This book is properly titled because these really are “thoughts.” They are amusing but more thought than deeply considered idea. Ephron’s ideas and opinions breezed into my own mind like a gentle breeze and drifted out just as quickly. I was ready to classify the book as a pleasant diversion, a not unsatisfactory way to spend several hours. On the way to my smug and certain opinion that Ephron had nothing of substance to offer me, she threw me two curves that have stuck with me. Writing of the illness and death of a friend, she says, “Death is a sniper.” Wow. Exactly, I thought. This image of death as a sniper is comforting to me. By identifying death as a sniper (I see the Angel of Death with a high-powered rifle coldly drawing a bead on someone, a precise but telling red dot from the laser sight on an unsuspecting forehead. Was it the hair, the clothes, the personal hygiene that prompted the decision?). If that’s the case, then the selection is less caprice and more impulse and there is an underlying spur, no matter how slight. I find comfort in that.
The second line is about grown children: “Meanwhile, every so often, your children come to visit. They are, amazingly, completely charming people. You can’t believe you’re lucky enough to know them. They make you laugh. They make you proud. You love them madly. They survived you. You survived them.” As the parent of a teen-ager, there are some days that I clutch this thought to my chest as if it were a life preserver, and I pray (and sometimes believe) that it may perhaps be true.
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