I Remember Nothing [38]
The realization that I may have only a few good years remaining has hit me with real force, and I have done a lot of thinking as a result. I would like to have come up with something profound, but I haven’t. I try to figure out what I really want to do every day, I try to say to myself, If this is one of the last days of my life, am I doing exactly what I want to be doing? I aim low. My idea of a perfect day is a frozen custard at Shake Shack and a walk in the park. (Followed by a Lactaid.) My idea of a perfect night is a good play and dinner at Orso. (But no garlic, or I won’t be able to sleep.) The other day I found a bakery that bakes my favorite childhood cake, and it was everything I remembered; it made my week. The other night we were coming up the FDR Drive and Manhattan was doing its fabulous, magical, twinkling thing, and all I could think was how lucky I’ve been to spend my adult life in New York City.
We used to go to our house on Long Island every summer. We would drive out with the kids the day they got out of school and we wouldn’t come back until Labor Day. We were always there for the end of June, my favorite time of the year, when the sun doesn’t set until nine-thirty at night and you feel as if you will live forever. On July Fourth, there were fireworks at the beach, and we would pack a picnic, dig a hole in the sand, build a fire, sing songs—in short, experience a night when we felt like a conventional American family (instead of the divorced, patched-together, psychoanalyzed, oh-so-modern family we were).
In mid-July, the geese would turn up. They would fly overhead in formation, their wings beating the air in a series of heart-stopping whooshes. I was elated by the sound. The geese were not yet flying south, mostly they were just moving from one pond to another, but that moment of realizing (from the mere sound of beating wings) that birds were overhead was one of the things that made the summers out there so magical.
In time, of course, the kids grew up and it was just me and Nick in the house on Long Island. The sound of geese became a different thing—the first sign that summer was not going to last forever, and soon another year would be over. Then, I’m sorry to say, they became a sign not just that summer would come to an end, but that so would everything else. As a result, I stopped liking the geese. In fact, I began to hate them. I especially began to hate their sound, which was not beating wings—how could I have ever thought it was?—but a lot of uneuphonious honks.
Now we don’t go to Long Island in the summer and I don’t hear the geese. Sometimes, instead, we go to Los Angeles, where there are hummingbirds, and I love to watch them because they’re so busy getting the most out of life.
What I Won’t Miss
Dry skin
Bad dinners like the one we went to last night
Technology in general
My closet
Washing my hair
Bras
Funerals
Illness everywhere
Polls that show that 32 percent of the American people believe in creationism
Polls
Fox
The collapse of the dollar
Joe Lieberman
Clarence Thomas
Bar mitzvahs
Mammograms
Dead flowers
The sound of the vacuum cleaner
Bills
E-mail. I know I already said it, but I want to emphasize it.
Small print
Panels on Women in Film
Taking off makeup every night
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
Acknowledgments
I thank, as always, Delia Ephron, Bob Gottlieb, Amanda Urban, and Nick Pileggi.
And also Arianna Huffington,