After fifty years, six friends gather again in Ottawa. What they discover over dinner isn’t nostalgia—it’s something even more enduring.
Picture this: six older people, most with silver hair, sitting around a large round table at a Chinese restaurant on Somerset Street in Ottawa. Outside, the autumn night air bites with the first signs of winter, but inside, warmth spills from steaming teapots and the glow of red paper lanterns. I was one of them, reunited with old friends I first met more than half a century ago. The moment felt dreamlike, as if I had stepped aboard a memory ship—sailing between what was and what still is, watching my younger self look across this same table in 1970, imagining what these dear faces might look and sound like in 2025.
Reunion of Old Friends: The Beauty of Lifelong Friendship
We met in our twenties, when the world was still new and full of promise. It was 1970, and I had just moved to Ottawa to attend Carleton University. Back then, we were hungry for change, arguing about politics, literature, and justice until closing time at Chinese restaurants on Somerset Street. We believed our generation could fix the world. Now, more than fifty years later, the world looks very different—but the six of us are still here, still talking, still laughing, still believing, in our own quieter way.
There’s a special kind of comfort that comes with friends who’ve known you since before your hair turned grey. These are the people who saw you stumble, celebrate, grow up, and grow old. When we meet, it’s not just a dinner—it’s a ritual of memory and belonging. I can’t think of anyone I’d turn to faster in times of trouble than the five others sitting at that table. After all these decades, I can’t even imagine my life without them.
How to Build Long Lasting Friendships?
What holds us together? Maybe it’s that we all believe, deep down, that we are decent, well-meaning people. We raised our children as best we could, worked to better our communities, and tried to live with honesty and kindness. We’ve weathered separations, illness, and loss. Yet here we are—still smiling, still telling the same jokes, still leaning in to hear each other’s stories.
I think what keeps us together is resilience—the kind that develops when you’ve lived through enough upheaval to recognize that life is rarely smooth sailing. We’ve been through recessions, wars, elections, pandemics, and personal heartbreaks. And yet, we remain troupers. We adapt, we endure, we show up. There’s a toughness about our generation, born not of cynicism but of care. We keep going because we believe in one another and in the possibility, however small, of a better world.
That night, over hot and sour soup and baked eggplant, our conversation turned—as it often does—to politics. Some things never change. We talked about the latest turmoil between Canada and the United States, and how U.S. president Donald Trump continues to shake the world order. On this particular evening, we learned that Ontario Premier Doug Ford had bought ad space on American television to air a clip of Ronald Reagan speaking out against tariffs. Reagan, Ford reminded viewers, believed in free trade. Hours later, at 4 a.m. online, Trump retaliated—imposing yet another tariff on Canadian goods crossing the border.
As I listened to my friends debate, I found myself holding back. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I was mesmerized by the scene itself. Here we were—six people in our seventies—still animated, still engaged, still arguing passionately about the state of the world. The cadences of our voices were the same as they were fifty years ago. The faces had changed, softened by time, but the essence of each person—the humour, the conviction, the spark—remained intact.
What Lifelong Friendship Teaches Us About Aging and Belonging
In that moment, I felt a profound sense of gratitude. For all the uncertainty that comes with aging, there is also a clarity. We may move more slowly, our memories may falter, but we know who we are. The friends I gravitated to in my twenties are still the ones whose company I crave today. They remind me not only of who I was, but of who I’ve become.
As we said our goodbyes and zipped up our coats against the chill, I caught a glimpse of us reflected in the restaurant’s window—a group of older friends still laughing, still teasing, still making plans for next time. Outside, the city shimmered with streetlights and possibility. Inside, the echoes of our laughter lingered like the faint aroma of jasmine tea.
We remain who we were. We remain ourselves.
