Well, I will now bemoan the fact that we do not have any tickets to any UA football games. I will bemoan it but be grateful that for so many years we were able to go thanks to the generosity of my dad... It was great to sit down Saturday and watch a full day of football. And how about that Tide? Really I just have to say that because it's expected in the south... I really should take the "a" off the "about" and say, "How 'bout that Tide?" Now we're correct in Southern Lingo.
My favorite line in any movie is from You've Got Mail. "I would buy you a bouquet of sharpened pencils if I only knew your name and address." Ahhh, Nora Ephron. I read a blog today that said when Fall comes she has a "welcome fall" party where she pulls out all her Nora Ephron movies (you know, You've Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seatle). All my favorites as well. Perhaps I'm hearing a new tradition... wanna join me? And then I read farther in her blog and it spoke to me...
I've been feeling lately that my life is in utter chaos... I mean, it just is and I really am ok with that but it's the teetering tottering on something beyond chaos that makes me worry. Like last week - Ellabee had an "incident" where my creative and inquisitive 3 year old experimented with scissors and hurt a little friend of hers. Truly, I'm not in denial - she wasn't angry, etc... just wondered what would happen if she scissored her friend... stitches. But my first thought was, "If I had been home [I was at work] this wouldn't have happened..." but really what I was saying is, "if I had had her at home, I could have protected her from this chaos that is life. Is it my job to protect her? Is it my job to create this world for her where there is no tv watching, only play in the park, only nature walks and ice cream pushups on a warm summer day. Perhaps this ideal I've been killing myself to maintain is not the ideal at all... deep thoughts.
Anyway, my new blogger friend (that I linked above) posted this commencement address portion from when Nora Ephron addressed Wesley... I thought it was appropriate:
"This is the season when a clutch of successful women -- who have it all -- give speeches to women like you and say, to be perfectly honest, you can't have it all. Maybe young women don't wonder whether they can have it all any longer, but in case of you are wondering, of course you can have it all. What are you going to do? Everything, is my guess. It will be a little messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your mind. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands.And this is something else I want to tell you, one of the hundreds of things I didn't know when I was sitting here so many years ago: you are not going to be you, fixed and immutable you, forever.
We have a game we play when we're waiting for tables in restaurants, where you have to write the five things that describe yourself on a piece of paper. When I was your age, I would have put: ambitious, Wellesley graduate, daughter, Democrat, single. Ten years later not one of those five things turned up on my list. I was: journalist, feminist, New Yorker, divorced, funny. Today not one of those five things turns up in my list: writer, director, mother, sister, happy. Whatever those five things are for you today, they won't make the list in ten years -- not that you still won't be some of those things, but they won't be the five most important things about you.Which is one of the most delicious things available to women, and more particularly to women than to men. I think. It's slightly easier for us to shift, to change our minds, to take another path. Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankee who made a specialty of saying things that were famously maladroit, quoted himself at a recent commencement speech he gave. "When you see a fork in the road," he said, "take it."
Yes, it's supposed to be a joke, but as someone said in a movie I made, don't laugh this is my life, this is the life many women lead: two paths diverge in a wood, and we get to take them both. It's another of the nicest things about being women; we can do that.Did I say it was hard? Yes, but let me say it again so that none of you can ever say the words, nobody said it was so hard. But it's also incredibly interesting. You are so lucky to have that life as an option."
I guess it's not really my job to create a movie titled life for Ellabee and Anne Bailey (and any other vowel named Stone's that come along), but to just live life, serving the Lord, loving my husband and my girls while we make a life together. Hum....
