His Oldest Friend: The Story of an Unlikely Bond

"A poignant tribute to two friends who, despite the gulf of 73 years, manage to ground each other in their all-too-uncertain worlds."--The New York TimesThey met under the most inauspicious circumstances. He was a teenage volunteer at a nursing home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was a wheelchair-bound resident in her nineties. He was a poor Hispanic, living in a rented room in the barrio, separated from his family. Her life, at least before arthritis hobbled her, was comfortable, with regular visits from her daughters and grandchildren. But when Margaret Oliver's daughter hired Elvis Checo to look in on her mother a few afternoons each week, nobody anticipated that this would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
In His Oldest Friend, Sonny Kleinfield takes us inside the lives of these two unlikely close friends to explore the world of the very young and the very old. Too often we tend to submerge individuals in the group identity of "youth" and "the elderly," but Checo and Oliver defy the stereotypes, offering each other that rarest of gifts: recognition and affirmation as a unique human being.