When We Had Time for Syllables

...A dispatch from bewilderness

Once upon a time, polar ice caps weren’t melting. Glaciers hadn’t shrunk to the size of ice cubes. We didn’t phish, facetime, or delete cookies. We didn’t text “srsly” for “seriously” or “tl;dr,” which means “too long; didn’t read” or “WTF” when we meant “go f—k yourself.”

We made time to write entire words and even whole sentences. We managed meals minus cellphones and survived without texting, tweeting, or sub-tweeting – the even shorter type of tweet for those whose schedules preclude four syllables.

Nora Ephron died in 2012. She was a triple Academy Award nominee for Best Original Screenplay for When Harry Met Sally, Silkwood, and Sleepless in Seattle and her death was a story for a few minutes.

Nora felt bad about her neck. She wrote a book about it. A lot of people feel bad about necks or other parts that don’t work as well as they used to, or don’t look as good as they did. A lot of people feel bad.

I had a daughter. She had a mommy. Once upon a time, her hand sought mine. I’m not the mom she wants or the mom she had. I saw my breasts in a mirror last week. They loved to sustain her. I could have looked at my tummy, too. It loved being her home.

Nora began in the mailroom at Newsweek when there were, as she recalled, “1 ½ women writers.” I am half a writer now and maybe half a mom. Nora wrote, “When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”

Nora also wrote, "Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real."