{"id":1618,"date":"2007-11-17T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-17T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/17\/best-friends-fo\/"},"modified":"2007-11-17T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-17T00:01:00","slug":"best-friends-fo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2007\/11\/17\/best-friends-fo\/","title":{"rendered":"BEST FRIENDS FOREVER"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cindyandjanesmall\"<\/a>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?.<\/p>\n

\"Cindy_and_jane_yearbook\"<\/a>
\nA "nice Jewish girl" in a milltown 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 curiousity; 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.
\nThen, just days before our wedding, she called.  "Do you still have room on that boat of yours?" (We got married on a boa<\/a>t.)  "I have to keep our promise- I’m coming!"  It was so great and meant so much.  Just as she knew it would.
\nThat 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.<\/p>\n

***NOTE: In order to observe the Sabbath, this post was written in late October and set to post on Saturday morning November 17th. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading BEST FRIENDS FOREVER<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4,7,98],"tags":[107,1954,222,1180,1181,1001,220,3421,193,359],"class_list":["post-1618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aging","category-baby-boom","category-life","category-religion","tag-baby-boom-2","tag-catholic","tag-faith","tag-friends","tag-friendship","tag-high-school","tag-jewish","tag-nablopomo","tag-time","tag-vietnam"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-q6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4386,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1618\/revisions\/4386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}