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We meet them on airplanes, trains, by sharing a counter at a coffee bar and maybe waiting in a long line at the grocery store or to buy a ticket to a movie or play. Or, sometimes, we meet when we’re a captive audience for an extremely long period at a surprising time—while waiting for our car to be fixed or being stuck with a sick family member in a hospital emergency room.  They look at us, we look at them and rather than continue with our heads buried in a book, magazine, Smartphone, iPad, newspaper or waiting for the...

It’s 2 a.m. Margaret, who has gotten up for the third time that night to go to the bathroom, drags her walker across the hardwood floor and crawls back into the king-sized bed that she shares with Barbara and her beau, Fixup. This is not a ménage à trois but an end-of-life arrangement. We spend our last days leaning against a row of pillows and tucked under a thick comforter. There’s a stack of all our books — our reading tastes are very different, a place for Margaret’s wine and chocolate, Fixup’s sleep-apnea machine and mask, which makes him look like...

Early in our careers as journalists, we discovered that we both loved writing about family business, and each wanted to write a book on the subject. We agreed to join forces to make the project more realistic.  We knew each other but not well, so we needed a big dose of hope to believe that we’d get along writing together, sometimes in close quarters. We also hoped our sample chapter and outline would appeal to a literary agent and eventually to a publisher who would give us a go-ahead and generous advance.    All our hopes became reality when the...

Margaret’s mother Bea was an elegant, classy lady who left her family many wise lessons before she died three years ago. Barbara was the lucky recipient of some of the advice by way of her working with Margaret for so many years. One nugget she shared has remained deeply engrained in both our brains: always to err on the side of being inclusive rather than exclusive, when possible. “Invite the extra person or people or couples. Don’t leave anyone out on purpose,” she’d say. “It can be so hurtful.” The ironic part of this lesson is that she rarely entertained...

We trade recommendations back and forth like baseball cards from our childhood. “Do you have a great dentist?” “Could you recommend the person who colors your hair?” “Have you been to Portugal and, if so, would you recommend going there? We’ve heard Lisbon is gorgeous. Where should we stay?” In fact, these days it seems that everyone has become a professional critic whether through conversation or online. Consider all the sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor where you can leave your comments for strangers and businesses to read. It’s so easy to ask someone for a suggestion or an opinion,...