NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I’ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today – from November 17, 2007.
There we are – Jane and me on her porch one summer during college. Friends since Brownies, we’ve always had a warm, respectful and sturdy relationship, interrupted by years at a time but never diminished. Recently she sent photos of a family reunion – her four kids and their spouses and all their kids. And some things she had written. Beautiful things. Especially about her parents. I knew them well; I spent so many Saturday nights at their house, even going to church with them in the morning. They never ate breakfast before Communion but Jane’s mom always insisted that I eat something even though I was going with them After all, I wasn’t taking Communion so why not?.
A “nice Jewish girl” in a mill town suburb (here I’m on the right and Jane on the left,)I had no Jewish friends; Jane, Catholic, was my dearest. What might have been a huge cultural gap was just a curiosity; differences in our lives but not in how we felt about one another. We’d always sworn to be at one another’s weddings; I’ll never forget her beautiful one in the cathedral at Notre Dame. Years later, when it was my turn, Jane was living in Dallas and already a mother; she just couldn’t make it.
Then, just days before our wedding, she called. “Do you still have room on that boat of yours?” (We got married on a boat.) “I have to keep our promise- I’m coming!” It was so great and meant so much. Just as she knew it would.
That was 36 years ago; almost twice the age we were when the top photo was taken. But it doesn’t matter. The blessing of shared memories — of remembering each other’s parents and the Girl Scout trip to New York and her first love, who died in Vietnam — and mine, who ran off, perpetually stoned, to Santa Barbara — those memories make her part of so much of who I was and who I’ve become. What a gift to me that the one whose friendship blessed me was so blessed herself – generous and fine — helping me to be what she knew I had to be when I wasn’t sure myself what that was…not at all.
Published by
Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
View all posts by Cynthia Samuels
There we are – Jane and me on her porch one summer during college. Friends since Brownies, we’ve always had a warm, respectful and sturdy relationship, interrupted by years at a time but never diminished. Recently she sent photos of a family reunion – her four kids and their spouses and all their kids. And some things she had written. Beautiful things. Especially about her parents. I knew them well; I spent so many Saturday nights at their house, even going to church with them in the morning. They never ate breakfast before Communion but Jane’s mom always insisted that I eat something even though I was going with them After all, I wasn’t taking Communion so why not?.
A “nice Jewish girl” in a mill town suburb (here I’m on the right and Jane on the left,)I had no Jewish friends; Jane, Catholic, was my dearest. What might have been a huge cultural gap was just a curiosity; differences in our lives but not in how we felt about one another. We’d always sworn to be at one another’s weddings; I’ll never forget her beautiful one in the cathedral at Notre Dame. Years later, when it was my turn, Jane was living in Dallas and already a mother; she just couldn’t make it.