I was married by then, age 18, and she, a year younger, had come to work in the same transcription-typing pool where I was employed, and we became friends. Both young, both Jewish girls, working in a pool of largely older women, we had some things in common. Where I was short, dark and compact she was larger, blonde and fully feminine-formed. That was almost sixty years ago.

Her parents, immigrants to Canada from Israel, had a very small children's-wear shop on Eglinton Avenue in Toronto, where we then lived. The family of four, parents and two children -- she had a younger sibling -- lived above the shop.

Her mother had blamed me once when her daughter came home with a formal dress she felt to be too conspicuous for a young woman. We'd gone to a wholesale showroom together and excitedly tried on dresses. I knew what I wanted, and she modelled a few for me, her full, womanly figure showing off each of her choices to distinction. She finally chose a glittering-fabric close-fitting dress with an open back, but to-the-throat front closure with a jaunty self-scarf tied in back at the shoulders.

As a young married couple, we used often to visit with her and her boyfriend, an affable, extrovert with a loud, cheerful voice, at the family apartment. Where we'd chat animatedly, laugh quite a bit, thanks to her boyfriend's turned-on sense of humour, and play card games.

There came a time at the office where we both worked when the typing pool supervisor, an older respected woman who had good relations with all the staff, suffered a horrible personal loss; her husband drowned attempting to save a woman caught in an undertow. And the company for which we worked was looking for her replacement.

I was the second-youngest in a pool of some twenty women, but I was the best typist, the most literate and capable, and though they must have suffered some misgivings at elevating the youngest to supervise a coterie of older women, the choice was made. Suddenly I found that all the friends I had made over the years working there had been transformed into hostile strangers. Everyone resented my new position, and balked at instructions given by me to them on how best to perform their professional duties.

The estrangement from my co-workers was complete when she too joined them in defiance of my supervision. Management attempted to rescue me from the situation, giving me an office of my own, but I felt so demoralized, I just left the company to look for work elsewhere. I had heard from some source that she and her boyfriend whom she'd married had a comfortable life together. I had also heard a decade ago that she hadn't survived a second bout with cancer.

And yesterday, my husband, who often looks at the 'hatch-and-dispatch' columns read a notice of his death. They left behind four children and eight grandchildren. A legacy that will most certainly carry on, populating the planet with offspring of their offspring.