A family watches a church Zoom meeting in Massachusetts. | Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

What my mother’s Zooms taught me about friendship.

Every day, my mom prays the rosary twice — once in the morning at 8:30 with her local church and again in the afternoon around 1:30. I say “around” because the second session depends on what time her cousins sign in to Zoom and what time they actually get the Apostles’ Creed started.

“We do our little tsismis before and a little tsismis after,” Liza, one of her cousins, told me, explaining the Zoom process. Tsismis is a Tagalog word for gossip. Liza was much more forthright than my mother about the dal dal (Tagalog has a lot of words for gossip), explaining to me that there was a really valuable social aspect to their daily Zooms.

“We