Retrieving the dry-clean only blouse from the dryer, I’m reminded of the day I found it in an unlikely little boutique in Guadalajara. I had been looking for one just like it for about 40. This has a lot to do with Nora Ephron.

Some years ago, I went to see Love, Loss, and What I Wore, the Ephron sisters’ stage-adaptation of Ilene Beckerman’s book by the same name. It’s about five women I’d never met but I already knew them. You probably do too. Like them, I can peer into my closet and hang on the clothes, shoes ,and handbags bulging from it, some of the most important moments of my life. Especially my boots and my coats. While not all of them came along to Mexico, they are all still “with me.”

There are my favorite brown leather boots with the beautiful patina, worn with an attitude the morning I was fired by a man who probably had it in him to be great, were it not for the misogyny that made him a small and unapologetic asshole who finally got what he deserved.  While being fired isn’t the best way to start a day,  it pleased me to turn on the heel of those well-worn boots and walk away from him.

There are the boots of patchwork leather my mother gave me; they make me feel like Carly Simon in anticipation of a date with Cat Stevens circa 1971. Or Linda Ronstadt. Or the late Christine McVie—pre-Fleetwood Mac— when she was still with Chicken Shack. There are the boots I wore the first time we took Sophie to see the snow and make angels in it; the classic Frye boots that I couldn’t pass up because they were both on sale and at a consignment store;  the pointy-toed suede knee-high boots that have been re-soled twice and that I couldn’t remove at the end of a long day without my husband helping me. I read somewhere that Madonna had a pair of those.  Madonna also had people. And, there are several pairs of black boots that vary only in length. There is no rationale for any of the boots, given the narrow window of opportunity for boot-wearing in Phoenix where I lived for over 30 years, bathed in relentless sunshine. 

Nor can I explain the coats, most of them bought in Belfast and carried back to one of the hottest places in North America, presumably to wear as a statement about how the heat can’t stop me from being my own girl, complete with scarf and coat, and maybe a turtleneck underneath. I even had a pair of leather fake fur-lined gloves. To be fair, these were purchased in anticipation of a winter work trip to Santa Fe with my best friend, where we shivered so hard, we had to buy woolly hats at The Gap. She also had to buy a back-up pair of boots, cheap and purple because #Prince. In our hats and gloves, we were perfectly accessorized to walk to the theater to see a new movie. Featuring lots of turtlenecks and body-shaming lines, Love Actually hasn’t aged well. Even Richard Curtis has acknowledged that his film is ‘out of date’ – too white and heteronormative. Still, I watch it every Christmas the way I watch The Last Waltz on Thanksgiving.

My favorite coat is my Christmas coat. I bought it at Marks and Spencers one year in Belfast and subsequently wore it for 20 Christmas mornings when I posed against the backdrop of a holiday tree created from pots of jolly red poinsettias outside Saks Fifth Avenue. I love that coat. In it, I feel like I’m related to Santa.  

Along with the boots, and a Bridge vintage leather Gladstone doctor’s bag— found on Ebay and which remained closed in the closet because the brass clasp was broken— are burgundy loafers, complete with pennies stuffed in the slot.  I bought them in 1989, maybe because they reminded me of the brogues I used to wear for Irish dancing, or maybe because I was influenced by the collegiate style of an American girl on her first day of fifth grade outfitted in khakis from the Gap, white socks, and her grandmother’s loafers.

Today, I am over 60, still  with nothing to wear to a gig, having already flung on the bed seven skirts that just aren’t “Americana” enough. I should be wearing something more Gillian Welch but unless I add badass boots, I could be dangerously closer to Nellie Olson in Little House on the Prairie.

Rushing to get ready, I find myself remembering Meryl Streep‘s married character in that scene where she’s wondering what to wear to a clandestine New York city rendezvous with Robert de Niro’s character (and married to someone else), in one of my favorite movies, Falling in Love. I watch it every year, sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas. You’ll have to watch to understand why.

In the end, something blue wins – doesn’t it always? Meryl settles on a blue and white striped blouse, the one I found on a rainy day outing to a mall in Guadalajara. It’s not exactly the same, but it made me feel exactly the same way I thought Meryl Streep might feel when she decided on it for her secret date with Robert de Niro.

I may not remember what you said to me, but I will never forget how your words made me feel or what I was wearing when you said them to me. I’ll remember what you were wearing too.

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Watching Love, Loss, and What I Wore I laughed and sighed, and even cried a little as I recognized my mother, my daughter, most of the women I know —including most of all the women I’ve been – in the stories that flew from the stage that night. There were tales of highly sought-after and completely impractical designer handbags which increase in size and price, the older we get; the various layers of “slimming” apparel– in various shades of black; high heels and high drama: bunions and ballet flats. Flats. My best friend’s podiatrist once suggested shoes from The Walking Company as opposed to a shot of Cortisone for pain. In retaliation, she switched podiatrists and lied, saying that, of course she had been wearing the custom orthotic so could she just have the shot. Please. Shoes from The Walking Company were not – and will most likely never be happening for my friend, a petite woman who “needs” the height. She is something of an innovator who once had what we both agreed was a million dollar idea to accommodate concert-goers under 5″5″. Expand-a-fan has yet to make it big. Mark Cuban has funded lesser inventions on Shark Tank.

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Within the sparkling Ephron dialogue on stage, there were also glimpses of all those things that, at some point, seemed so essential in a wardrobe as well as all those unessential and unforgivable things we may have said to other women. Including our daughters. “Are you going to go out in that?” “What did you do to your hair?”

In spite of the laughter that rippled through the audience that night,  there was a yearning. Something was missing. Nora Ephron herself. It made me sad to feel her absence. No longer here to go back and forth with us through the phases we know, I miss her.  From shoulder pads and big hair, to pant-suits and Brazilian blow-outs, and then, invariably and for comfort’s sake, to  Eileen Fisher, which feels a bit like The End, or as one of the women mused last night – “When you start wearing Eileen Fisher, you might as well say, ‘I give up.’ You might as well . . .

It was leukemia that took Nora Ephron from us – a cancer she had kept private from a world that already knew many of the intimate details about the backs of her elbows, her aging neck, her dry skin, her small breasts about which she wrote in A Few Words About Breasts, the contents of her purse, and hair color –  her weapon of choice against not only the gray hair that grows back with a vengeance but the youth culture in general. Quick and daring and witty, she regaled us with stories of the many indignities visited upon her as she grew older, but she did not tell us about the cancer.

When I imagine her and the way I think she was, Ephron is striding across a set not unlike The Strand Bookstore in the East Village where almost all her books sold out the morning after her death. She is suggesting a direction to Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, while searching for the glasses that are on top of her head. I imagine her laughing with the darlings of Hollywood, surrounded by books, as in the old Jimmy Stewart movie The Shop Around the Corner which she resurrected and rewrote with her sister, Delia, as the romantic comedy, You’ve Got Mail starring, naturally, Ryan and  Hanks. Between the words of the Ephron sisters and the pair’s natural chemistry, Hollywood had a recipe for success in the romantic comedy genre.

Although a cynic with a sharp tongue, I suspect Ephron was also a romantic. It would have been poetic had she been handed a happy ending like the kind she invented in her fail-proof feel-good “chick flicks.” But that ending would not have been real, and Nora Ephron liked to keep it real.

Her contribution to the movies is a tiny part of her legacy as a writer, but those films are a massive part of the soundtrack to my American life as a woman who immigrated from Northern Ireland to the United States about the same time as Harry met Sally.

I know it’s not the most famous part of the movie, but there’s one scene that never fails to make me laugh and snap me back to the young woman I used to be, the one who shows up occasionally to remind me how little time there is to become myself. Sally has just found out that her ex-boyfriend is getting married. Tearfully, she confides in Harry that she is destined to be left on the shelf, a spinster, alone at forty. At the time, she is barely thirty, with a cute hair cut that I remember being convinced would work with fine and naturally curly hair. It didn’t. As a side note, I carried in my wallet, for about a decade, a page from a glossy magazine featuring Meg Ryan’s numerous haircuts.  And, for countless hairdressers rendered clueless by my hair, I unfolded that page as though it were the Turin Shroud, and asked them to please give me a Meg Ryan haircut. Not until I turned 50 and found the unflappable Topher who still makes time for my hair every time I return to Phoenix, did they ever get it quite right, but that is a story that has been told here before. Too many times.

And I’m gonna be 40 . . .  someday

Once upon a time, 40 was a lifetime away from eighteen, and by all accounts the deadline for “letting oneself go” and, yes, for Eileen Fisher. 50 was sensible and dowdy. 60 heralded blue rinses for hair not jeans. 70 was out of the question, and definitely not a new fifty.  With my thirties behind me, my forties too, and my fifties, I’m wondering what’s next. I’ve also accepted a couple of truths about myself. Some are minor. I don’t have sensible hair, and sometimes I give too much away. Others are more painful. I should stay far away from insecure men in positions of power and recognize earlier that it’s not worth waiting for mean girls to redeem themselves. 

Being over 60 is a bit like going to Home Depot. It’s just too big, and when I’m there, I have to ask for help. And, nobody in Home Depot cares what I’m wearing.

I’m worried of course that I might run out of time to do the things I need to do. Not necessarily those Bucket List things, but definitely those that will bring me closer to those I love the most. It’s gratifying and essential to know who loves me and who loves me not.

To be scrupulously honest, none of this self-awareness in any way diminishes how much I resent the aging process as “a thing” and the way it sneaks up on me. One minute, I’m reading the tiny print on the back of a shampoo bottle, the next I’m desperately seeking one of the pairs of cheap reading glasses I bought at the airport or found on a desk, forgotten by some other woman in the same predicament.  My hearing isn’t what it used to be either, which I would rather blame on my attendance at very loud concerts over the past forty years.

Several months before he died, my husband and I went to see Fleetwood Mac in Phoenix . Of course we didn’t know that this would be the last concert he ever attended, and I remember a fleeting moment of something like melancholy as we caught a white-haired Mick Fleetwood bow out and off stage in his bright red hat, pointed red shoes, and the dangling wooden balls, and, center-stage, Stevie mesmerizing everyong just like the white winged dove sings a song. Stevie. 76 and still spinning in black. Rock on gold dust woman.

Black is the envy of all the other colors, right? Navy blue, brown, and gray have all taken turns at declaring themselves “the new black.” The truth is black isn’t even black. The little black dress is not the same color as the wardrobe-staple-black-blazer that I want to wear with black pants on a fat day. (Yes, I’m body shaming, but … my body, my shame.) The blacks don’t match. One is a dark-greyish black, the other a bluish-purplish black. I love black, but unless you are Stevie Nicks in an air-conditioned theater, it is not the color for a summer in Phoenix – where Stevie lives.

Phoenix is too damned hot. Along with the boiling but brief hot flashes that come free with the drugs that are supposed to keep breast cancer at bay, black would be unbearable. A 110 degree summer day also makes any form of physical exercise unappealing. When I lived there, I barely  walked the length of myself after the thermometer reached 100 degrees.  This could also have been be attributed to a flat-out fatigue – the only ‘f’ word that has ever offended me and which was my constant companion during years of breast cancer treatment.  Maybe it was the Tamoxifen that made me write things down when my once stellar powers of recall started showing signs of weakness.  I used to scoff at makers of lists. No more. Another of life’s ironies. Along with aging comes the forgetting of names, the names of people I see every single day, names I might forget on days that might be the most important of those people’s lives.

I have digressed, and may as well proceed on this tangent. If you know me, you know that along with my irrational fear of car-washes and drowning (although not at the same time), is the even greater fear of becoming a hoarder whose secret life will be the subject of an A&E documentary. No, it’s not time to call in the camera crew, but I may be a future contender given my chronic aversion to throwing things away. The house in Mexico is still home to an unpacked box full of things that matter. To me . . .

Since before my only child started school – almost thirty years ago –  I have saved every drawing, handprint, book report, birthday card, report card, and, apparently, every receipt from Target. Not in one place, of course. Stuffed in vases and between the pages of books are random letters from the tooth fairy, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and her grandparents. There are even pieces of notebook paper that bear only her name in the top right corner. In the spirit of those organized professional organizers on TV, who would have me place everything on the front yard before organizing it into piles of things that should be stored, displayed, or dumped, it really is time to tame the paper tiger.

Full of good intentions, I began “organizing” one day. For about an hour and with no real sense of urgency, I made  folders for my daughter’s school work and special photographs. I threw away greeting cards  made not by her but by some stranger at Hallmark. I even filled a box with paperbacks to donate to a local bookstore. I kept all the hardcovers.

Flipping through the pages of a school composition book, I came upon something my daughter had written when she was very little.

I love the leggy and winking 29 year old, hand on her hip, but I am almost afraid to ask what happened to her. It’s a sharp decline to 50. I wonder what Nora Ephron would make  of my little girl’s “mountain of life.”

We know what she thought of 60 and beyond …

“I have been 60 for four years now, and by the time you read this I will probably have been 60 for five. I survived turning 60, I was not thrilled to turn 61, I was less thrilled to turn 62, I didn’t much like being 63, I loathed being 64, and I will hate being 65. I don’t let on about such things in person; in person, I am cheerful and Pollyanna-ish. But the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over 60.

The long shadows are everywhere ¬ friends dying and battling  illness. A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes, little ones and big ones. There are dreams that are never quite going to come true, ambitions that will never quite be realised.

There are, in short, regrets. Edith Piaf was famous for singing a song called ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’. It’s a good song. I know what she meant. I can get into it; I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from. But the truth is that je regrette beaucoup. Why do people say it’s better to be older than to be younger? It’s not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you’re constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday. Even if you’re in great shape, you can’t chop an onion the way you used to and you can’t ride a bicycle several miles without becoming a candidate for traction. If you work, you’re surrounded by young people who are plugged into the marketplace, the demographic, the zeitgeist; they want your job and someday soon they’re going to get it.”

And that’s all I have to say about that. Except thank you, Nora.

Nora Ephron (1941 – 2012)

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