My parents, Gilbert and Marilyn, left, with their friends, Abe and Shirley, celebrating their engagements in 1946 at Junior's in Brooklyn.
The photo is black and white, nearly seven decades old and meticulously preserved. My parents gaze at me from the left side of a restaurant booth, wide-eyed and hopeful. My mother, 19, has flowing dark hair and is wearing a corsage on the left top side of her dress, as is the woman directly across from her. Both are young, striking and newly engaged to the boyhood friends from Manhattan’s Lower East Side alongside them, hands resting on their bare arms.
