The coronavirus pandemic has meant months now of living at home with a beautiful view and a computer at my disposal.  It is, as they say, what it is. I’m not complaining. I’m more confused than anything else by a lack of motivation to do anything that’s good for me. Unlike overwhelmed and exhausted front-line workers in places where the virus is rampant, facing each day a terror I cannot begin to imagine, I know I’m lucky. Really lucky. I have my health and a job and therefore the privilege to ponder more mundane and meaningless things like why I’m still in my pajamas at four in the afternoon unless I have to make an appearance on yet another digital meeting.

By now, I should have finalized a collection of essays for a book that will most likely never be finished, mastered conversational Spanish, and toned my upper arms. I am duty bound to report that most days I barely walk the length of myself, choosing instead to spend even more time online.  Each morning, I peruse my Twitter feed hoping for the demise of Trump, I update my Facebook status with a lovely memory of something real that happened in the real world with real and much-missed people, and then I “go” to work via email and Zoom – the latter never intended to host both my professional and social life –  more often than not wearing the same thing I wore the day before and without  makeup which I am now rationing for those times I venture outside to places where I keep a safe distance from people who aren’t wearing masks.

I’m not alone in this online life.  In fact, a new survey reveals that on the other side of the Atlantic, people are spending on average, a quarter of their waking day online instead, presumably, of doing the things they always swore they would do if only they had the time.

There are two contagions at work here – the coronavirus itself and its attendant emotions, the latter getting in the way of making things and making them work.  I tell myself that if I were back in the house I own in Phoenix instead of a rental in beautiful Mexico – and Mexico is beautiful – it would be different. I would be different. I would be cleaning out the crammed closets and cupboards I left behind, forever ridding the place of the stuff I have told myself my daughter will want one day, even though I know she won’t. She really won’t.

An unsettling ennui has set in, and all the experts have something to say about it in articles in The New York Times – to which I finally paid a subscription –  and none of it convincing me that I can do anything about it. With no recognizable shape to days that evaporate quickly and no clear end in sight, I can’t do the kind of backwards planning that has always served me well both professionally and personally. I miss deadlines, even those that required all-nighters to meet – especially those.  I love deadlines. I know I could and should create some, but it’s just not the same as someone else doing it for me.

I didn’t know until this morning that the late Nora Eprhon loved deadlines too. In her own words, when she started out as a reporter for The New York Post:

I loved the city room. I loved the pack. I loved smoking and drinking Scotch and playing dollar poker . . . I loved the speed. I loved the deadlines.

I loved Nora Ephron. I love thinking of her smoking and drinking and in the throes of a rewrite to meet a deadline.  Words like “moxie” and “chops” come to mind. I love thinking about what she would have to say about us in the time of corona. I imagine she would keep it light, making light of the fact that due to coronavirus-induced closures of beauty salons in recent months, there are probably as many grey-haired women in America as there were in the 1950s when only seven percent of them dyed their hair.

It was a rare leukemia that took Nora Ephron from us, a cancer she kept private in a world that already knew many of the intimate details of her aging neck, her dry skin, the contents of her handbag, her small breasts about which she famously wrote A Few Words, and her weapon of choice against not only the gray that returns with a vengeance every four weeks, but the youth culture in general – hair color. With a quick and daring wit, she slapped us with stories of the many indignities visited upon her aging body, but she did not tell us about the cancer. Cancer was not copy, as her son explains in the documentary about her life:

I think at the end of my mom’s life she believed that everything is not copy,” he says. “That the things you want to keep are not copy. That the people you love are not copy. That what is copy is the stuff you’ve lost, the stuff you’re willing to give away, the things that have been taken from you. She saw everything is copy as a means of controlling the story. Once she became ill, the means to control the story was to make it not exist.

Somewhere in the middle of my life, I realized I have always understood the need to control and contain. As much as I have revealed of myself in these virtual spaces, I know for sure what is not copy. My breast cancer was and is copy. Some of the work of widowhood is copy too, but not all of it. I know what to keep and what to discard, how to control it and myself – most of the time. I know how to be private. I know how to keep what is precious, private. I know how to – as Meryl Streep says of Ephron – ‘achieve a private act.‘  I know how to avoid certain kinds of endings; I’m very good at the long game. I know what Nora Ephron’s son knows – that closure is over-rated.  I can’t begin to consider it without recalling the first time I realized how much it mattered to other people, following a school principal’s evaluation of a lesson I’d taught in which she indicated, with some disappointment, that I had provided “no closure” for a too-big class of middle schoolers. I chose not to argue with her, because I knew that, unlike her, I would be back in my classroom the next day and the next to continue – not to close – with my students.  It is the continuing that matters along with what I wore and how my hair behaved.

Continuance – it has a nice ring to it.

Resurrected in her son’s documentary, Ephron is among us once again. Vibrant, funny, and in control.  It is easy to imagine her striding across a set not unlike The Strand bookstore in the East Village where all her books were almost sold out the morning after her death. In my mind, she is authoritative – and maybe even perceived as a bit mean – providing direction to actors that adore her, at the same time searching for the glasses that are on top of her head. By many accounts, she was a cynic with a sharp tongue. According to her son, she had:

a luminous smile and an easy way of introducing herself, but a razor in her back pocket.

A sentimental old fool, I can’t help wishing for the romance she so effortlessly delivered on screen and that real life would have handed her the happy ending she served up so many times in those fail-proof feel-good “chick flicks.” But the happy ending would not have been real, and my guess is that Nora Ephron liked to keep it real.

Her contribution to the movies is a tiny part of her legacy as a writer, but those films are a big part of the soundtrack to my American life as a wide-eyed immigrant who got here right around the time Sally met Harry. Granted, it is probably not as memorable as the fake orgasm scene in Katz Deli, but there’s a  moment in When Harry met Sally that never fails to snap me back to the girl who still shows up now and again to remind me  how little time there is to become who I am supposed to be. Life happens in the twinkling of an eye. It is for the living and for living, she tells me, and always when I need to hear it.

In the scene, a tearful Sally has just found out that her ex is getting married. Harry doesn’t get it that for Sally this means spinsterhood – at forty. At the time, mind you, she is barely thirty, with a cute hair cut I was convinced would work with my natural curls. It didn’t. Undeterred, I carried in my wallet, for several years – maybe a decade – a page from a magazine featuring all Meg Ryan’s cute haircuts. I really did. And, for countless hairdressers rendered clueless and incompetent by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page, as though it were the Shroud of Turin, to politely ask them for a Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50 and found Topher at an aptly named Altered Ego beauty salon, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before. Too many times, perhaps.

And I’m gonna be 40 . . .  someday

Just yesterday I felt the same way.  Forty was a lifetime away from eighteen, the deadline at the time for “letting oneself go” and, let’s be honest, Eileen Fisher.  Fifty was sensible and dowdy. Sixty heralded blue rinses for hair – not jeans. Seventy was out of the question, and definitely not a new fifty. What does that even mean? With sixty looming on my near horizon, I’m wondering what’s next. Whatever it is, I hope it includes visits to my parents in Ireland and lemon meringue and a decent President in the United States. With my thirties and forties and most of my fifties behind me, I am accepting a couple of truths about myself. Some are visible – I do not have sensible hair, and I have a tendency to ramble when I’m nervous, and I’m nervous most of the time because I still worry about what people think of me. Others are hidden and more painful and definitely not copy. I’m gonna be 60 someday . . . and some days it feels like I’m lost in IKEA, one of my least favorite places on the planet, too big, with strange Scandinavian words on signs around ‘rooms’ that require instructions and assembly. There’s no end in sight.

Still, none of this self-awareness in any way diminishes how much I resent the aging process in general and the way it just sneaks up on me at the most inopportune times. One minute, I am reading the small print on the back of a shampoo bottle, the next I’m desperately seeking one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the carwash or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in the same predicament. My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at very loud concerts over the past forty years than on something as graceless as aging.

About six months before he died, my late husband and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Phoenix. Other than the fact that it was the last concert he saw on this earth and the last time I would cheer for an encore with him, I hold on to the moment I caught a white-haired Mick Fleetwood bow out and off stage in a bright red hat, pointy red shoes, and dangling wooden balls, and in the background, Stevie Nicks still spinning in black. Mesmerizing. Just like the white winged dove sings a song. Stevie, at almost seventy. Rock on gold dust woman.

So many beginnings and endings, with who knows how many more to go . . .

In various places in my house in Phoenix, I have saved my daughter’s drawings, handprints, book reports, birthday cards, report cards, certificates, and, apparently, every receipt from Target. Stuffed in vases and file folders and between the pages of hard-cover books are random letters from Zoe the Tooth Fairy – and her posse of pixie pals who lived in the mesquite tree in our back yard for years – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and her grandparents. There are even pieces of notebook paper that bear only her name in the top right corner. In the spirit of the uber-organized professional organizers on Learning Channel documentaries, the ones who tell flustered hoarders to place everything they own on the front yard before organizing it into piles of things that should be stored, displayed, or dumped, it is time – theoretically –  to tame the paper tiger.

Full of good intentions one day before making my mid-life move to Mexico – and for about an hour – I organized. I made some folders for my daughter’s school work and special photographs. I threw away the greeting cards that were made not by her but some copywriter at Hallmark, and I filled a box with books and teddy bears to donate to the local bookstore. While flipping through the pages of one of her school composition book, I came upon one of her drawings entitled The Mountain of Life.

I love the leggy and winking 29 year old, hand on her hip, but I am almost afraid to ask what happened to her.  I can almost see a wry smile creep across Nora Ephron’s face as she tells that 50 year old to straighten up for Act Two, to cause some trouble, just as she urged a bunch of Wellesley graduates in her 1996 Commencement Speech – to continue.

No closure.

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women. Thank you. Good luck. The first act of your life is over. Welcome to the best years of your life . . .

RIP Nora Ephron (1941 – 2012)

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