Warmly wrapped in memories of loving friends

“The four of us are a perfect square,” Louise had said as she outlined the square of the table where we lunched at the now sadly gone Beckham Grill in Pasadena.

The name caught on instantly. Without Louise ever defining our title, Tonie, Zandra, Louise and Pabs, as she called me, became The Squares.

As we shared salads that day, it was impossible to imagine any one of us without the other three. But it was not to be. Tonie’s loss to cancer folded us into a triangle. When Louise left us, so unexpectedly, after a fall, Zandra and I continued to call ourselves The Squares. And now that she, too, is gone, and I am the only remaining square, I still think of myself in the plural, The Squares.

Over the years the sides of the square supported us in ways we could not have foreseen. Zandra’s husband, “Dr. Paul,” as he was affectionately known, performed surgery on three of us and my mother.

Tonie not only catered the wedding when George and I got married, she provided her rose garden for the ceremony.

When Louise, after being widowed for many years, decided to slip off quietly to remarry, the rest of us hunted her down and sent Champagne to the honeymoon suite.

Although we came from diverse cultural backgrounds — Russian Jewish, Italian and German Catholic — not only did we all learn how to cook for and observe each other’s holidays, we could mourn in three languages.

We even shared a bathrobe, a gift from my mother-in-law. The pale blue robe is warm and cuddly and slightly too big, so it fit over our clothes. When Zandra’s husband had an accident and was in the intensive care unit, she asked me to bring her something warm. “It’s freezing in here.” I delivered “Old Blue” and it stayed in circulation. Whenever one of The Squares was sitting in the hospital with a loved one, whoever had the robe rushed right over with it.

I had lost track of the robe until this morning, when I found it on the floor in the back of my oblong closet. It seems it slid off the hanger and waited to be found on a day when it was really needed.