Summary

George keeps a photograph of his grandmother, Mammy, by his bedside and he wishes he knew more about the young woman standing at a train station with a suitcase beside her. George never knew Mammy's husband because he died of a heart attack long before George was born. George muses that Mammy must have been an exceptional woman to have left home when she did because that was something that girls in those days--nearly a hundred years ago--just did not do.

When it came time for George to leave home to attend college in 1977, his parents drove him to Columbia. He ducked out of a fraternity rush party to go see a Barbra Streisand movie, much to Betty's horror because the son of one of her friends had extended the invitation to George. Betty did not like social embarrassments, especially this close to home...