Nora Ephron is at a private film screening. There are not enough seats for the crowd and more people keep arriving. The host suggests they double up and sit on laps. Nora observes all this with mounting frustration, finally she tells her friend Bob:
“It’s really very simple. Someone should get some folding chairs and set them up in the aisles.”
Bob looks at me. “Nora,” he says, “we can’t do everything.”
My brain clears in an amazing way.
Nora. We can’t do everything.
I have been given the secret of life.
Although it’s probably a little late.
Which is a longish way of saying that I caught the cold going around, my ankle hurts, it’s slushing again, and I’m staying in my pajamas all day with Nora for company. I think she would appreciate that. Here she has been dead about a year, and may be up for an honorary Academy Award tonight (she wrote When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and more) and yet she is still hanging out with an old “friend” whom she never met, who knows her only for the wonderful work she left behind. She may not have been able do everything, but that’s an awful lot, isn’t it?
