How fondly I remember sitting at their kitchen table with my mother and father, both in their eighies, talking and drinking instant coffee. Both are dead now. I would drink any amount of instant coffee to have them back.

There are detective novels set in Canada by Dean Kaplan. In them, the tec often mentions sitting at the kitchen table with his mother and father, talking and passing around a single tea bag. He doesn't know how lucky he is.

Their other son, the doctor who lives hundreds of miles away and is too busy to call home, is the golden boy, of course. Silly people.