The other day, I went shopping in Guadalajara where I found a blouse I’ve been looking for – for almost 40 years. I suppose an explanation is in order. It begins – as many stories do – with an encounter with something by Nora Ephron.

In the summer of 2013, my best friend and I went to see the enchanting and poignant Love, Loss, and What I Wore, Nora and Delia Ephron‘s stage-adaptation of Ilene Beckerman’s book by the same name. I’d never met them, but I knew each of the five women on stage. Like them, I can still 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 made it to Mexico in the move, they are all most definitely “with me.”

There are my favorite brown leather boots with the beautiful patina, worn with an attitude the morning I was fired by someone who might possibly have been great – possibly – were it not for the misogyny that made him a small, unapologetic asshole.  While it wasn’t the best way to start a day,  it gave me a distinct pleasure to turn on the heel of those well-worn boots and walk away from him. Forever.

Then there are the boots of patchwork leather that my mother gave me; they make me feel like Carly Simon in anticipation of a date with Cat Stevens circa 1971. Or Linda Ronstadt. There are the boots I wore the first time her daddy and I took Sophie to see the snow and make angels in it; the classic Frye boots that I simply could not pass up because they were on sale and at a consignment store;  the pointy-toed suede knee-high boots that have been re-soled twice and always required additional assistance from my late husband to remove from my tired and swollen feet at the end of a long day.  Madonna had a pair. Finally, there are all those pairs of black boots that vary only in length. For those of you living in cooler climes, there is perhaps a sixty day window for honest boot-wearing in Phoenix, Arizona. Seriously. I lived there for almost 30 years, day after day of relentless sunshine and no sensible rationale for the boot collection.

Nor can I explain the coats, each one purchased in Ireland 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, although those were purchased in anticipation of a winter work trip to Santa Fe, also with my best friend, during which we froze and had to buy hats at the Gap. As I recall she may even have bought an extra pair of boots, and I think they might even have been purple because Prince. In our hats and gloves, we were cute and cozy, perfectly accessorized as we walked to the theater to see the new movie everyone was talking about  – Love Actually.

During the Christmas holidays, I  always wear the long red coat I bought at Marks and Spencers one year in Belfast. Even if it’s only for five minutes. I don’t care if it is 80 degrees; that coat is a stunner.  Particularly against the backdrop of a holiday tree made of a big triangle of pots of jolly red poinsettias outside Saks Fifth Avenue at the Biltmore Fashion Park. And, it makes me feel a bit like Santa, deciding who’s been naughty or nice or both. Or Sinead O’Connor who used to walk around Dublin in a cape like Red Riding Hood . . . 

Along with the boots, and the Bridge vintage leather Gladstone doctor’s bag – which I bought on Ebay and have not been able to open for several years because the brass clasp is broken –  hiding in a corner of the closet, is a pair of burgundy loafers, complete with pennies stuffed in the leather.  I haven’t worn them since 1989. Why are they still there? Maybe because they remind me of the brogues we wore to school or for  Irish dancing, or maybe I was influenced by the collegiate style of a fifth-grade American girl wearing khakis from the Gap, white socks, and her grandmother’s loafers.

Given where I am this evening –  still almost 60, still  with nothing to wear to a gig – having already flung on the bed seven skirts that just aren’t “Americana” enough for our act. I should be wearing something more Gillian Welch but that could be dangerously closed to something like Nellie Olson in Little House on the Prairie.

  I 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. For me, in the end, something blue wins; it always does. Even Meryl settles on a blue and white striped blouse. That blouse. For 37 years I have looked for it, and finally on a rainy day outing to a mall in Guadalajara, I found it. It’s not exactly the same, but it made me feel exactly the same way I thought Streep’s character, Molly, 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.

Speaking of ‘gigs,’ I’m happy to say I have saved none of the ‘armor” I used to wear to the job I used to have before that asshole man fired me. Mostly suits. Navy suits.  I remember when the time came for me to return to it a year after my daughter was born, I was completely unprepared for the crying – mostly mine – that preceded and continued after I deposited her in the waiting arms of Bonnie, the cheery classroom assistant at a Montessori school. I remember I wanted to be like the other mothers who didn’t appear to have jobs outside the home. Well maybe not in their comfortable cargo pants and Birkenstocks but, (this was pre-Starbucks) I would have like to hang out in the parking lot with a favorite mug full of coffee brought from home. I like to think I conveyed a vague impression of adulthood with my Anne Klein suits bought on consignment and hair on the verge of sensible – only on the verge.  As a school administrator, I was hell-bent on impressing on someone – most likely myself – the notion that I was “A Professional Working Mother,” that I could do it all or have it all, all at the same time. I couldn’t. I didn’t.

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How I laughed and sighed, and even cried a little, as I recognized my mother, my daughter, my best friend, and myself 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 black, of course – high heels and high drama, bunions and ballet flats. Flats. Incidentally, to her horror, my best friend’s podiatrist had 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. Also, she is something of an innovator who once had what we thought was a million dollar idea to accommodate concert-goers under 5″5″ – the expand-a-fan has yet to make it big, but you never know.

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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 many of us keep saying to our daughters and ourselves – “Are you going to go out in that?” or “What did you do to your hair?”

And, in spite of the appreciative laughter that rippled through the audience,  there was a yearning. Something was missing – 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  stages and closets we all know so well.  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 from us, 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 her weapon of choice against not only the gray hair that grows back with a vengeance but the youth culture in general – hair color. With a quick and daring wit, 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.

In my mind’s eye, 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, she charmingly resurrected and rewrote with her sister, Delia, as the romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail starring, naturally, Meg Ryan and Tom 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 those she crafted in those 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 but 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 is not the most memorable 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 who I am supposed to be, because, as I have learned, life happens in the twinkling of an eye.

In the scene,  Sally has just found out that her ex-boyfriend is getting married, and tearfully, she tells Harry that she is going to be left on the shelf, a spinster, alone at forty. Mind you, at the time she is barely thirty, with a very cute hair cut that, at the time, I was sure would work with naturally curly hair. It didn’t. As a side note, I carried in my wallet, for several years – maybe ten – a page from a magazine featuring the many cute haircuts of Meg Ryan. I really did. 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 one of those cute haircuts. Not until I turned 50 and found Joanne at Mane Attraction, 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, and by all accounts the deadline for “letting oneself go” and, I suppose, 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.  Two years from 60,  I’m wondering about what I’ve done and what’s next. With my thirties behind me, my forties too, my fifties . . . I am accepting 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. Like my hair, each performs poorly when the pressure rises. 

Being almost sixty 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, and it’s probably fair to say that  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 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 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 wholly 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, at sixty-five, still spinning in black. Rock on gold dust woman.

Black. Black is still 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 black blazer (wardrobe staple) 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, which ironically is Stevie’s hometown.

Phoenix is hot. Searingly so, beginning in June. When you add to that, the boiling but brief hot flashes that come free with a drug that’s supposed to keep breast cancer at bay, my beloved black would be unbearable in a 110 degree summer days 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. Then again, this could also have been be attributed to a flat-out fatigue – the only ‘f’ word that has ever offended me  –  that was my constant companion during breast cancer treatment.  Perhaps it was the Tamoxifen that made me write things down when my once stellar powers of recalls started showing signs of weakness. How I used to scoff at makers of lists. Another of life’s little ironies. Finally – for now –  there is the wildly embarrassing 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 a room full of unpacked boxes full of things that matter. To me . . .

Since before my only child started school – almost 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 ever-so organized professional organizers on TV, those 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.”  I can almost see a wry smile creep across her 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:

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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