Cynthia Samuels

IN MY MIND I’M GOIN’ TO CAROLINA – KITTY HAWK, ACTUALLY

We bought the kite for the four-year-old in this picture, in his father’s arms* We’re right outside Kitty Hawk and all of us are climbing the dune to watch the ("Oh my, it looks just like the very first airplane!") kite take to the air in the same sorts of breezes that aided the real plane 105 years ago in a spot near here. We’ve been here on the Outer Banks of North Carolina for 4 days and have established a lazy rhythm, somewhat altered by Wednesday’s wanderings not only to a "kids day" at a local kite store but also to the very scene of the Wright Brothers’ flight.

Our young friend has been beyond excited. The kite store was festooned with models suspended above our heads. The first airplane! A biplane! Jets and propellers and passenger planes and military planes and photos and puzzle boxes with still more. Small children, particularly, it seems, small boys, love airplanes (and dinosaurs) and our young companion is no exception. It’s wonderful to to watch him explode with joy at the small pleasure of a store display. And then to cross the highway to the dunes and see his own new possession take to the air. Oh – and to reassure him that the aspiring hang-gliding students one dune beyond will not fly over and tangle themselves in our kite strings.

Nearby is the official Wright Brothers National Memorial; we went there, too. It’s remarkable to see, this plain, very effective museum, marking with simple stones the small distances that set off the revolution that enabled us to move from a flight of 120 feet to the landing of a man on the moon in just 66 years. Remarkable too to go with this wonderful, ecstatic 4-year-old and his family and wonder, 66 years from now, what their world will be. How much farther will we have flown and whose ingenuity and inspired curiosity will have taken us there? Perhaps our young friend will lead his own airborne, or space-borne, leap forward. One of the great gifts of sharing days like this with little kids is the reminder of all the possibilities to come, no matter how tough or grim the future may appear. Another, of course, is that it’s just plain wonderful to spend time with gifted parents and their spectacular, curious, eager and lively kids.

Tonight we pack up the food and the clothes and the toys and prepare to drive back to Washington in time for a dinner honoring, among others, my husband and me. Both of the wonderful kite-flying families who joined us here are returning early, surrendering part of their precious beach time, in order to be there with us for the event. And our kids are coming – the biggest treat possible. So right now, at 4:30 on a Thursday morning, I’m just sitting in a deserted living room in a North Carolina beach house, counting the blessings of family and friends and every happy memory past, current or still to come — and wishing, for those children of ours, and our dear friends here, the same pile of wonderful moments we’ve known and hope to know. Good morning to you, too.

*As always, I won’t share his name or anyone’s identifiable photo to respect their privacy.

BLOGGING BOOMERS CARNIVAL, WEEK 73, WITH ITS USUAL INTERESTING MIX OF IDEAS

Blogging boomers are back, this week at our new friend at Dina at This Marriage Thing, a little late this week due to some technical stuff but here nonetheless. Take a look for posts on workforce aging, Karen Allen, attorney advertising and more.

FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

By the time Robert Kennedy decided to run for President, in March of 1968, just days after Eugene McCarthy’s great New Hampshire primary showing demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson’s weakness and the real unpopularity of the Vietnam war, I was already neck-deep in McCarthy’s campaign. I’d been involved since the summer before, in what, before McCarthy agreed to run, we called Dump Johnson. When Allard Lowenstein (himself assassinated in 2000), recruited us for it at the 1967 National Student Association (NSA) meeting, he’d say "You can’t beat somebody (LBJ) with nobody." So he had worked very hard to get Bobby to run, but he refused.

It was Gene McCarthy who agreed to stand for all of us against the Johnson administration and the war. After NSA I organized the Smith campus. We were among the first students to go each weekend to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy and against the war. So when Kennedy announced, just days after our great New Hampshire triumph, that he would also run, we were devastated, and angry.

Over the months of campaigning though, I came to have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy and his campaign. There was no way to watch him without feeling the power of his connection with all kinds of Americans and his compassion, poetry and sense of justice. This moment, just as an inner city Indianapolis neighborhood learned of the death of Martin Luther King, is typical of him at his best:

By June the campaign was tense; such an important issue and the two Senators were running against one another as well as (and sometimes, it seemed, instead of) the war. Kennedy won Indiana. McCarthy won Oregon. We moved south to Los Angeles(one of many places I saw for the first time from a campaign bus) criss-crossing the state from Chico to San Francisco and back to LA. Just before the midnight after the primary, as June 4, 1968, election day, became June 5, we knew we’d lost, so we went to Senator’s concession in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton and then back upstairs to mourn. We weren’t even watching the rest of coverage. Suddenly, running through the halls of the staff floor of the hotel, one of McCarthy’s closest advisors shouted "Turn on the TV! They’ve done it again!"

Continue reading FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

BLOGGING BOOMERS BLOG CARNIVAL – JUNE 2: VACATIONS, GAS PRICES, MOMS AND HEALTH

Blogging Boomers are back at I Remember JFK this week. You can read about everything from saving gas by figuring out the "walkability" of your next apartment, to child-free vacations to prostate cancer. All it smart, unique and useful. Stop on by.

ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL NEW MOM POSTS EVER

This is Catherine Connors, also known as Her Bad Mother. Mom to a preschool daughter and a brand new son, she’s a former professor of political philosophy and a blogging star. And this week, after the birth of her son, she wrote one of the most powerful posts I’ve ever read about being a mother, bearing a second child and being a woman with a heart and a soul and a body. Read it.

WEDDINGS, INDY, CARRIE BRADSHAW AND ME (SPOILER ALERT – BIG HINTS ABOUT SATC ENDING)

I went to see Sex and the City tonight with a group of women in their 20’s, much younger than Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte or Miranda. I’m older than all of them. They liked it, thought it was disorganized, or OK, or so-so or good. I loved it.

As I tried to explain why, I got strangely emotional, struggling to describe how Samantha’s 50th birthday, the remarkable relationship shared by these four friends, the happy endings and the fairy tale aura, just made me happy. It’s tough to measure the impact of experience on a life perspective, or the different perspective of those just beginning to accumulate those experiences; good friends who are young adults newly married or newly parents – still far from my place as the mother of grown sons.

This, the film’s opening weekend, saw it push Indiana Jones out of first place. I’ve complained a great deal about the latest Indy movie. My husband emailed our older son that the movie "sucked." He responded that he had loved, it, that it was just "one big comic book." Clearly, he felt the same way I’d felt about the girls of Sex and the City. As he put it, with his usual wisdom "I guess everything is a matter of perspective."

Continue reading WEDDINGS, INDY, CARRIE BRADSHAW AND ME (SPOILER ALERT – BIG HINTS ABOUT SATC ENDING)

CHARMED, AGAIN. AND PROBABLY NOT FOR THE LAST TIME

NOTICE: YOU MAY NEED INSULIN TO READ THIS – IT IS REALLY SAPPY — CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED

Right now, I’m crying. Not just teary, crying. Right now, the third time I’ve been to this moment. It’s so embarrassing that until I complete this post I don’t even know if I’ll ever let you see it. Why such emotion on a sunny day so close to my birthday? Over a television show? The final epsiode of one that went off the air in 2006. One that’s about witches?

If, like me, you never paid much attention to CHARMED, appearing on the now-defunct and youth-oriented WB – about three sisters who are witches and who have witchy powers including, when acting together with the “power of three”, to best Ultimate Evil (I know, I know), let me tell you a bit about them. I’ve written about them before – when I first found them two years ago and again almost a year ago, after a wedding whose ritual reminded me of theirs, even though in theirs families gather from across the divide between living and dead. As I wrote then:

On my favorite guilty pleasure, Charmed, rituals of birth and marriage are attended not only by those who share the lives and loves of the Halliwell sisters (yeah they’re witches and their story spent 8 TV seasons enchanting us all) but also by those who came before. They summon, “through space and time” all members of “the Halliwell line.” Surrounded by these translucent figures of past
generations, today’s Halliwells celebrate marriages and new arrivals. Those fully and those ephemerally present conclude together “blessed be.”

What does this have to do with Jewish weddings — or any other terrestrial weddings for that matter? A lot. Eight years on the air, the longest running show with female leads, it dealt often with travel through time and space and dominions never imagined. But when really important events arose, all the magic was supplanted by a single, simple spell that basically –well — brought the family together.

I just looked the show up on Wikipedia and discovered that it went off the air on my 60th birthday – having run from October 7, 1998 to May 21, 2006. My
husband, when he’s in psychiatrist mode, talks about “anniversary reactions” – when we experience deep feelings but can’t quite figure out where they come from. Sometimes, they have to do with the occurrence of anniversaries we haven’t even noticed have arrived. In this case, though, I didn’t know the year the show ended, much less the date. In fact, I was in Paris with my family to celebrate this 60th birthday landmark on that day and didn’t even notice the demise of the long-running series. In fact, I first discovered it, in re-runs, airing as I worked in my office. I used it to keep me company (believe it or not, it’s on four hours a day – two in the morning and two in the afternoon.) Didn’t know a thing about the show or its success.

I got an earful from one of my sons when I asked though, who claimed that the show caused plenty of fights with his (then) girlfriend. Apparently, it was on at the same time as the Simpsons and every week was a negotiation.

But for me it’s somehow more than that. These three sisters, and their powers, are deeply moving. Their battles and solidarity, their humor and courage, their conviction that they could literally save the world from evil (p.s., they did) all resonated in a very weird way. Still do.

Hence the tears. The final episode, as the post-show future unfolds, feels like my own life. Endings. Loving farewells. The (hopefully) gratification of recognizing a life at least partially well-lived. The kids and their kids and an idyllic togetherness among sisters and their husbands and their children and their destiny. A lot to hope for and, I guess, as my own life moves forward, something to cry about.

SUMMER DRESSES, 60S TV, MARRIAGE, CRUMBLING BRIDGES AND OBAMA: ALL PART OF BLOGGING BOOMERS CARNIVAL #71!

This week the Carnival stops at John Agno’s So Baby Boomer. If you want to read about "green" cars, summer dresses, good marriages, TV for all us 40+ folks, our crumbling infrastructure or Barack Obama, you can get there from this inventory of our latests efforts. Take a look.

HOPING FOR A DIFFERENT ENDING: “RECOUNT” ON HBO

I can remember reading Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s wonderful No Ordinary Time, about the World War II years in the White House: FDR, Churchill, Eleanor – it’s a wonderful, inspiring story and forever changed my understanding of leadership. I read the book on tape, mostly in my car. As I came to the book’s end, and the death of President Roosevelt, I drove around so that I could finish it. All the while, I kept hoping — "maybe this time he won’t die." Totally irrational but still – that was what I felt And I didn’t feel it again until tonight, as I watched Kevin Spacey, Tom Wilkinson, Laura Dern and Denis Leary in HBO‘s Recount, the story of the 2000 presidential election battle in Florida.

Reviews have reminded us that the story has been "altered" for dramatic reasons even though it’s presented as a docudrama. There may be more drama and less docu than historians would wish, — but the basic reality is there – and from the perspective of 8 years and the traumas of the Bush Administration, very painful to watch. In some ways it’s like watching a car accident about to happen – in slow motion — and not being able to do a thing to stop it. Here’s a little bit of it:

Continue reading HOPING FOR A DIFFERENT ENDING: “RECOUNT” ON HBO

THE OBAMA LANDMARK: RACIAL ATTITUDES ON MY BIRTHDAY

Today is my 62nd birthday. It’s pretty amazing. Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness a Democratic primary where a white woman (for the first time) and an African-American man (for the first time) are the major Democratic Presidential candidates. Not only am I, while still healthy and not rickety, able to witness the probable nomination of the 46 year old product of an interracial marriage, who has lived outside the U.S. in the developing world, and who is running on a platform of unity and commitment to helping our country have a better future. AND who is the first candidate to sit for a video interview with BlogHer, thus demonstrating a comprehension of women who blog — and those women who read them.

Not only that. This morning, half-awake, watching C-Span footage of the Obama Iowa rally last night, I saw a nice white Iowa lady of a certain age, like the one in this photo, put one hand on either site of Obama’s face and kiss him on the forehead. And it wasn’t even a big deal.

You need to realize that in my lifetime as someone old enough to notice – probably the past 40 years — that would have been unthinkable. That a highly regarded TV drama was canceled after one season because it featured a white male and black female social worker working together and stations across the south refused to carry it. Slowly, as the Civil Rights movement brought us forward, things changed. And here, I’m really only talking about symbols – not all those individual life moments that remain so difficult for so many. I believe that when symbols change, real change will follow. And some of that appears to be true.

In September of 1967 Peggy Rusk, daughter of then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, married Guy Smith – and it was so unusual it made the cover of TIME Magazine. Which wrote this:

Resignation Offer. As recently as 1948, California law would have made the union a criminal offense in the state. Until last June, when the U.S.
Supreme Court killed Virginia’s miscegenation law, 16 states still banned interracial marriage. More to the
point, and more poignant, in a year when black-white animosity has reached a
violent crescendo in the land, two young people and their parents showed that
separateness is far from the sum total of race relations in the U.S.—that to
the marriage of true minds, color should be no impediment. Indrawn as usual,
Rusk pronounced himself “very pleased.” Clarence Smith, Guy’s father,
said simply: “Two people in love.”

That’s right – Rusk offered to resign because of the wedding – that was
how unusual it was. In the early 90s I visited a high school
near Cincinnati, OH, which was once KKK country. I was producing a “space
bridge” — a satellite conversation between high schools in Ohio and Moscow. The night
before the show I gave a reception for the families of the kids featured
in the program. As they wandered in, there in the middle of Ohio, I noticed that one couple was comprised of a white man and an African American woman. Apparently I was the only one who did though. One of the boys’ parents had divorced and his dad had married this woman who was now the kids’ stepmom. And in the middle of semi-rural Ohio, close to the Kentucky border, nobody cared. I guess you’d need to have been around for canceled TV shows and Secretaries of State offers to resign, to be so struck by what happened.

Fast forward to the Grammys, 1990, this winning song and video, with this kiss.

I guess it’s just that we forget how bad things used to be; a kiss like Neville and Ronstadt’s once could ruin both careers.

There’s lots more. But what does all this have to do with a presidential candidate? In Iowa? I don’t know why but as I watched this morning I was so struck by the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime. Probably it’s just the birthday. Whatever happens in the campaign, and I am worried about the race stuff that came out of Kentucky and West Virginia, it was a reminder that at least things are better than they were before. OH and last week I read that there has not been a white male Secretary of State in the US for 11 years! Nobody’s been yelling about that, either.