THERE’S an old Italian saying, “A tavola non si invecchia,” which means: At the table, you don’t grow old. All of us, of whatever age, need to socialize in public places to feel connected and alive.
That sense of shared conviviality was notably absent recently when police officers removed loiterers, many of them elderly Korean-Americans, from a McDonald’s restaurant in Queens. The slew of comments that followed a report of the dispute were unsympathetic to those who whiled away their hours there.