So there's that scene...

So there's that scene in "You've Got Mail"...the scene where Meg Ryan is leaving her bookshop for the very last time and she turns to shut the lights out and oh so sadly reminisce, when she sees her mother and herself twirling...Yeah, that scene breaks my heart 1000 times over.



My favourite part..."all it really means is that something you didn't want to happen has happened..."

Given a series of "I wish I had a life like that" wishes, Meg Ryan's life as Kathleen Kelly, owner of "The Shop Around the Corner," the children's book store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a shop inherited from her mother, would rank embarrassingly high on my list. Closing it would shatter me. Watching it happen in a fictional movie breaks my heart into ten billion pieces.

See here's the thing, and it's quite a little thing, but it's my thing...

When you find a corner of the planet that is nearest perfection...safe, inspiring, where you know exactly what you're doing, and exactly how to do it...if you're lucky enough to stumble into that incredible place, that lovely place ('cause there's just no better word than lovely sometimes) where you never have to pretend or lie to yourself, where being who you are is easy...it's hard to give up. You're certain, and rightly so, perhaps, that you might never find it again. If you are lucky enough to love a place that deeply then, as Kathleen Kelly suggests, a part of you dies.

I tend to love that deeply.

I feel as though I've found that place eight, or nine, or ten times across the good fortune of my life, or I've come very close to it, and it strikes me that someday, maybe one day soon, I'll run out of luck...I won't ever find that place again. I found it on a bridge in Paris...on the edge of sea and sky in Big Sur, California...in the Hartwig Building at the University of Michigan...above El Camino Real in San Clemente...at a Boys and Girls Club on London, ON...at a beach house in Brights Grove...on Clinton Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn...in so many places that I fear I've used up my allotment. These days I stumble through a career that feels an awful lot like that...and I get to trip over a game that I love, and I get to give it to a hundred or so tiny people, helping to make them big people, and it feels oh so transitory, so dangerously...perfect. I worry that soon all of those moments will all just be fleeting memories.

I have a hard time watching Kathleen Kelly and her Mom twirling...a really hard time. It's a beautiful scene, but one that stomps on my soul. You can say what you want about that film, about my affection for it, but that scene...oh, that painful, excruciating scene...heart breaking brilliance. BTW...how is it possible for Meg Ryan to look any better than she does in this movie? The quick answer...it's not.