The in crowd

My friend H’s mother lives in the same Florida nursing home as my mother-in-law. So H and I decided to fly down together.  On the plane, H was saying that her mother always felt that my mother-in-law was “popular” and she was not. Ah, we clucked, how sad that such adolescent insecurities persist into old age. Later I was making plans with my mother-in-law and a friend of hers to go to dinner, and they made sure to arrange for a third friend to join us so that our table of four would be prefilled and no one they didn’t like could join us. Ah, I thought to myself, how sad that such insecurities continue to be justified.