 1,100 royal families.

8. Many other parts of the world are becoming more, not less, equal

In Switzerland and the Netherlands, the share of national income taken by the 1% has shrunk to historic lows. Inequalities have fallen since 1990 in Brazil and since 2000 in Sweden. Even in the UK, income inequalities since the 2008 crash have fallen back to early 1990s levels – if you strip out the very richest 1%. Only this tiny minority is still moving away from the rest. Since 2005, global economic inequalities have been falling, but again only if the wealth and income of the very richest is ignored. We are facing a fork in the road between having a majority global middle class, or most of us becoming a global service class employed to satisfy the needs of a tiny minority of super-rich individuals.

In spring this year, Oxfam revealed that some 85 of the world’s richest people now had as much wealth as the poorest half of all humanity. A few weeks later, Forbes magazine updated that estimate to just 67 people. Then, within days, they corrected that estimate on their website to 66 people, so fast was the wealth of the multi-billionaires rising in the world during early 2014. Such rapidly expanding bubbles always explode, and the larger they get, the more messily they end.

9. Concentration of wealth at the top is unsustainable …

Wealth concentration damages economies. It focuses activity within finance and other services geared towards the super rich – resorts, hotels, all manner of servant duties – and away from actually productive work. It is far better to have a mixed economy where some manufacturing still takes place near to where goods are consumed. It is also damaging to rely on industries with high numbers of very low-paid employees. If you eat out half as much but pay twice as much for the privilege, then cooks, washers-up and waiters can be paid more, as they are in Switzerland. Nowhere in Europe “employs” unpaid interns in such numbers as Britain, including in its financial industry; this does not make a vibrant market economy.

Economists based in Hamburg, Göttingen and Harvard recently studied trends since 1961 in nine high-income countries and revealed that, as those at the very top take more, overall economic growth becomes more sluggish. It is not just that the richest leave less in the pay chest for everyone else: the chest fills more slowly when the 1% take more, when employees must get by on subsistence wages, when interns must work themselves into the ground for nothing.

10. But no one knows when the tipping point will come

It is exactly a century since the income and wealth of the 1% last began to fall abruptly. Inequality peaked in the years 1912 and 1913, when the organisation of British society was epitomised by the sleeping arrangements on the Titanic.

That world was changed by external events: the first world war, the 1916 Easter uprising, the Russian revolution of 1917, and the influenza pandemic of 1918 that killed 50 million people worldwide. Taxes rose rapidly. The job was finished by unions, politicians and suffragettes, the greed of the 1920s bankers and the crash of 1929. The net income of the 1% was cut in half by 1939.

Today there are not enough people to buy property in London at prices inflated by the greed of the 1%. Firms cannot sell enough to justify the largesse offered to a few at the top, and banks cannot legally or morally make enough profit to pay over 2,000 bankers more than £1m a year. Roughly half the voters of Scotland haven’t expressed their wish to leave the union in poll after poll because they see London and its inequalities as stable or sustainable.

We can see the rising dissent and anger and the changing of attitudes towards the rich, but not the precise event that will come to be labelled as the turning point, just as we could not a century ago. But it is coming. We may even have passed it. Note how pay at the top of the BBC has fallen, and that no banker today is paid what Bob Diamond received a few years ago. The language and moral sentiment is changing. By being angry and disgusted with the current extent of inequality, we make it unacceptable, and its defenders become pariahs. Gross economic inequality is as vile as racism, misogyny and hatred of the disabled; as damaging in effect; and as dependent on a small group of supporters who believe that just a few should have more and more and more, because they’re worth it.

A go-alone Scottish economy is viable – but would it be any better?

Scots may dream of a Swedish-style state but, lacking concrete plans, Ireland is the likelier model

• 
• • Aditya Chakrabortty
  • The Guardian, Monday 15 September 2014 20.38 BST

‘Like a Rorschach test, both right and left gaze upon the saltires and the protesting crowds outside BBC Scotland, and see exactly what they want to see.’ Illustration: Daniel Pudles

A friend mails from Edinburgh: “The referendum is all anybody talks about. My mate is getting married next week and says despite that, all his dreams are about independence.” An uncle born in Rangoon, but living in London for 50 years, comes to visit with one thing on his mind: “I can’t hear enough about what’s happening in Scotland.”

Britain is in the middle of something so epic that almost everyone feels compelled to have a view on it. And like a Rorschach test, both right and left gaze upon the saltires and the protesting crowds outside BBC Scotland – and see exactly what they want to see.

For the right, this is an insurgency of the subsidy junkies: a coalition of the ungrateful, the unaffordable and the utopian, hell-bent on disrupting an order that has provided three centuries of stability. Seen from the left, this is an uprising by capitalism’s oppressed, throwing off the shackles placed on them by Thatcher’s children and the Blairite zombies they are just a vote away from a socially just Xanadu. I exaggerate a little, but – after all the afternoon rallies and midnight blogs and front-page warnings from the Queen – I’m not alone.

The fundamental point, though, is this: neither picture captures the reality. Look at Scotland’s economic profile, and it’s clear that independence would be viable. But count up the building blocks that would form the basis of a new economy, and it looks sadly unlikely that an independent Scotland would be much of an alternative to the Old Corruption south of the border.

None of the above is going to stop the no campaign from keeping the union together at all costs. Which is why this weekend’s newspapers were bursting with dreadful warnings from Deutsche Bank about how a yes vote would be “a political and economic mistake as large as Winston Churchill’s decision in 1925 to return the pound to the gold standard” or the missteps in Washington that triggered the Great Depression.

That note of alarm came from the foreword to a two-page research note issued by Deutsche. Over the year, I have read thousands of such finance-house briefings – indeed, I have dim memories from very early in my career of having contributed to a few – and can say two things about them with confidence. First, for all the numbers and letterheads, they are not the word of God. They are a cross between a commentary and a forecast: think of a horse-racing tip without the colourful names, or Simon Heffer with more graphs. The Deutsche paper fits the form to a T: the bank’s group chief economist’s remarks are less economic than political in nature. “Why anyone would want to exit a successful economic and political union … to go it alone for the benefit of ... what exactly, is incomprehensible to this author.”

Fair enough: it’s one man’s view. But the other rule of research notes is that there’s bound to be another expressing a contrasting opinion. Such as the email I received from the head of the global strategy team at Société Générale. It argues that a yes vote would lay bare the fact that, without Scotland’s oil exports, the rest of the UK simply doesn’t pay its way in the world – and so independence would see “sterling quite rightly plunge into the abyss”.

Two well-known financial strategists, two divergent views – but only one gets amplified by the media. Funny that.

To make the sort of call issued by the Deutsche economists, you would need the kind of information about who would get what share of the oil and of the UK’s debts that we just don’t have yet – because those negotiations between Holyrood and Westminster haven’t even begun. Despite that, the no camp leaps on any passing argument to support its side. Even if they are pish. You can’t argue both that a go-alone Scotland would be as overbanked as Iceland, and that RBS and Lloyds leaving spells disaster: it’s one or the other.

That said, the technicalities mean the transition to independence would be turbulent. Forget about devo max; there would be austerity max, thanks to Scotland’s budget deficit. Worried over the value of their assets, savers and companies would try to shift their money south. Thousands of business contracts would need to be redrawn.

If the Scots go into currency union with the rest of the UK, their interest rates, financial regulation and probably their tax-and-spend policies will be dictated by the entity they have just opted out of. The plan B of merely adopting the pound would be even worse, and leave banks headquartered in Scotland in need of a new lender of last resort. As Dundee-born economist Mark Blyth points out, the most sensible option, of a Scottish currency, would take about five to seven years to set up a new central bank, a new bond shop and a new tax office.

These are just the technicalities – and they already spell a decade of pain. But provided the new country’s electorate was primed for such sacrifices, they could be got through. The big question for the left, both in Scotland and the rest of the UK, is what kind of alternative economy would be built. And I can’t see that it would be so different. Adopting the pound or the euro would bind the new country into the same old hated structures. Going by SNP policies, this new small state would follow the path trod by many of its predecessors over the past two decades: cut corporation tax, sell assets and try to draw in as much foreign capital as possible. The result wouldn’t be Sweden, but Ireland: a plaything for big multinationals.

It wouldn’t be impossible to craft an alternative economic policy: but there isn’t one in place yet. Ask for one and you are pointed to the Wee Blue Book or Adam Ramsay’s 42 Reasons: both are smart, generous-minded critiques of Britain’s political economy, but they are short of concrete alternatives. Ask for an alternative to Alex Salmond and you’re shown “good bloke” Patrick Harvie. But the Green party he heads polls about as well north of the border as Ukip.

In the old days of ethnic nationalism, having a vacuum in place of an alternative wouldn’t matter so much: separatism would be an end in itself. But the yes campaign that’s emerged over the past few years is built around a civic nationalism, in which the forming of a nation is only the means to an end of progressive values. Trouble is, around the central issue of economics, there is a blank ready to be filled by the old conservatism and lobbying.

My parents helped me to lose my virginity

When he was 16, Boris Fishman and his girlfriend felt ready to have sex but he wanted the setting to be right and there was nowhere to go. Then he had an idea ...

• Boris Fishman
• The Guardian, Friday 12 September 2014 14.30 BST

Boris Fishman … 'I wanted it to resemble the epic lovelorn couplings in Marquez's books.'

We were each other’s firsts. I was 16, a stressed-out immigrant kid, she was the daughter of Colombian Catholics who were quite fond of the church’s policy on pre-marital sex. So it took us quite a while to awkwardly, semi-defeatedly concede to each other that we had run out of excuses to avoid sex. “This weekend?” I said grimly.

“Your house?” she said.

On Saturday morning, when the springtime sun finally made a strong showing outside after a dreary, wet winter, I came downstairs, where my parents and maternal grandmother were gathered around breakfast, and asked, as casually as I could: “Are you guys doing anything tonight?”

My father, not one for socialising or reading between the lines, wrinkled his forehead and said: “No?”

But my mother, who reads between the lines, needed only one look at me to say: “Of course!” She didn’t know why she was being asked, but she knew she was being asked.

“Why not go out for dinner?” I said, feeling guilty. “My treat.” Since arriving from the Soviet Union a decade before in 1988, none of our immigrant habits had eased; we almost never ate out – too expensive.

But I had been hoarding dollars from my summer jobs landscaping and lifeguarding. My offer must have indicated to my mother how badly I wished for the thing I was asking.

“But we’re not going anywhere tonight,” my father repeated, confused. My mother smacked his arm with the back of her hand: “Yes, we are.”

My grandmother only lolled her head, smiling. Whatever the adventure, she was in, as long as it included the family. (She had lost most of hers in the Holocaust.)

With curiosity, scepticism and goodwill, my parents and grandmother piled into the cramped, rusty Buick that was our first car in America and fumed off to whatever discount place they were going to for dinner. Newly permitted to drive, I jumped into our other car and sped off to a linen shop, in one of the nondescript shopping malls that surrounded our town like a blockading army.

I had been reading quite a bit of Gabriel García Márquez – my girlfriend’s compatriot – and I wanted her first time to resemble the epic, lovelorn couplings in his books. I wasn’t sure how things would hold up at my end, so at least everything else could be perfect.

After buying sheets (surely, I was the only unaccompanied 16-year-old male in the store), I stopped at the florist’s and asked for two dozen roses, rapidly depleting the funds I had set aside for my family’s dinner. I was so anxious that I gashed a finger trying to open the cellophane packaging in which the sheets were packed. I laid them down and wondered how tacky it was for the folding creases to show. Márquez had said nothing about folding creases. I tore the sheets back off the bed, yanked my mother’s ironing board from the hallway closet and got to work, the clock marching forward without mercy. My girlfriend was almost due and my family surely soon after that.

I gashed another finger plucking the petals off the thorn-riddled roses. (You thought I was going to give my girlfriend the flowers? No, like a maestro unveiling his circus, I would peel back the bedspread to reveal … fresh sheets covered in rose petals!)

Trying desperately not to bleed all over the enterprise, I stretched the ironed sheets over the mattress, scattered 300 rose petals on top and covered it all with the bedspread.

The main event was nothing like my literary hero had promised: primarily, we were relieved it was over. Now we could savour the falsely sweet memory of a milestone achieved. We turned on the television, called the diner and ordered a takeaway.

However, there was no sign of the adults. It was dark by now; I couldn’t imagine them choosing a restaurant that took serious time with its meals. There was no such place in our town, in any case.

They weren’t back when I drove my girlfriend home and they weren’t back by the time I returned. Eleven turned to midnight to 1am, and I turned from amusement to worry to terror at having consigned my family to catastrophe all because I wanted to lose my virginity.

I paced the living room and waited.

Boris Fishman’s parents, Anna and Yakov.

Though I would be unable to explain the feeling until many years later, the unease in my chest that evening had less to do with the awkwardness of a first coupling than the knowledge that it had been an obligation performed by two young people who felt a tremendous amount of affection for each other and desperately wished that could be enough.

I wrote my first poems for Gloria and she listened patiently to my complaints about the pressures of all that was expected from me at home. She came to my tennis matches and I wrote her term papers. But there were too many silent moments between us and the fact that our parents did not see us together – a Catholic and a Jew – only deepened the gloom. Our parents’ opinions mattered to us with all the weight they suspected was lacking.

Gloria and I would never regret that we had given ourselves to each other, but among the many other lessons with which adulthood awaited us was the news that for a life together it was not enough to love someone; you had to like them, too.

She was one year older than me and when she went off to college we unravelled. All the same, when I went to college, my mother demanded to know whether I had chosen it because it was only half an hour from where Gloria was studying.

“It’s Princeton, Ma,” I said. “Who cares why I chose it?” (I had selected Princeton because it offered the most financial assistance and because my parents would be footing the bill). But having spent their formative years in a country that lied to and abused its citizens, especially if they were Jewish, my parents were always alert to a con, even from their own flesh and blood.

As for Gloria, we reconnected several years ago after more than a decade. We have dinner every few months, each meeting as if no time has passed. The intense feelings that we experienced in those impressionable years have left us with a seemingly ineradicable tenderness available only to people like us. Sometimes I wonder: would we have stood a chance if we had ignored our parents about our relationship, too? There is no way to know.

So, this is adulthood: being old enough to have questions that will never be answered. Now, the parents listen only sometimes. Gloria and I laugh and commiserate about it when we meet at dinner. In those moments, our friendship feels like a secret and a gift.

But back to that spring night in 1996. When I heard the garage-door rumble open at 2am, I leapt off the couch where I was napping fitfully and burst through the connecting door in the front hallway.

“Where were you?!” I demanded like a parent sighting children who had violated their curfew. “It’s 2am!”

“We wanted to give you your time,” my mother said, taken aback.

“Where were you?” I demanded.

Recent immigrants don’t eat out, not if someone in the family is paying (my pocket was as good as their own, as far as they were concerned). They had spent seven hours parked in the lot outside Shop Rite down Hamburg Turnpike, next to the diner from which my girlfriend and I had ordered food. They had made sandwiches. They snacked on turkey slices with mayo and cucumber and talked about all the things they wished their only son to achieve. Seven hours they had talked and they could have gone on until dawn.