There we sat, old friends huddled in a cozy booth at the Quiet Woman, our favorite haunt for literally decades. When we arrived at the restaurant we took a minute to point out the many different booths we had once occupied, with a little vignette attached to each as we reminisced.

“Remember, we sat right there that night we plowed through four bottles of wine and Janie picked a fight with that guy,” and “We sat over there that time when the waiter took the pic of us all wearing our cheaters,” or, “It was in that booth that I sat there sobbing over my failing marriage, remember?”

On and on the memories flowed, of our many visits to this wonderful restaurant, marking time and major benchmarks in our long, long friendship.

The three of us became besties back in 1968 while gutting out that first ominous year of junior high, the 7th grade. Who can forget that awkward phase of early adolescence? I cringe when I see my 7th grade school photo, a dork with a pixie haircut, braces, and wearing a gawd-awful ensemble in brown and gold that sent my complexion to a greenish sort of beige. Regardless of my ultra-nerdiness, these two embraced me anyway and a lifelong friendship was born.

Over the decades we have been right there for each through life’s many trials and tragedies, a support system that, as long as we live, will be like gold to us. As we gain wisdom and perspective that we may not have had twenty or thirty years ago, we now realize just how rare this treasure of friendship really is.

Not just a regular friendship is this one, oh no! Ours feels like that soothing sense of going home, putting on your comfiest slippers and snuggling under the softest blanket…a respite in a world that is full of superficial, half-baked ‘connections’ or umpteen Facebook “friends” where the extent of conversation is often just a ‘like’ on a posted photo.

No, this friendship is soul-deep, a living current that runs through each of us, keeping us connected like sisters. We might only come together a couple of times a year (one of us lives out of the country), but when we do it is like time has not skipped a beat. There is a sense of serenity between us, a true and honest love for each other where no pretense or posturing is ever needed or welcome. We are just us, and that means we truly know each other, beneath the façades that we reserve for the outside world.

I’ve noticed that as we change and grow older, the topics discussed in our get togethers have changed, too. In our youth, chats revolved around boyfriends, fashion, and music. By the time we hit our 30s and 40s life became real, so most conversations leaned toward kids, marital woes, and finances. Conversations in our tumultuous 50s were punctuated with health scares, serious kid issues, divorce, care-giving for a loved one, and picking up the pieces after tragedy.

So there we were at the Quiet Woman, all of us having just turned 60. We passed cheaters around the table any time we wanted to look at a photo on a phone or read the menu. Conversations this time were, as always, raw and real, and have shifted towards discussions of crepey skin, when, if ever, we will retire, sun damage - ok dammit, wrinkles - how often we touch up our gray roots, and how all our bustlines have expanded post-menopause, much to our chagrin.

I assured the gals that at some point we won’t give a hoot anymore and will just give up the ghost. We will prance around in our 70s wearing muu muus and proudly jiggling our crepey, flabby arms in glee, happy to finally accept the realities of aging. Or not.

We always say that if by chance some day we all end up old and alone, we will get a beach house and live out our remaining years together. And, knowing us, we will probably still don our bikinis in our eighties, even if we really shouldn’t.