by Nora Ephron
I went to my computer and pulled up the pictures from the last Christmas we’d all been together. There we were, so happy, crowded together, overlapping. There was Ruthie. She had the most beautiful smile.
The next day, Walter called. He’d just arrived in New York with fourteen mince pies, and he was bringing them to Christmas dinner come hell or high water. “I love mince pie,” he said. “It wouldn’t be Christmas without mince pie.”
I know how he feels.
RUTHIE’S BREAD AND BUTTER PUDDING
5 large eggs
4 egg yolks
1 cup granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 quart whole milk
1 cup heavy cream, plus 1 cup for serving
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Twelve ½-inch-thick slices brioche, crusts removed, buttered generously on one side
½ cup confectioners’ sugar
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Butter a shallow two-quart baking dish.
Gently beat the eggs, egg yolks, granulated sugar, and salt until thoroughly blended.
Scald the milk and cream in a saucepan over high heat. Don’t boil. When you tip the pan and the mixture spits or makes a sizzling noise, remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract. STIR GENTLY, don’t beat, into the egg mixture until blended.
Overlap the bread, butter side up, in the prepared baking dish and pour the egg mixture over the bread. Set in a larger pan with enough hot water to come halfway up the side of the dish. Bake for about 45 minutes, or until the bread is golden-brown and a sharp knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. The bread should be golden and the pudding puffed up. This can be done early in the day. Do not chill.
Before serving, sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar and place under the broiler. Don’t walk away; this takes only a minute or so. Or you can use one of those crème brûlée gadgets to brown the sugar.
Serve with a pitcher of heavy cream.
—December 2006
I Remember Nothing
I HAVE BEEN forgetting things for years—at least since I was in my thirties. I know this because I wrote something about it at the time. I have proof. Of course, I can’t remember exactly where I wrote about it, or when, but I could probably hunt it up if I had to.
In my early days of forgetting things, words would slip away, and names. I did what you normally do when this happens: I scrolled through a mental dictionary, trying to figure out what letter the word began with, and how many syllables were involved. Eventually the lost thing would float back into my head, recaptured. I never took such lapses as harbingers of doom, or old age, or actual senescence. I always knew that whatever I’d forgotten was going to come back to me sooner or later. Once I went to a store to buy a book about Alzheimer’s disease and forgot the name of it. I thought it was funny. And it was, at the time.
Here’s a thing I’ve never been able to remember: the title of that movie with Jeremy Irons. The one about Claus von Bülow. You know the one. All I ever succeeded in remembering was that it was three words long, and the middle word was “of.” For many years, this did not bother me at all, because no one I knew could ever think of the title either. One night, eight of us were at the theater together, and not one of us could retrieve it. Finally, at intermission, someone went out to the street and Googled it; we were all informed of the title and we all vowed to remember it forever. For all I know, the other seven did. I, on the other hand, am back to remembering that it’s three words long with an “of” in the middle.
By the way, when we finally learned the title that night, we all agreed it was a bad title. No wonder we didn’t remember it.
I am going to Google for the name of that movie. Be right back….
It’s Reversal of Fortune.
How is one to remember that title? It has nothing to do with anything.
But here’s the point: I have been forgetting things for years, but now I forget in a new way. I used to believe I could eventually retrieve whatever was lost and then commit it to memory. Now I know I can’t possibly. Whatever’s gone is hopelessly gone. And what’s new doesn’t stick.
The other night I met a man who informed me that he had a neurological disorder and couldn’t remember the faces of people he’d met. He said that sometimes he looked at himself in a mirror and had no idea whom he was looking at. I don’t mean to minimize this man’s ailment, which I’m sure is a bona fide syndrome with a long name that’s capitalized, but all I could think was, Welcome to my world. A couple of years ago, the actor Ryan O’Neal confessed that he’d recently failed to recognize his own daughter, Tatum, at a funeral and had accidentally made a pass at her. Everyone was judgmental about this, but not me. A month earlier, I’d found myself in a mall in Las Vegas when I saw a very pleasant-looking woman coming toward me, smiling, her arms outstretched, and I thought, Who is this woman? Where do I know her from? Then she spoke and I realized it was my sister Amy.
You might think, Well, how was she to know her sister would be in Las Vegas? I’m sorry to report that not only did I know, but she was the person I was meeting in the mall.
All this makes me feel sad, and wistful, but mostly it makes me feel old. I have many symptoms of old age, aside from the physical. I occasionally repeat myself. I use the expression “When I was young.” Often I don’t get the joke, although I pretend that I do. If I go see a play or a movie for a second time, it’s as if I didn’t see it at all the first time, even if the first time was just recently. I have no idea who anyone in People magazine is.
I used to think my problem was that my disk was full; now I’m forced to conclude that the opposite is true: it’s becoming empty.
I have not yet reached the nadir of old age, the Land of Anecdote, but I’m approaching it.
I know, I know, I should have kept a journal. I should have saved the love letters. I should have taken a storage room somewhere in Long Island City for all the papers I thought I’d never need to look at again.
But I didn’t.
And sometimes I’m forced to conclude that I remember nothing.
For example: I met Eleanor Roosevelt. It was June 1961, and I was on my way to a political internship at the Kennedy White House. All the Wellesley/Vassar interns drove to Hyde Park to meet the former first lady. I was dying to meet her. I’d grown up with a photograph in our den of her standing with my parents backstage at a play they’d written. My mother was wearing a corsage and Eleanor wore pearls. It was a photograph I always thought of as iconic, if I’m using the word correctly, which, if I am, it will be for the first time. We were among the thousands of Americans (mostly Jews) who had dens, and, in their dens, photos of Eleanor Roosevelt. I idolized the woman. I couldn’t believe I was going to be in the same room with her. So what was she like that day in Hyde Park, you may wonder. I HAVE NO IDEA. I can’t remember what she said or what she wore; I can barely summon up a mental picture of the room where we met her, although I have a very vague memory of drapes. But here’s what I do remember: I got lost on the way. And ever since, every time I’ve been on the Taconic State Parkway, I’m reminded that I got lost there on the way to meet Eleanor Roosevelt. But I don’t remember a thing about Eleanor Roosevelt herself.
In 1964 the Beatles came to New York for the first time. I was a newspaper reporter and I was sent to the airport to cover their arrival. It was a Friday. I spent the weekend following them around. Sunday night they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. You could make an argument that the sixties began that night, on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was a historic night. I was there. I stood in the back of the Ed Sullivan Theater and watched. I remember how amazingly obnoxious the fans were—the teenage girls who screamed and yelled and behaved like idiots. But how were the Beatles, you may ask. Well, you are asking the wrong person. I could barely hear them.
I marched on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam. This was in 1967, and it was the most significant event of the antiwar movement. Thousands and thousands of people we
re there. I went with a lawyer I was dating. We spent most of the day in a hotel room having sex. I am not proud of this, but I mention it because it explains why I honestly cannot remember anything about the protest, including whether I ever even got to the Pentagon. I don’t think I did. I don’t think I’ve ever been to the Pentagon. But I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it one way or the other.
Norman Mailer wrote an entire book about this march, called The Armies of the Night. It was 288 pages long. It won the Pulitzer Prize. And I can barely write two paragraphs about it. If you knew Norman Mailer and me and were asked to guess which of us cared more about sex, you would, of course, pick Norman Mailer. How wrong you would be.
Here are some people I met that I remember nothing about:
Justice Hugo Black
Ethel Merman
Jimmy Stewart
Alger Hiss
Senator Hubert Humphrey
Cary Grant
Benny Goodman
Peter Ustinov
Harry Kurnitz
George Abbott
Dorothy Parker
I went to the Bobby Riggs–Billie Jean King tennis match and couldn’t really see anything from where I was sitting.
I went to stand in front of the White House the night Nixon resigned and here’s what I have to tell you about it: my wallet was stolen.
I went to many legendary rock concerts and spent them wondering when they would end and where we would eat afterward and whether the restaurant would still be open and what I would order.
I went to at least one hundred Knicks games and I remember only the night that Reggie Miller scored eight points in the last nine seconds.
I went to cover the war in Israel in 1973 but my therapist absolutely forbid me to go to the front.
I was not at Woodstock, but I might as well have been because I wouldn’t remember it anyway.
On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can’t remember it, who can?
The past is slipping away and the present is a constant affront. I can’t possibly keep up. When I was younger, I managed to overcome my resistance to new things. After a short period of negativity, I flung myself at the Cuisinart food processor. I was curious about technology. I became a champion of e-mail and blogs—I found them romantic; I even made movies about them. But now I believe that almost anything new has been put on the earth in order to make me feel bad about my dwindling memory, and I’ve erected a wall to protect myself from most of it.
On the other side of that wall are many things, pinging. For the most part I pay no attention. For a long time, I didn’t know the difference between the Sunnis and the Shias, but there were so many pings I was finally forced to learn. But I can’t help wondering, Why did I bother? Wasn’t it enough to know they didn’t like each other? And in any case, I have now forgotten.
At this moment, some of the things I’m refusing to know anything about include:
The former Soviet republics
The Kardashians
Twitter
All Housewives, Survivors, American Idols, and Bachelors
Karzai’s brother
Soccer
Monkfish
Jay-Z
Every drink invented since the Cosmopolitan
Especially the drink made with crushed mint leaves. You know the one.
I am going to Google the name of that drink. Be right back….
The Mojito.
I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn’t it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up. You can delude yourself that no one at the table thinks of you as a geezer. And finding the missing bit is so quick. There’s none of the nightmare of the true Senior Moment—the long search for the answer, the guessing, the self-recrimination, the head-slapping mystification, the frustrated finger-snapping. You just go to Google and retrieve it.
You can’t retrieve your life (unless you’re on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).
But you can retrieve the name of that actor who was in that movie, the one about World War II. And the name of that writer who wrote that book, the one about her affair with that painter. Or the name of that song that was sung by that singer, the one about love.
You know the one.
—November 2010
The O Word
I’M OLD.
I am sixty-nine years old.
I’m not really old, of course.
Really old is eighty.
But if you are young, you would definitely think that I’m old.
No one actually likes to admit that they’re old.
The most they will cop to is that they’re older. Or oldish.
In these days of physical fitness, hair dye, and plastic surgery, you can live much of your life without feeling or even looking old.
But then one day, your knee goes, or your shoulder, or your back, or your hip. Your hot flashes come to an end; things droop. Spots appear. Your cleavage looks like a peach pit. If your elbows faced forward, you would kill yourself. You’re two inches shorter than you used to be. You’re ten pounds fatter and you cannot lose a pound of it to save your soul. Your hands don’t work as well as they once did and you can’t open bottles, jars, wrappers, and especially those gadgets that are encased tightly in what seems to be molded Mylar. If you were stranded on a desert island and your food were sealed in plastic packaging, you would starve to death. You take so many pills in the morning you don’t have room for breakfast.
Meanwhile, there is a new conversation, about CAT scans and MRIs. Everywhere you look there’s cancer. Once a week there’s some sort of bad news. Once a month there’s a funeral. You lose close friends and discover one of the worst truths of old age: they’re irreplaceable. People who run four miles a day and eat only nuts and berries drop dead. People who drink a quart of whiskey and smoke two packs of cigarettes a day drop dead. You are suddenly in a lottery, the ultimate game of chance, and someday your luck will run out. Everybody dies. There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day. Whether or not you believe in God.
(Although there’s no question a belief in God would come in handy. It would be great to think there’s a plan, and that everything happens for a reason. I don’t happen to believe that. And every time one of my friends says to me, “Everything happens for a reason,” I would like to smack her.)
At some point I will be not just old, older, or oldish—I will be really old. I will be actively impaired by age: something will make it impossible for me to read, or speak, or hear what’s being said, or eat what I want, or walk around the block. My memory, which I can still make jokes about, will be so dim that I will have to pretend I know what’s going on.
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 t
he 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.
—November 2010
