{"id":4367,"date":"2016-05-08T11:26:25","date_gmt":"2016-05-08T18:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/?p=4367"},"modified":"2016-05-06T16:55:37","modified_gmt":"2016-05-06T23:55:37","slug":"big-birthday-memory-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2016\/05\/08\/big-birthday-memory-13\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Birthday Memory #13: Best Friends Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I\u2019ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today \u2013 from November 17, 2007.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"cindy<\/a>There we are – Jane and me on her porch one summer during college.\u00a0 Friends since Brownies, we’ve always had a warm, respectful and sturdy relationship, interrupted by years at a time but never diminished.\u00a0 Recently she sent photos of a family reunion – her four kids and their spouses and all their kids. And some things she had written.\u00a0 Beautiful things. Especially about her parents.\u00a0 I knew them well; I spent so many Saturday nights at their house, even going to church with them in the morning.\u00a0 They never ate breakfast before Communion but Jane’s mom always insisted that I eat something even though I was going with them\u00a0 After all, I wasn’t taking Communion so why not?.<\/p>\n

\"cindy_and_jane_yearbook\"<\/a>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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We’d always sworn to be at one another’s weddings; I’ll never forget her beautiful one in the cathedral at Notre Dame.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 “Do you still have room on that boat of yours?” (We got married on a boa<\/a>t.)\u00a0 “I have to keep our promise- I’m coming!”\u00a0 It was so great and meant so much.\u00a0 Just as she knew it would.
\nThat was 36 years ago; almost twice the age we were when the top photo was taken.\u00a0 But it doesn’t matter.\u00a0 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 —\u00a0 those memories make her part of so much of who I was and who I’ve become.\u00a0 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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NOTE: As I approach my 70th birthday, I\u2019ll reprise a milestone post here each day until the end of May. Today \u2013 from November 17, 2007. There we are – Jane and me on her porch one summer during college.\u00a0 Friends since Brownies, we’ve always had a warm, respectful and sturdy relationship, interrupted by years … Continue reading Big Birthday Memory #13: Best Friends Forever<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3799,3800,3,4,3798,3801,7,98],"tags":[107,1954,222,1180,1181,1001,220,3837,221,193,565],"class_list":["post-4367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3799","category-3800","category-aging","category-baby-boom","category-big-birthday","category-big-birthday-70-1946-2016","category-life","category-religion","tag-baby-boom-2","tag-catholic","tag-faith","tag-friends","tag-friendship","tag-high-school","tag-jewish","tag-life-time-friends","tag-religion-2","tag-time","tag-wedding"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-18r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4367","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4367"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4390,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4367\/revisions\/4390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}