On my filing cabinet sit two framed copper sheets into which a Greenwich Village street artist pressed my parents’ portraits in 1963. They capture my father and my mother at the apex of their young lives: newly arrived in New York City from their rural Utah roots, a graduate student and his pretty young wife, no children, no debt, the future at their fingertips.  I love the pressings and am so pleased my parents gifted them to me years ago.  This morning, though, they were gone.  On opening the top filing cabinet drawer in search of a file, I found the frames hidden in the drawer.  I marched to my mother and asked angrily if she knew anything about the portraits being moved to the drawer.  “They are ugly,” she announced.  “I was sitting in your chair waiting for the laundry and just couldn’t stand to look at them anymore.”  Well, I spat, these portraits are mine, and I love them, and I love them where they are.  And that is my chair and my private space you have been sitting in and messing with.  And you are not allowed to sit in my space and touch my things and move my things around, whether you like them or not.  If you see something of mine you don’t like, you are allowed to talk to me about it or to leave my room and sit somewhere else while you wait for your laundry.  But you are not allowed to be in my private space or to touch and move my special things.  Of course, she cried.  But I was too piously put out to care.  I felt justified in drawing an immediate and clear boundary, one she should have already been fully aware of without my emotional explanation.  And of course, it was stupid and mean of me to do anything other than kindly and patiently explain appropriate boundaries to my old mother who has lost her husband of 62 years and who can’t stand to see herself and her handsome young husband in the beautiful prime of long-lost youth.