I Feel Bad About My Neck

by Nora Ephron

you gently slip on your sandals and leave and on the way home you absolutely ruin the polish on your big toe and since your big toe is really the only thing anyone notices

Your parents weren’t into parenting. They were merely parents.

You love them wildly, way more than your parents loved you.

your adolescent is large, probably larger than you.

The day finally comes. Your child goes off to college. You wait for the melancholy. But before it strikes—before it even has time to strike—a shocking thing happens: Your child comes right back. The academic year in American colleges seems to consist of a series of short episodes of classroom attendance interrupted by long vacations. These vacations aren’t called “vacations,”

The nest is actually empty. You’re still a parent, but your parenting days are over. Now what? There must be something you can do. But there isn’t. There is nothing you can do. Trust me.

there’s a solution: Get a dog.

I bring all this up because I bumped into Bill the other day. I was watching a Sunday news program, and there he was. I have to say, he looked good. And he was succinct, none of that wordy blah-blah thing that used to drive me nuts. He’d invited a whole bunch of people to a conference in New York, and they’d spent the week talking about global warming, and poverty, and all sorts of obscure places he knows a huge amount about. When Bill described the conference, it was riveting.

may not be a newspaper reporter forever

What’s more, I learn that the faculty hated her from the very beginning because she had a party for them and served lukewarm lasagna and unthawed Sara

I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.

Can I be romanticizing my early reading experiences? I don’t think so. I can tick off so many books that I read and re-read

read when I was growing up—

All this happens to me when I surface from a great book. The book I’ve currently surfaced from—the

I’ll have to start breathing the air in today’s New York again, but on the other hand, perhaps I won’t have to. I’ll find another book I love and disappear into it. Wish me luck.

Write everything down. Keep a journal. Take more pictures. The empty nest is underrated.

Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it’s your last, or do you save your money on the chance you’ll live twenty more years?