CALGARY — Almost four decades of correspondence be-tween two women from different corners of the world culminated in a first-time meeting in the Toronto airport this spring.
Pen-pals Lori McCrae and Nadira Sukul had agreed to meet in New York City, where Sukul now lives with her husband and daughter. McCrae works in Calgary, where she resides with her spouse.
Sukul, originally from Guyana, was returning from a visit to her parents in Ontario with her daughter and husband when the McCraes’ flight was delayed by weather. As a result, they ended up first meeting in the Toronto airport.
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“There were hugs all around,” said McCrae.
Once in New York, the Sukuls showed them the sights and the pen-pals took time alone together.
“When we met and got talking, it was surprising how much we had in common,” said McCrae.
“It was surprising how much we hadn’t talked about.”
Both work as executive assistants, are poor at reading maps and have “an oddball sense of humour.”
Sukul said she had less freedom than her brothers when she was younger and was not allowed to associate with males.
McCrae, who moved from a mixed farm at Red Cross, Sask., into Marshall, Sask., as a teen, described herself as a loner and a bookworm.
Her mother had died when she was 10, and she found there was little to do in her community.
They started writing to each other as pen-pals in their mid-teens.
“It was a way to make a new friend,” said McCrae, who wrote to Sukul in Guyana after seeing a notice for pen-pals in The Western Producer when she was 15.
For Sukul, she started writing McCrae after picking pen-pals from the Guyana Chronicle, something commonly done at the time.
“I wanted a totally different country, far away,” she said, citing the opportunity to learn about another country and its culture.
“There was no internet, so the best way was writing letters.”
Both had other pen-pals, but those letters soon dropped off. The two friends continued their correspondence long after they married and started working.
“It was always so exciting to get an airmail envelope with a foreign stamp on it,” said McCrae.
Living in Marshall, it was pretty exotic to get that kind of thing,” she said, recalling her surprise at receiving a photo of a young Sukul looking like any other teen in a T-shirt and jeans.
The letters shared each other’s travels and visits, sometimes mentioning cultural events such as the Hindu Diwali Festival.
“I think the old-fashioned way of sitting and writing a letter is a lost art,” McCrae said.
Letter writing waxed and waned, dwindling down to just birthday and Christmas cards in some years. McCrae decided it was time to meet her longtime friend when she reached 50, so she cobbled together loyalty program points, money from an income tax return and a Christmas bonus to make it happen.
Technology has taken over their correspondence these days with the pair exchanging phone calls and text messages.
Both plan to stay in touch and perhaps even teach each other new cooking techniques via Skype.
“We are friends forever,” said Sukul. “I don’t even look at her as a pen-pal but just look at her as a good friend, almost like family.”
Added McCrae: “It’s hard to explain, but there is a connection.”
