Janice does the Herculean job of arranging of the get-togethers. She works methodically and with gusto: making sure each of us are in the group text and always thoughtfully putting forward more than one date. It can be challenging coordinating lives filled with grandchildren, travel, golf, volunteering and in a couple of cases, working.
Nobody can remember how exactly it started but we all remember it was close to half a century ago: lunches and dinners with a core group of ‘girls’. When the lunches started, many of us were young wives. Get togethers were always initiated by Cindy – who’d snagged the handsomest of fellas. We’d get a phone call (this was long before email) and that phone all would be a telephone chain, usually starting with Ellen, who’d married her high school sweetheart. Together, Cindy and Ellen would get to Kathy, with her pharmacist husband, and then Joanne who’d also married her high school sweetheart; Ruby married an Englishman she’d met at age 16 when he picked her up whilst they were both on trip to Israel. I married a local law student fella who came from money.
When phone calls changed to emails, we welcomed Cindy’s reliably cheery: ‘Hello my girls’. Babies happened to many of us and we rejoiced and grumbled: parenting was hard, marriage was no picnic. “I’d take a good piece of chocolate cake over a good screw any day.” Of the seven of us, three divorced: Ellen who went on to find the love of her life, and Ruby who always had a man or two going and me, who found my own second love of my life at the TV station where we both worked. Janice married her perfect partner later in life.
We always had tons talk about. Certainly we’d get caught up with one another – the social events, the marriages, the travels we’d taken. But there was always friendly gossip about the other people we knew from grade school – because that’s how long many of us had known each other. We lunched and dinnered together, comparing children’s progress through their university or other life choices, right through to grandchildren. Occasionally there’s an element of gentle snark: someone’s ex, someone’s attitude, someone else’s kid’s foibles.
We’ve stayed in good shape tho Joanne has had hip and knee replacements. We’re an attractive bunch, and we’re all aging gracefully. Janice, with her pixie cut has reinvented herself many times – from designing jewelry and sculpture before shifting to graphic design and designing my company logo. Ruby, now the natural long blonde of the bunch is a travel agent to the rich and spoiled. Joanne – who’s hair is short and curly – has a Doctorate in Education and author off nine books, Ellen, with her stylish bob, was a French teacher who now volunteers at Sunnybrook Hospital gift shop. Kathy – who was also a teacher – hides her assisted red hair under a cute hat to honor her sis who’s lost her hair with chemo treatments. My hair continues to be assisted blonde, getting ever shorter. My professional life has been one way or another in media.
Over the years, other ‘girls’ we went to school with would hear about our get togethers and want to be invited. And over the years there were a couple of ‘intruders’, but it never felt right. Perhaps we should have been more welcoming but after the those first couple, Kathy was adamant: nobody else. That could be because each new ‘intruder’ was not a comfortable fit for one or another of us.
Other than the quarterly get-togethers we don’t see each other regularly. Yet, we’ve come to count on one another for solace, sympathy and encouragement which is exactly what was needed when the first of us died: Cindy – original organizer extraordinaire, and the other blondie. We rallied around Cindy’s husband and consoled ourselves at having had such a gift: girlfriends through the ages.
