I just finished reading an Elizabeth Berg novel called The Pull of the Moon. Elizabeth Berg is my current favorite novelist; she writes movingly and beautifully about lots of topics that are big with me at the moment. The Pull of the Moon is about a fifty-year-old woman who's having a difficult time with menopause, so she she leaves her husband and goes on a soul-searching road trip. Sometimes the structure is transparent, and sometimes she lays it on a little thick, but nonetheless the book is interspersed with observations like this one, that begins with the woman reading the local paper as she's eating dinner at a (folksy, downhome) diner:

There was a photograph on the front page of a group of people sitting around a picnic table, all of them older. It was the sixtieth reunion of the local high school, McKinley High. I thought probably this small crowd was there to see who was still alive. But when I looked closer at the faces, I didn't see any mournful satisfaction. I saw that they were looking at each other in a way that bypassed all those years. The football player was still seeing the pink-cheeked girl in the pleated skirt, and vice versa.

I remember a man whose wife died a gruesome death telling me he was amazed by people who were amazed that he could take care of her in the end, that he could keep her at home and offer ice chips to lips that no longer said anything comprehensible, that he could uncomplainingly change sheets a few times a day because they had been soiled for this awful reason or that. "But I saw her the way she used to be," he told me. "I mean, through the way that she was now. Through it all and including it, actually, it was all always her." And I remember thinking, that was a lucky woman. Never mind that she died a horrible death - we are all faced with that possibility. What mattered was that, at the end, someone who loved her sat by her, saying, I see you.

The passage goes on, and she eventually concludes, "Life has its way, and it seems to me now that the object might only be to learn how to be graceful, to understand the value of a deep kind of acceptance."

This is so much how I've been thinking lately that I feel as if Berg is stealing my thoughts . . . so nice to hear that I'm not the only one who's ever felt this way . . .


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So when we got home from the store, the cats were anticipating the arrival of their (long-awaited) food. Todd and Freddy were sitting by the dish. Otto - the longhaired gray one - was sitting on the kitchen counter, staring out the window of the door we come in, perfectly positioned to stare into our eyes as we walked in. To top it all off, he was above us as we walked in, so he was looking down on us. We got the food pronto; there's a reason he's Top Cat around here . . .