Retrieving the dry-clean only blouse from the dryer, I’m reminded of the day I found it in an unlikely little boutique in Guadalajara. I had been looking for one just like it for about 40 years, and that, my friends, has something to do with Nora Ephron.

Some years ago,  I went to see Love, Loss, and What I Wore, the Ephron sisters’ stage-adaptation of Ilene Beckerman’s book by the same name. It’s about five women I’d never met but I already knew them.  You probably do too. Like them, I can peer into my closet and hang on the clothes and shoes and handbags bulging from it, some of the most important moments of my life. Especially my boots and my coats. While not all of them came along to Mexico, they are all still “with me.”

There are my favorite brown leather boots with the beautiful patina, worn with an attitude the morning I was fired by a man who probably had it in him to be great, were it not for the misogyny that made him a small and unapologetic asshole who finally got what he deserved.   While being fired isn’t the best way to start a day,  it pleased me to turn on the heel of those well-worn boots and walk away from him.

Then there are the boots of patchwork leather my mother gave me; they make me feel like Carly Simon in anticipation of a date with Cat Stevens circa 1971. Or Linda Ronstadt. Or Christine McVie pre-Fleetwood Mac when she was with Chicken Shack. There are the boots I wore the first time we took Sophie to see the snow and make angels in it; the classic Frye boots that I could not pass up because they were both on sale and at a consignment store;  the pointy-toed suede knee-high boots that have been re-soled twice and that I couldn’t remove at the end of a long day without  my husband  helping me.  Madonna had a pair too.  Madonna also had people.

Finally, there are several pairs of black boots that vary only in length. There is no rationale for any of the boots, given the narrow window of opportunity for boot-wearing in Phoenix, Arizona where I lived for over 30 years, bathed in relentless sunshine. 

Nor can I explain my coats, most of them bought in Belfast and carried back to one of the hottest places in North America, where there is rarely the need for a sweater let alone a coat– other than to make a statement about how the heat can’t stop me from being my own girl, complete with scarf and coat, and maybe a turtleneck underneath. I even had a pair of leather fur-lined gloves. To be fair, I bought these in anticipation of a winter work trip to Santa Fe with my best friend, where we actually shivered and had to buy woolly hats at the Gap. She also had to buy an extra pair of boots. They were cheap and purple because #Prince. In our hats and gloves, we were adorable. Cute and cozy, we were perfectly accessorized as we walked to the theater to see the new movie everyone was talking about  – Love Actually.

My red Christmas coat is a stunner. I bought it at Marks and Spencers one year in Belfast and subsequently wore it for maybe 20 Christmas mornings when I posed against the backdrop of a holiday tree made entirely of pots of jolly red poinsettias outside Saks Fifth Avenue. It also makes me feel a bit like I’m related to Santa. Or like lovely, lost Sinead O’Connor who used to walk around Dublin in a cape like Red Riding Hood in black and white … 

Along with the boots, and the Bridge vintage leather Gladstone doctor’s bag, found on Ebay and which remained closed in the closet because the brass clasp was broken, are burgundy loafers, complete with pennies stuffed in the leather.  I wore them once in 1989. Why are they still there? Maybe because they remind me of the brogues we wore for Irish dancing, or maybe because I was influenced by the collegiate style of an American girl on her first day of fifth grade in khakis from the Gap, white socks, and her grandmother’s loafers.

Given where I am today– 60, still  with nothing to wear to a gig – having already flung on the bed seven skirts that just aren’t “Americana” enough. I should be wearing something more Gillian Welch but unless I add badass boots, I could be dangerously close to something more Nellie Olson in Little House on the Prairie.

Getting ready, I sometimes feel a bit like Meryl Streep‘s married character getting ready for a clandestine New York city rendezvous with Robert de Niro’s character, also married– to someone else–in one of my favorite movies, Falling in Love.

In the end, something blue wins; it always does. Meryl settles on a blue and white striped blouse. That blouse.  The one I found on a rainy day outing to a mall in Guadalajara. It’s not exactly the same, but it made me feel exactly the same way I thought Meryl Streep felt when she decided on it for her secret date with Robert de Niro.

You see, I may not remember what you said to me, but I will never forget how your words made me feel or what I was wearing when you said them to me. I’ll remember what you were wearing too.

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I laughed and sighed, and even cried a little, as I recognized my mother, my daughter, the women I know– most of all the woman I’ve become– in the stories that flew from the stage that night – tales of highly sought-after and completely impractical designer handbags which increase in size and price, the older we get;  the various layers of “slimming” apparel– in various shades of black; high heels and high drama: bunions and ballet flats. Flats. My best friend’s podiatrist once suggested shoes from The Walking Company as opposed to a shot of Cortisone for pain. In retaliation, she switched podiatrists and lied, saying that, yes, had been wearing the custom orthotic so could she please just have the shot.  Shoes from The Walking Company were not – and will most likely never be – happening – for my friend – a petite woman who “needs” the height. She is something of an innovator who once had what we thought was a million dollar idea to accommodate concert-goers under 5″5″. Expand-a-fan has yet to make it big, but it would not surprise me to see it on Shark Tank one day.

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Within the sparkling Ephron dialogue on stage, there were also glimpses of all those things that, at some point, seemed so essential in a wardrobe as well as all those unessential and unforgivable things we may have said to other women, including our daughters –”Are you going to go out in that?” “What did you do to your hair?”

In spite of the laughter that rippled through the audience, there was a yearning. Something was missing that night. Nora Ephron herself. It made me sad – it still does – to think of her no longer here to go back and forth with us through the phases we know.  From shoulder pads and big hair, to pant-suits and Brazilian blow-outs, and then, invariably and for comfort’s sake, to  Eileen Fisher, which feels a bit like The End, or as one of the women mused last night – “When you start wearing Eileen Fisher, you might as well say, ‘I give up.’

You might as well . . .

It was leukemia that took Nora Ephron, a cancer she had kept private from a world that already knew many of the intimate details about the backs of her elbows, her aging neck, her dry skin, her small breasts about which she wrote in A Few Words About Breasts, the contents of her purse, and hair color –  her weapon of choice against not only the gray hair that grows back with a vengeance but the youth culture in general. Quick and daring and witty, she regaled us with stories of the many indignities visited upon her as she grew older, but she did not tell us about the cancer.

When I imagine her and the way I think she was, Ephron is striding across a set not unlike The Strand bookstore in the East Village where all her books were almost sold out the morning after she died. She is suggesting a direction to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, while searching for the glasses that are on top of her head. I imagine her laughing with the darlings of Hollywood, surrounded by books, as in the old Jimmy Stewart movie The Shop Around the Corner which she resurrected and rewrote with her sister, Delia, as the romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail starring, naturally, Ryan and  Hanks. Between the words of the Ephron sisters and the pair’s natural chemistry, Hollywood had a recipe for success in the romantic comedy genre.

Although a cynic with a sharp tongue, I suspect Nora Ephron was a romantic at heart, so it would have been poetic had she been handed a happy ending like the kind she invented in her fail-proof feel-good “chick flicks,” but it would not have been real, and 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 such a big part of the soundtrack to my American life as a woman who immigrated to this country round about the time “When Harry met Sally.” Granted, it’s not the most famous part of the movie, but there’s one scene that never fails to make me laugh and snap me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who shows up now and again to remind me just how little time there is to become myself.

Sally has just found out that her ex-boyfriend is getting married, and tearfully, she tells Harry that she is destined to be left on the shelf, a spinster, alone at forty. At the time, she is barely thirty, with a cute hair cut that I remember being convinced would work with naturally curly hair. It didn’t. As a side note, I carried in my wallet, for about ten years, a page from a glossy magazine featuring Meg Ryan’s numerous cute haircuts.  And, for countless hairdressers rendered clueless by the state of my hair, I unfolded that page, as though it were the Shroud of Turin, and politely asked them to give me a Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50 and found the unflappable Topher who makes time for my hair every time I go back to Phoenix, 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

Once upon a time, 40 was a lifetime away from eighteen, and by all accounts the deadline for “letting oneself go” and, I suppose, Eileen Fisher. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses for hair – not jeans. 70 was out of the question, and definitely not a new fifty.  Now 60,  I’m wondering about what I’ve done and what’s next. And, it’s not particularly easy. With my thirties behind me, my forties too, and my fifties, I have accepted a couple of truths about myself. Some are minor – I do not have sensible hair and I talk too much. Others are more painful. I should stay far away from insecure men in positions of power and recognize earlier that it’s not worth waiting for mean girls to redeem themselves. 

Being 60 is a bit like going to Home Depot, one of my least favorite places on the planet. It’s just too big, and when I’m there, I have to ask for help. Nobody in Home Depot cares what I’m wearing.

I’m worried that I might run out of time to do the things I need to do. Not necessarily the kinds of things that might turn up on a “bucket list” but definitely those that will bring me closer to those I love the most. And, I know who loves me and who loves me not.

To be scrupulously honest, none of this self-awareness in any way diminishes how much I resent the aging process as “a thing” and the way it just sneaks up on me. 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 airport 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.

Several months before he died, my husband and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Phoenix . It was the last concert he ever attended. I remember there was a fleeting moment of something like melancholy as we caught a white-haired Mick Fleetwood bow out and off stage in his bright red hat, pointed red shoes, and the dangling wooden balls, and Stevie Nicks still mesmerizing just like the white winged dove sings a song. Stevie. 75 and still spinning in black. Rock on gold dust woman.

Black. Black is the envy of all the other colors, with navy and brown and gray having declared themselves “the new black.” The truth is – and we know this – black isn’t even black sometimes. For instance, The little black dress is not the same color as the wardrobe-staple-black-blazer that I want to wear with black pants on a “fat day.” The blacks don’t match. One is a dark-greyish black, the other a bluish-purplish black. I love black, but unless you are Stevie Nicks in an air-conditioned theater, it is not the color for Phoenix in the summer, where Stevie lives.

Phoenix is hot. Searingly hot. When you add to that, the boiling but brief hot flashes that come free with the drugs that are supposed to keep breast cancer at bay, my beloved black would be unbearable in a 110 degree summer day that also make any form of physical exercise unappealing. When I lived there, I barely  walked the length of myself after the thermometer reached 100 degrees. This could also have been be attributed to a flat-out fatigue – the only ‘f’ word that has ever offended me  and which was my constant companion during breast cancer treatment.  Maybe it was the Tamoxifen that made me write things down when my once stellar powers of recall started showing signs of weakness. How I used to scoff at makers of lists. Another of life’s little ironies along with the  forgetting of names, the names of people I see every single day, the names of people I forget on days that might be the most important of their lives.

I have digressed a little, as befits my age. Those of you who know me know that along with my irrational fear of car-washes and drowning (although not at the same time), is the even greater fear of becoming a hoarder whose secret life will be the subject of an A&E documentary. It’s not quite time to call in a camera crew, but I may be a future contender, given my chronic aversion to throwing things away. The house in Mexico still has cabinet full of unpacked boxes full of things that matter. To me . . .

Since before my only child started school – over twenty years ago –  I have saved every drawing, handprint, book report, birthday card, report card, and, apparently, every receipt from Target. Not in one place, of course. Stuffed in vases and between the pages of books are random letters from the tooth fairy, 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. So in the spirit of those organized professional organizers on TV, who would have me put everything on the front yard before organizing it into piles of things that should be stored, displayed, or dumped, it is time to tame the paper tiger.

Full of good intentions, I began “organizing” one day. For about an hour and with no real sense of urgency. I made a few folders for my daughter’s school work and special photographs, I threw away greeting cards that were made not by her but some stranger at Hallmark, I filled a box with books to donate to a local bookstore, and then while flipping through the pages of a school composition book, I came upon something my daughter had written when she was very little.

I don’t know what or who inspired it. 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 wonder what Nora Ephron would think of my little girl’s “mountain of life.” We know what she thought of 60 and beyond …

“I have been 60 for four years now, and by the time you read this I will probably have been 60 for five. I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn’t much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over 60.

The long shadows are everywhere ¬ friends dying and battling  illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realised.

There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’. It’s a good song. I know what she meant. I can get into it; I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from. But the truth is that je regrette beaucoup. Why do people say it’s better to be older than to be younger? It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday. Even if you’re in great shape, you can’t chop an onion the way you used to and you can’t ride a bicycle several miles without becoming a candidate for traction. If you work, you’re surrounded by young people who are plugged into the marketplace, the demographic, the zeitgeist; they want your job and someday soon they’re going to get it.”

RIP Nora Ephron (1941 – 2012)

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