Egg Salad Sandwiches

As a kid, I always dreaded the last Wednesday of the month. That was the day my mother made egg salad sandwiches. For hours afterward, the acrid, slightly metallic odor would linger in the kitchen. Even now, the mere thought of it fills the inside of my nose with phantom wisps of sulfur.

Unfortunately, my aversion held little sway with my mother. I was still expected to boil dozens and dozens of eggs, peel the shells and then douse the remains with heaps of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. “Don’t scrimp on the mayo,” she would chide me. “Those sandwiches need to be easy to chew.”

For years, I served as my mother’s sous chef. With assembly line precision, we would cover the kitchen table with slices of Wonder Bread, depositing a healthy dollop of egg salad on one slice before covering it with another. Once made, I would slip the sandwiches back into the plastic sleeve in which the bread had come. When we reached 120 sandwiches, my brother would carry the stacks out and placed them in the back of the car, headed to a rundown corner of Boston’s Chinatown.

In the late 1960s, my hometown was consumed by racial tensions, the busing crisis and a contentious mayoral race between Louise Day Hicks and Kevin White. There was little political capital left to address the city’s growing homeless population. In increasing numbers, those without shelter drifted from the Common into the streets of the “Combat Zone,” Boston’s red-light district, which was much larger then. Largely hidden from public view, their existence held little purchase for…