I looked around my life a few weeks ago and thought, in both a real and dreamy in-my-head kind of way: all this. I want all this. We are coming to the end of a long, now third, turn into high-rise living. I have been made for this since I watched Richard Gere in “Autumn in New York” and put myself, one day, in a New York apartment with an iconic rooftop garden. Middle-aged Will Keane’s cinematic magic does not easily spin itself into real life. The coveted brick walls and floor-to-ceiling windows that meet cloud cover don’t usually pair, in the Midwest, with an outdoor terrace and skyline views, not to mention a great parking garage, concierge and elevator to the unit. I want 88 Greenwich Street. I really do.
But I want space for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding“ too. I want family and friends around my table for hours. The best conversations are the ones that linger over empty water glasses and crumbs. Isn’t all this the song and dance of life?
I want “Seven Days in Utopia.” Space, big-sky space, to think about the sacred and write about how there is nothing in the world more important than loving and knowing the Maker of every dream inside us and making him known.
I want “Mary Poppins.” Oh, how I love Mary Poppins. What would it be like, I think, to channel her into my Tootsie heart — joy, imagination and a firm hand — without losing my ever-loving mind over not having time to finish cleaning the kitchen until after baths.
Then there’s “A Good Year.” All that land. At the end of Broadway out our windows there is the landmark of the golden dome of a church that is goodness and light in all this concrete. I forgive the concrete for the freedom it has given me. I do miss a good, green, sun-drenched vista and hauling loads of bedding plants in the trunk of the van, and I am all in on the heavenly antidote, for our busy lives, of grapes to glass and farm to table. The Provencal life. The quilt my mother bought there, on a trip together celebrating 40 and 60, and gave to me is in a box somewhere in one of two storage units that get more expensive about every six months. I will shake it out soon. Meanwhile, my hands occasionally find land — and lavender — in her dirt, in her yard. And I’m remembering that the last time I saw our sprouting almost 6-year-old, he said, I want to come see you in your village. (High-rise.) There’s that.
I want my age. I sat with my girls a week or so ago talking about girl things. Things you can’t talk to your husband about without making him leave the room. We (J. and I) just saw “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” I loved it but it’s hard to go back in life, you know? I want to be mother and grandmother to their grandmillennial lives, sharing icons like Bunny Williams and Charlotte Moss while they introduce me to influencers I’d never meet on my own. I want to be strong like them.
I want “Begin Again” for how it celebrates the soul of a man, how much he loves and how much he needs and how little he says about those things, and for the picture of how brokenness that is raw and stripped-down can produce something big and beautiful if we’ll just quit worrying about what others think of us.
I looked around and thought, while some of all this is now fading to memory, I want everything I have.
