Mom could have shown the idiots in Washington what it means to make do

◼ She was able to balance the books in the real world never once going off the fiscal cliff - Denis Hamill/New York Daily News

Fiscal cliff.

Every time I hear that phrase ricochet in the Washington, D.C., echo chamber, I think of my mother.

There she is with the bills piled on one side of her at the Formica kitchen table and a thin pile of currency — singles, fives and tens — in another stack.
When House Speaker John Boehner said that “God only knows” where these “fiscal cliff” talks between him and President Obama were heading, I could see my mother rushing to now defunct St. Stanislaus on 14th St. in Brooklyn to kneel and light a candle before the statue of St. Anthony.

“St. Anthony, finder of all things lost, please find me a way through this terrible mess,” she'd whisper, before racing to work as a cashier at the RKO Prospect to help feed five of her seven kids still at home in a chilly tenement flat....