Lost and Found

"We chummed together for years."
"I used to help her [delivering newspapers]. And we used to do a little bit of smooching."
"I had two people that I loved. I had to choose one, and then put the other in a folder and put it on the top shelf."
"I married Jacky. My love for Joyce stayed on the top shelf until Jacky passed away."
"It wasn't hard [to rediscover love]. Once I was able to bring that folder down from the top shelf."
Bruce Elliott, 85, St.Catharines, Ontario

Bob Tymczyszyn/St. Catharines Standard/Postmedia Network

"Joyce?"
"Yes."
"This is Bruce."
"My Bruce?"

One telephone call was all it took. It was serendipity, however, that brought them back together when one day, decades after the two friends who were children when they first dedicated themselves to their mutual close friendship, renewed that friendship. When Bruce's sister came across Joyce at a luncheon. And recognition set in and with it contact and renewal.

As children 70 years earlier, they lived in close proximity to one another, in the same neighbourhood. He was 14, she was 12. They roller-skated together, played outdoor games with their other friends, and became inseparable. Joyce had a newspaper route, and so did Bruce, for the local daily newspaper. He recalled folding the newspapers  so they could be thrown accurately and neatly onto subscribers' porches.

They grew into their late teens as two young people devoted to one another. But Bruce was older than Joyce and they somehow drifted apart after he went to college, then quit school to begin an apprenticeship with an area tool and die maker. Which was where he met Jacqueline, who became his wife in 1949. They were married for 64 years, and had eight children together before she died at age 82.

Joyce too left school at age 16 after completing Grade 9, going to work at a supermarket as a cashier. Seventeen years later she moved to Toronto where she lived for 40 years. She had two marriages, her second to a professional golfer whom she was married to for 38 years, until he died at age 75, in 2002. Which was when Bruce's sister came across Joyce, helping to put the old friends back in touch.

Bruce and Joyce Elliott on their wedding day. Handout/St. Catharines Standard/Postmedia Network

They began to meet three times weekly with a Breakfast Club. They met as friends, with the memory of their childhood friendship warming the ongoing relationship. And then Bruce's wife was moved to a nursing home where he visited with her daily. With his failing eyesight, Joyce accommodated his new circumstances by often driving him to the nursing home.

A year later Bruce's wife Jacqueline died. At that juncture it seemed a sensible decision that the two old friends would want to spend the rest of their lives together. Joyce is 82 to Bruce's 85, and they are once again always at one another's side. "I only wish my mother were alive to see it. She always thought it would happen", reminisced Joyce.

They were married a day after Bruce's 85th birthday.

85 year-old Bruce Elliott and his wife Joyce now 82 revisit their old neighbourhood Wednesday June 17, 2015. The couple lived across the street from each other as children, became teenage sweethearts but then lost touch and married other people. Their spouses have since died and the couple married this past year. Bob Tymczyszyn/St. Catharines Standard/Postmedia Network