A Blogger's Interface

Blogroll Me!

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of meeting fellow blogger M from Ink as Rain. She is a 17-year-old who was briefly visiting Toronto on her senior school trip.

I first learned about her several months ago on Robert Avrech's blog Seraphic Secret. He featured her review/personal feelings about Robert's recently released book, The Hebrew Kid and the Apache Maiden. He is a longtime major Hollywood, award-winning screenwriter who was impressed enough with her outlook and her language to share her words with us. I was impressed enough to write to her and tell her how impressed I was with her.

M is a prolific writer, reader and an all-around good gal. I don't know her all that well, but when you read blogs, you also end up reading a lot between the lines. And those spaces do say a lot about this young woman, as have her messages to me over the past several months.

I was pleased when she contacted me last week and asked if we could perhaps meet. After consulting her trip schedule, it was decided that I'd come after work to meet her at the restaurant where they were having dinner. She warned me that she'd be wearing a blue kerchief.

As I entered the restaurant to a throng of teen girls dressed in a sea of denim, and looked around, I spotted her. She was pretty much what I'd imagined her to be: sweet, gentle and overall what I've always been called, "a nice Jewish girl"! Over the adolescent voices and the clink of cutlery and dishes, we managed to hold a brief "getting to know you" conversation.

She'd been very excited to meet me, had told some of her friends about it, and some of her fellow bloggers whose blogs I've visited were also on the trip. They, too, were happy to meet me, having heard all about me. Wow, a pseudo-blogging celebrity...!

I looked at M, I looked at her peers and thought to myself: "If I'd been handed a different deck of cards to play with in my life, I might very well have had a daughter that age."

Okay, so my own daughter is not yet that age, but in the meantime I'm happy enough to know someone that age who is wise beyond her years.

Her family should be proud of her, this high school graduate who is setting out to learn in a seminary in Israel, and later go on to college. I wish her lots of mazel on reaching this point in her life and setting off on a new and seemingly unknown course.

And one more thing, "Hey, M, may the blogging force be with you!"