Last Tuesday morning we decided we'd leave Toronto that day. I had spoken with two of my teen-age girlfriends, making arrangements to meet. At their apartments, roughly a 15-minute-drive distance from each other, no pets were permitted entry. They had maintained contact with one another over the 50 years since our girlhood, and remained close friends. I had more recently connected with one of them over the Internet and we emailed occasionally.

We were not only girlhood friends from high school, but as we grew older and boys came into our lives and we eventually married and had the first of our children, we remained good friends, seeing one another occasionally before losing contact in the pell-mell of our lives. The husband we had known of one of them left her years ago for a much younger woman, and she had eventually re-married, to lose the second husband to widowhood. The other lost a son aged 14 in a dreadful car accident, her husband whom we'd known well, died at age 56, and now she is the sole remaining family member of her generation of five siblings.

After much discussion we felt the best possible place where we could meet up was a nearby public park and we settled on the large greenspace of Earl Bales Park off Bathurst Street. So, that morning, we took Riley out for the last time to the little parkette nearby the hotel we were prepared to check out of, and observed as Toronto was awakening to yet another overcast, humid day with ample moisture left over from rain the night before and more in the forecast.

On our way back to the hotel we stopped at a little Chinese bakery to pick up several fresh-baked containers of cookies as nominal gifts for our friends; one of almond cookies, the other buttercookies, and one for ourselves since my husband cannot resist such temptations.

As we drove up Bathurst we found traffic as heavy as expected; most however, driving in the direction opposite to ours which didn't make our direction much less crowded. We eventually reached the park, earlier than our assigned time, and enjoyed its morning greenery to walk about after parking. There was ample evidence this is a well-used park, a community centre was open and busy with people coming and going, sitting about chatting, strolling on the pathways. We awaited the car that would bring our two old friends to this meeting place, wondering would we recognize them? One, we would, since she had sent photographs.

When they did arrive, it was an exhilarating moment we all savoured, hugging and greeting one another with the joy of reacquaintance after so long a period of our lives. We sat talking for hours. We took photographs, and we laughed and we commiserated, we agonized and we celebrated, and we vowed we'd never let another such long lapse occur, without maintaining contact. The prospect of another fifty years' lapse leaving us in our 130th year of age, elicited further guffaws.

We all look our age, more or less. Their health is far more impacted with the ravages of old age than we might have hoped. One looked fairly hale, although her condition is the far more serious one. The other looks exceedingly frail, but both celebrate life and take from it whatever the kindness of fate proffers. It was a good meeting, a thoughtful and celebratory one, one that will give us pause for remembrance of youth and fraternity.