Nora Ephron died yesterday. She was a wonderful writer and film-maker. My favourite of her films is Julie and Julia, followed closely by You've Got Mail (When Harry Met Sally is universally loved but I just can't fall in love with Billy Crystal's Harry... he grates on me!). She wrote stories of love and sweetness and hope. Beautiful little ordinary moments interwoven with extraordinary, heartwarming, life-changing ones. She is the kind of writer I aspire to be (mixed with a little Lena Dunham, and Murakami, of course).
Today I came across this list written by Nora and published in her book I Remember Nothing, via the lovely Sandi Sieger (on Instagram) and, subsequently, Mark Colvin (on Twitter).
What I Will Miss
My kids
Nick
Spring
Fall
Waffles
The concept of waffles
Bacon
A walk in the park
The idea of a walk in the park
The park
Shakespeare in the Park
The bed
Reading in bed
Fireworks
Laughs
The view out the window
Twinkle lights
Butter
Dinner at home just the two of us
Dinner with friends
Dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives
Paris
Next year in Istanbul
Pride and Prejudice
The Christmas tree
Thanksgiving dinner
One for the table
The dogwood
Taking a bath
Coming over the bridge to Manhattan
Pie
(via Lists of Note)
In light of her death, Nora's list is particularly poignant. What will she miss? The little things. Those lovely moments, interactions and rituals which are repeated, over and over, year after year, anticipated and familiarised, memorised and taken for granted. The ordinary things: butter, a walk in the park, the bed. The joyful, the beautiful: laughter, the Christmas tree, Paris. The things that make life worth living; that keep it chugging along, peppering the mundane and inevitable with love and fun and nostalgia and something to look forward to.
So many of us search, search, search for... something. What is it? Success? Love? Fame? Happiness? Riches? For our family to be proud of us? The admiration of strangers? But what is it that we really want, deep down?
So many of us search, search, search for... something. What is it? Success? Love? Fame? Happiness? Riches? For our family to be proud of us? The admiration of strangers? But what is it that we really want, deep down?
For me, I think it is... ease. Comfort. I want to be settled, to feel secure. It's not that I don't want success or achievement. I do. But I want to be sure that I am good enough to get where I want to be, rather than mired in the anxiety of questioning whether or not I will ever make it. It's not that I don't want big, exciting things to happen in my life. I do. It's just that I want to feel safe, too. A safety net of my lover, my family, my dog, my home to fall back on, when the excitement dies down and the world closes in. I am a homebody, at heart. And I love other places, other than my home, but only to the extent that they feel like... home. So essentially, I think, home is what I am searching for. And it is what I will miss.
“I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn
