By today's standards that consider youth of 18 to be children, we were back in 1955 at that age, too  young to marry. We had, between us, though, thought about eloping when we were 17, and just presenting ourselves afterward -- after a civil ceremony we imagined wouldn't be difficult to arrange -- as married, to our families.

I dimly recall saying something of that nature to my mother. My parents and his parents were not amused. They relented, however, and said that we should wait another year and a marriage would be arranged. Would be arranged, in that all the details of a formal marriage, which we most definitely did not want, would be organized.

But in a small community such as ours there are traditions and formalities recognized as necessary to the prevailing culture in marriages. We, two young people who were in love, simply wanted to be together. I dreamed of our marriage as an arrangement that no one could deny us that would see us beside one another through life, experiencing it all together. That's what I envisioned, it's what I wanted. It's what he wanted.

For me the thought of every waking hour being shared in close tandem with him was the future I sought. That we would go to bed together, wake together, pursue life together and that in a nutshell was life and the future. We had been together, in fact, since we were both 14. I begrudged every hour we were not together. His constant presence in my life was all I really ever wanted.

Today it is 64 years since we stood together in a synagogue under a wedding canopy and were formally brought into the marriage covenant in a traditional Jewish ceremony. For our parents on either side, it was an opportunity to demonstrate that they could mount a wedding where tradition and culture and religion meshed. And in so doing reciprocate proudly the similar ceremonies that they had attended when their friends' marriageable-age offspring wed.

The wedding was really not for us, it was for our parents. Although we didn't look forward to the event that they felt was so necessary, it was the means by which we could be joined in marriage so our futures together could be assured. Marriage is a costly business, all the more so for people who struggle to survive financially, and such a struggle was always part of my parents' lives.

And the fact is we were secular Jews. No religion, simply Jewishness. A high awareness of tradition, of culture, but not religion. Yet to my parents it was imperative that we be married in a synagogue, by a rabbi. And we were. One of the few times in my life I had ever entered a synagogue. My husband's grandfather, who had arrived in Canada at the turn of the 20th century was an orthodox Jew who attended synagogue daily.

Yet for them the larger issue in recognition of the inevitable was that they would somehow be able to mount and fund an event that would rival those that their friends had celebrated on like occasions. There were few extended relatives because as Jews those extensions were lost during the Holocaust. But there were landsmen, survivors and those who had arrived in Canada just before the breakout of the Second World War, and previous to it. They were family.

We were ourselves assigned to pay for the flowers and the photography; a learning experience for us. We were no longer attending school; it had been made abundantly clear to me that Grade 10 was all I could anticipate finishing before heading out to the permanent workforce to aid my family's finances. We had joined the working class, he in a variety of short-lived industrial-level jobs and me as a typist in an commercial typing pool situation. It's how we began our working lives. It's how we initiated our married lives.

My wedding gown was borrowed from the daughter of a close friend of my parents. My mother-in-law-to-be adjusted the gown down to my smaller size. His formal wear like that of all the family members involved in the ceremony was rented. My husband owned an old mini-Minor. We had made reservations for our honeymoon at a rustic place called Cedar Grove Lodge near Huntsville, Ontario, close to Algonquin Park, that wonderful nature preserve.

We had rented a little cabin there for the week. Meals were served in a large mess hall. The place was on a small lake, and my husband did some fishing; the kitchen in fact, served us the trout he had caught one evening. Being served meals someone else cooked outside our homes was a new experience for us. All the cabins had names of local birds, and ours was Bob-o-Link. We were in heaven, we both loved being close to nature and made several day-trips to hike in Algonquin Park, complete with packed lunches prepared by the kitchen of our hosts.

We have never left our version of heaven.