I mentioned that I can no longer eat or drink. A reader wrote: "That sounds so sad. Do you miss it?" Not so much really. Not anymore. Understand that I was never told that after surgery I might lose the ability to eat, drink and speak. Eating and drinking were not mentioned, and it was said that after surgery I might actually be able to go back to work on television.
Success in such surgery is not unheard of. It didn't happen that way. The second surgery was also intended to restore my speaking ability. It seemed to hold together for awhile, but then, in surgeon-speak, also "fell apart."
A third surgery was attempted, using a different approach. It seemed to work, and in a mirror I saw myself looking familiar again. But after a little more than a week, that surgery failed, too. Blood vessels intended to attach the transplanted tissue lost function, probably because they had been weakened by radiation. A fourth surgery has been proposed, but I flatly reject the idea. To paraphrase a line from "Adaptation's" orchid collector: "Done with surgery."
During that whole period I was Nil by Mouth. Nobody said as much in so many words, but it gradually became clear that it wouldn't ever be right again. There wasn't some soul-dropping moment for that realization. It just...developed. I never felt hungry, I never felt thirsty, I wasn't angry because the doctors had done their best. But I went through a period of obsession about food and drink. I came up with the crazy idea of getting some Coke through my g-tube. My doctors said, sure, a little, why not? For once the sugar and a little sodium wouldn't hurt. I even got some tea, and a little coffee, before deciding that caffeine addiction was something I didn't need.
I dreamed. I was reading Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, and there's a passage where the hero, lazing on his river boat on a hot summer day, pulls up a string from the water with a bottle of orange soda attached to it and drinks. I tasted that pop so clearly I can taste it today. Later he's served a beer in a frosted mug. I don't drink beer, but the frosted mug evoked for me a long-buried memory of my father and I driving in his old Plymouth to the A&W Root Beer stand (gravel driveways, carhop service, window trays) and his voice saying "...and a five-cent beer for the boy." The smoke from his Lucky Strike in the car. The heavy summer heat.For nights I would wake up already focused on that small but heavy glass mug with the ice sliding from it, and the first sip of root beer. I took that sip over and over. The ice slid down across my fingers again and again. But never again.
One day in the hospital my brother-in-law Johnny Hammel and his wife Eunice came to visit. They are two of my favorite people. They're Jehovah's Witnesses, and know I'm not. I mention that because they interpreted my story in terms of their faith. I described my fantasies about root beer. I could smell it, taste it, feel it. I desired it. I said I'd remembered so clearly that day with my father for the first time in 60 years."You never thought about it before?" Johnny asked.
"Not once."
"Could be, when the Lord took away your drinking, he gave you back that memory."
Whether my higher power was the Lord or Cormac McCarthy, those were the words I needed to hear. And from that time I began to replace what I had lost with what I remembered. If I think I want an orange soda right now, it is after all only a desire. People have those all the time. For that matter, when I had the chance, when was the last time I held one of those tall Nehi glass bottles? I doubt I ever had one from a can.
I've found memories now come welling up almost alarmingly. It's all still in there, every bit. I saw "Leap Year," with its scenes in Dublin, and recognized the street where I stayed in the Shelbourne Hotel, even though the hotel wasn't shown. That started me on Trinity College nearby, where I remembered that McHugh and I saw the Book of Kells in its glass case. And then I remembered us walking out the back gate of Trinity and finding a pub where we were to join two of his brothers. And meeting Kitty Kelly sitting inside the pub, who became famous in our stories as the only whore in Dublin with her own coach."Are you two students?" McHugh's younger brother Eugene asked them innocently.
"I'm a working girl meself," the first said.
"Her name is Kitty Kelly," her friend volunteered. "I'm her coach."
I walked into that movie with the Book of Kells and Kitty Kelly's coach and Eugene McHugh far from my mind. The story itself had long since fallen from our repertoire. But it's all in there.
When it comes to food, I don't have a gourmet's memory. I remember the kinds of foods I was raised to love. Chaz and I stayed once at Les Pres d'Eugenie, the inn of the famous Michel Guerard in Eugénie-les-Bains. We had certainly the best meal I have ever been served. I remember that, the room, the people at the other tables and our view in the photo, but I can no longer remember what I ate. It isn't hard-wired into my memory.Yet I could if I wanted to right now close my eyes and re-experience an entire meal at Steak 'n Shake, bite by bite in proper sequence, because I always ordered the same items and ate them according to the same ritual. It is there for me.
Another surprising area for sharp memory is the taste and texture of cheap candy. Not imported chocolates, but Red Hots, Good and Plenty, Milk Duds, Paydays, Chuckles. I dreamed I got a box of Chuckles with five licorice squares, and in my dream I exalted: "Finally!" With Necco wafers, there again, the licorice were the best. The peculiar off-purple wafers were space-wasters. As a general rule in candy, if anything is black, red or green, in that order, I like it.This got carried so far one day I found myself googling White Hen-style candy with the mad idea of writing an entire blog entry on the subject. During visits to a Cracker Barrel I would buy paper bags filled with licorice, root beer, horehound and cinnamon drops. Searching for Black Jack gum, I found whole web sites devoted licorice in its many forms. I even discovered and downloaded a photo of a basket that seemed assembled from my memory, and it is below.
But the last thing I want to start here is a discussion of such age old-old practices of pouring Kool-Aid into a bottle of RC Cola to turn it into a weapon. Let me return to the original question: Isn't it sad to be unable eat or drink? Not as sad as you might imagine. I save an enormous amount of time. I have control of my weight. Everything agrees with me. And so on.What I miss is the society. Lunch and dinner are the two occasions when we most easily meet with friends and family. They're the first way we experience places far from home. Where we sit to regard the passing parade. How we learn indirectly of other cultures. When we feel good together. Meals are when we get a lot of our talking done -- probably most of our recreational talking. That's what I miss. Because I can't speak that's's another turn of the blade. I can sit at a table and vicariously enjoy the conversation, which is why I enjoy pals like my friend McHugh so much, because he rarely notices if anyone else isn't speaking. But to attend a "business dinner" is a species of torture. I'm no good at business anyway, but at least if I'm being bad at it at Joe's Stone Crab there are consolations.
When we drive around town I never look at a trendy new restaurant and wish I could eat there. I peer into little storefront places, diners, ethnic places, and then I feel envy. After a movie we'll drive past a formica restaurant with only two tables occupied, and I'll wish I could be at one of them, having ordered something familiar and and reading a book. I never felt alone in a situation like that. I was a soloist.
When I moved north to Lincoln Park and the Dudak's's house, Glenna Syse, the Sun-Times drama critic, told me about Frances Deli on Clark Street. "They make you eat your vegetables," she told me. There were maybe a dozen tables inside, and you selected from the day's dishes like roast chicken, lamb stew, lake perch and, yes, the veggies, although one of them was rice pudding. You want roast chicken, here's your roast chicken. It was so simple it almost made you grin. You didn't even have to ask for the bed of dressing on which it slumbered.Frances has moved into a bigger space across the street but nothing much else has changed. Nobody will look at you funny if you bring in the Sunday paper and spread it out. And breakfast? Talk about the breakfast. If a place doesn't advertise "Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner" and serve tuna melts, right away you figure they're covering up for something.
There's a place called the Old-Timer's Restaurant across the street from the Lake Street screening room in Chicago. I love that place. No fuss, no muss, friendly, the owner stands behind the cash register and chats with everybody going in and out. I've ordered breakfast at lunch time there. "You're still serving breakfast? I asked. "Hey, an egg's an egg."I came across this sentence in its web review, and it perfectly describes the kind of place I like: " A Greek-style chow joint replete with '70s wood paneling, periwinkle padded booths, a chatty wait staff and the warble of regulars at the bar. Basically, if you've ever had it at any place that starts with Grandma's, Uncle's or any sort of Greek place name, you can find it here." Yes. If a restaurant doesn't serve tuna melts, right away you have to make allowances.
So that's what's sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I'm alone, it doesn't involve dinner if it doesn't involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, "Remember that time?" I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it's sad. Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now.
')
You just reviewed Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind as a great movie; if that says anything about your current self, I think you should watch Soderbergh's Solaris again.
I know what you mean about dreaming tastes and being able to remember exactly what something tasted like. A few years ago my sister and I had the most amazing ice cream; it tasted like flowers smell. It was served as a side to some chocolaty fudge thing that I don't remember. What I do remember is fighting with my sister over the creamy delicious perfume. I get to taste that whenever I want.
Hey Mr. E!
Remember that time when i wrote those comments and you responded? haha i know, that was great. Good Times.
Ebert: You were the guy that time I tripped over the starting line.
There are certain big things, that don't seem so big--first day at school, learning to ride a bike, getting sincere applause, and even tough things like getting beat up, seeing the girl you love with another guy, being REALLY BAD at something and still wanting to do it, because you like it--they are all important things that have to happen, for someone to know Humanity fully. Now you, Roger, have these things that have happened to you, that inform you in ways that explanation never can; and your Appreciation is the better for it, and your criticism is colored by it.
In the AA thread, several alcoholics told you they'd read your reviews of alcoholism-related movies, and from your revealed understanding speculated that you had walked in those shoes; and your review of THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY included "we are left with the reflection that human consciousness is the great miracle of evolution, and all the rest (sight, sound, taste, hearing, smell, touch) are simply a toolbox that consciousness has supplied for itself." I think with those words you proved a real identification with Jean-Dominique Bauby that you gained with your medical trevails. Like him, you have made the most of an extreme circumstance; and like him, you reached places you never would have, absent that circumstance.
A poet friend of mine is following you on Twitter and is surprised at your Twitter prolificity. I've speculated that you're revealing to the best of your time and whim what it is like to see the early 20th Century through your eyes, in the fulfillment of that developing duty of world citizens, that of microhistorian.
Building a cadre of international correspondents, too, seems a step toward gaining insight into The Great Human Adventure, much as subscribing to WORLD PRESS REVIEW did for me in the mid-80's. I imagine your ultimate aim is all continents and many countries . . .
I am hoping and agnostically praying that your Adventure unfolds over the next ten years with a recovery of your gustatoriality; what an appropriate lagniappe/reward for your perseverance that would be! But you have proven that your indomitability of spirit needs no such prospect to continue fully partaking in the Great Human Adventure. Congratulations!
I have enjoyed your writing since the days when you and Gene first cranked up the original show.It's how I came to "know" you. I live in NC, so I did not have access to the Chicago papers - and, of course, there was no internet. A Friend of mine who once lived in Illinois accomodated me by cutting out your reviews and columns and sending them to me. His work was patchy, at best. The son-of-a-bitch then had the temerity to move. I found you again, but it took the machinations of the Albemarle Regional Library to restore you to me.I kept watching the show, of course, but it was your writing that really moved me. It took weeks, sometimes months for your works to reach me, but that made the reading of them all the more rewarding. I feasted on your words in the same way that I had once feasted on The short stories that Jean Sheperd had written for Playboy, back in the sixties. To an extent, I didn't give a rotten-apple damn WHAT you were talking about, as long as you were talking about something. I read no self-pity within your post, so I won't address your infirmity, except to say that all of my most positve thoughts and very good wishes go with you. And while I cannot begin to empathize with your experience (hell, can anyone who is not you?)I hope it gives you some solace to know that there are untold mumbers of people, out in the ether, who value your writings on the level of Hemingway. Good writing is immortal. Please do your damndest be likewise. I should not like to live in a world in which Roger Ebert no longer illuminates the dark corners. Take care of yourself. Please. Bud Wright
Hello Mr Roger, I'm a student from Egypt. An aspiring screenwriter and your reviews are very educational and inspiring.
The article you wrote is excellent. True, that the best thing about food is dining. Eating with family and friends. I tried once to eat alone in MCDonalds and it was an awful experience.
Thanks for sharing such personal experiences.
Love this post and yes, we certainly are at dinner right now!
All I do all day (if I'm giving a damn about my weight that particular day) is say "no" to fries and "no" to cheese and "no" to cake...no, no, no...
I felt compelled to share that, don't know why...
I am glad that you are at peace with it all and as always - honest.
Keep it coming Roger!
I've always looked upon the blog as a variety of places and all rolled into one.
It's a cafe in the morning. In the afternoon it's tea shop inside a bookstore across the street from a trattoria and after 8 pm it's an Irish Pub.
Smile.
Little wonder then, that I'm often thinking about food in here. For conversation is indeed like food and why I can empathize with that sign of lament. I know it's possible to be hungry for things that feed you soul; not just your tummy.
I'm a good listener but also an outspoken chatty boots. When I'm working freelance and not for a studio, I'm more solitary of course and consequently miss the chatter of other artists around me. And whenever bad weather has kept me indoors for too long as was the case today, I'll snoop around online and discover something new so I can come back here and share it with you...
Anthony Bourdain visits Voodoo Donuts in Portland with Chuck Palahniuk who wrote Fight Club: includes brief ghost story (3:00 min.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaHVK35R3-s
While in Chile, Bourdain stops by "Sibaritico's" to try a local favorite: foot-long hot dogs drenched in tomatoes, sauerkraut and guacamole in a mega bun! (2:00 min)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aR_LncmNH5U
Now there's a job, eh? Getting paid to talk about food. :)
So what have you done with your rice cooker?
Ebert: Using it to test drive recipes for this:
http://twitpic.com/wslz9
I've read that the nose is an "emotional time machine." Since taste and smell are tied together, your vivd recollections confirm that greatly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/science/05angier.html
I hope it isn't rough on you when you review films like "Ratatouille" or "Julie and Julia." Thank you for reminding me how incredibly fortunate I am.
Hi Roger,
What a wonderful article.
Thanks very much for sharing these moments of your life, and thanks for reminding me again what a joy eating with family is. My family had a late Christmas dinner last night, and we did exactly what you mentioned - we talked.
Warmest regards,
Alisdair.
Oof. That last line hit me hard. This is my first time making a comment here, but your blog is one of the few that I check on and read on a regular basis. The imagery you are able to conjure when you write of your past experiences is incredible. But I digress.
Being a man with a deep appreciation for food, but perhaps not so much for the opportunities it presents to socialize (being the quiet introverted type), I may just be inspired to open my mouth to do something other than stuff things into it. While I cannot imagine not having the ability to eat, drink, or speak willingly, I do have some understanding of knowing the words but not the song, so to speak, which is why this entry particularly resonated with me. Thank you for sharing, Roger.
Hi Roger,
What a wonderful article.
Thanks very much for sharing these moments of your life, and thanks for reminding me again what a joy eating with family is. My family had a late Christmas dinner last night, and we did exactly what you mentioned - we talked.
Warmest regards,
Alisdair.
Life's a funny thing
Bobbing on a string
Rippling in the water
Reflections of us
Sons and Daughters
There is something about sitting in a well worn eatery reading the paper while the world revolves around you. A soloist indeed.
The sweet serenity of a cosmic flutist riffing over eggs and joe. But it's not about the eggs and joe, it's never about the thing. It's about the intangible, the immaterial. The sounds of light and the smell of warmth.
So bless the dialogue of this blog, may it bloom and grow and remain part of us all.
Thank you Roger, and pass the salt.
When you opened the blog with 'I can no longer eat or drink', I felt very sad for you. But when I read on, and this just may be the melancholic mood I'm in on this particular day, I felt even sadder. I see a glass half-empty to your glass half-full perspective which states that when you lose the ability to perform a certain task, all you are left with are your memories. I'm convinced this is not the case with you but it frightens me.
As the saw states, a half empty glass is a half full glass. A friend lost her senses of taste and smell ( she is young ) after an accident and that was a few years ago. These days the net and movies are the stuff that majorly populate my days, more than I would like them to. If these were to get subtracted there would be books. If that too, ones thoughts are there and one can see movies, read and travel with the mind's eye.
But food seems hard but I guess food goes with hunger ( my state as I type ) and without hunger food becomes a burden or a dissipation.
It is said breathing is not living. You are much more than breathing.
I'm of the opinion that any challenge that broadens our horizons is nourishment in itself. I am thrilled to partake of your conversation. As my partner likes to say in times of crisis: "Moral support!" and much affection.
Jesus! Red Hots! That was my favorite candy! You used to be able to buy a box for a dime at the movie theater. A box of those lasted me through "Star Trek II--The Wrath of Khan" when I saw it on opening night in Rutland, VT. (haven't thought of THAT for years!) Red Hots were the best--nice and chewy and you could savor the flavor for a long time. Excellent post, Mr. Ebert!
Ebert: And just a little red hot.
I don't think you understand how amazing you are. Or maybe you do and I'm just a silly fangirl.
Ebert: Anyone who can put together a blog like yours is far, far beyond silly fangirldom. And BTW, I agree with you on "Away We Go." It had a special quality.
I take it you did your own graphic design? It establishes a strong personality for everything else. I've been fooling with this Movable Type blog template, but it's far from flexible. MV does have the advantage of keeping 250,000 posts online.
i experienced the taste and aroma of the dishes you described in your blog sitting here far away in India and reading your blog...that is the power of words i guess...thanks for the dinner, roger...
Reads like you are still gaining acceptance, Roger. I can relate. We are going through the same thing with our son.
I hate it when people give me unsolicited advice, so I make it a point not to give any.
I also hate it when people ask how he's doing as a courtesy, you know, like a way of saying "How ya doin'?" and just expecting, "Fine. How are you." So I don't ask.
If it means anything, the conversations you hold here have given me respite from some very hard times in the last couple years. I didn't even refer to our son's illness for the first few months that I started responding to what you posted and....that was okay.
I'm guessing there are others like me here. I've realized recently that my closest friends are loners in one way or another. Most of them are artists, teachers, musicians, conspiracy theorists, cranks, thinkers, runners: Control freaks who function best on their own & who share the inability to emote or relate to others in normal ways.
Maybe this blog is our higher power's gift.
Ebert: Artists, teachers, musicians, conspiracy theorists, cranks, thinkers, runners.
I'm not sure if we have any runners here.
As always I enjoyed our "dinner" this together. I am guilty of eating so quickly, I never taste the food or think about what I am eating, where it came from or what work went into its arrival on my plate. After reading your post, I will again employ my "slow food" lessons and eat a little more consciously.
I am tasting now the frosty mug A & W root beer from my youth as you did; thanks for the memories (you can have all my necco and good and plenty candies and i will take your hot tamales)
That's very true. I've always thought that the best moments in life are those shared with people who are capable to make you generate some kind of connection throug which we can express everything by means of seemingly conventional words, or even without them.
This is the first time I've left a comment in this blog, mostly because I feel kind of unsure with the correction of my English (I'm from Spain and I still have to improve it a lot). I have been reading your reviews since I was fifteen (I'm 18 now), when, while I was preparing a review of "the usual suspects" for the program I conducted in my village's local radio, dicovered, in my astonishment, a critic who hadn't liked it. From that moment, I started to read your reviews on any film I saw, and ended up admitting that, even though I didn't always agree with your opinions, you were the movie critic with the best writing quality I ever had the pleasure to read. During three years your reviews and blog entries have accompanied my growth as a reader ans as a movie lover, and also you've been one of the best English teachers I've had.
For all this, Roger, I'd like to thank you very much.
Pau
ok yes,
Let's have dinner then. One of my dreams comes true right before my eyes. I've always wanted to talk to you face-to-face. Yesterday i had dinner with my entire family, i mean uncles, cousins etc and two of my cousins had a terrible argument for the first time in years. after a while they started hitting on some of the rest of us, and ten minutes later everything was back to cool. That was an unforgettable moment because when you fight with someone badly, you reach to a point where you have to decide whether he really represents all the awful things you stand against and you want to punish him for that, or that he is a good person who is just trying to get by like the rest of us and he's just had a bad moment. I always think it's the second.
Once again, there are many hidden lessons between your lines. The lesson I learnt was to appreciate food and to appreciate company.
By the way, since I'm from Greece and I live in Greece, you are always welcome.
Ebert wrote, Whether my higher power was the Lord or Cormac McCarthy.
They're one and the same, Roger...
That was a wonderful post. I was wondering if you find yourself writing more than in the past? For someone who uses words for a living, I would think that your need to express yourself would double your print output now that you've become mute.
I once read that Stephen Hawking attributed some of his breakthroughs to the fact that he is so isolated within himself. The mind turned to things that could occupy it in the absence of other stimulus.
Calabogie
Beautiful! Your words are forever poetic. It is a wonder how the human mind naturally eveolves to adapt to situations, allowing happiness when the perception of "bad" is our natural inclination. God? In a way, it can be described as that. I'm glad to have dinner with you, Roger. Your words are inspiring. And I, for one, will keep my mouth shut at the table and let you speak. No, no...I don't need any salt. This conversation is tasty enough!
Beautiful article Roger. You may not be able to speak, but your writing has never been better. There's a stream-of-consciousness quality to your anecdotes that is almost Proust-like.
You continue to be an inspiration and an example of how to cope with a debilitating condition. Thanks.
Roger,
I hope that in the not-too-distant future, science will find a way to manipulate our memory. By that I mean - minus all of the potential abuses of course - we could upload and download memories directly to and from each other and visualize precisely what is being described by one to another and virtually share experiences. More than that - wouldn't it be fantastic if we could erase specific portions of our memory so we could read a great book, watch a favourite movie, or make love to our spouses for the first time again? =)
Until we can, I'll just say 'Thanks for sharing your memories with us the old-fashioned way Roger, they sparked some of my own'. ;-)
Nestle Dark Raisinets is one of my favorite memories during New York Visit in 2004. I have never come across it after returning to South Korea. I will probably immediately buy it right after arriving at O'Hare airport, if this year goes smoothly according to my plan and I can attend your festival(There has not been serious trouble yet, but I am watchful. Anything can happen nowadays).
You're spot on about missing dining, not food.
When he had just turned three, my son was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, an inflammatory bowel disease. We opted for enteral feeding to bring it under control, so, for six months, he got an elemental formula through a naso-gastric tube. (He was allowed to have a certain number of Popsicles per day by mouth.) Within weeks of starting treatment, he showed signs of remission and after six months, he slowly returned to eating "normal" food during the day, with the formula as a night-time supplement. He had a G-tube inserted when he was four and still has supplemental feeding five nights a week.
For us, the toughest part of that six months was the loss of family meals. We did try having him at the table, with a Popsicle, while we ate a regular meal, but it wasn't really very satisfying. My husband and I felt bad eating in front of our son, so we would often eat in shifts, in another part of the house. We knew our son's nutritional needs were being met but we so missed that time around the table.
Thanks for this blog post -- and all the others. It was a pleasure having dinner with you.
They call them "restaurants" for a reason. Restorers of the soul, they are.
Roger, Funny how the brain is superbly adaptable to accept such dire circumstances and find a way to cope and even thrive. I just watched a PBS program last night on how people strive to find happiness in spite of what appears to be a catastrophic experience.
In a small way I had food deprivation experience years ago while on a extended journey in India. I was committed to embrace a simple bland diet while on an extended fast and found myself dreaming of chocolate cake and other deserts when asleep. I resolved to seek out such foods and gorge myself when I got home. After the 2 month retreat was over, I returned back to the states and found my food desires quickly waned. I remember I was very surprized. I can only assume it was because they were again available to me again at will.
By the way, I want to thank you for allowing me to sit at your table and enjoy your frequent feasts. I especially enjoy the company you keep on this blog.
I had two grandmas. One ate to live and the other lived to eat. I live to eat.
At least that is what I've always said. But maybe it isn't true.
Shopping, cooking, eating, talking. Searching for new recipes. Talking about what to cook next. Talking about what we've cooked before. It's the camaraderie with my husband that I enjoy the most.
I think I could give up eating. I couldn't give up the rest.
I've been wondering how anyone would want to live if they couldn't eat. I get it now.
A little sad but mostly fascinating... I very much get the "soloist" thing as well, which renders the most anonymous of diners the ideal place to read or work. That's how a city becomes a home, when one is at ease by oneself at some restaurant-- coffee, or lunch, or dinner with everyone and no one.
I enjoy large, collective meals too, though I was recently impressed by their importance in French culture, where I spent the holidays. At least four hours, usually much more, of every day was devoted to eating together, sitting around the table, pairing wines with different perfectly prepared dishes. As delicious as everything was, this total, week-long negation of my soloism was disconcerting for me after a while. Particularly as my French is lousy, I had to pay intense attention just to stay with the conversation, and rarely could concoct a witty response in time to fit it in to the subject matter at hand. I remember Baudrillard's words, written in horror in New York City: "The man who eats alone is dead." While I obviously don't agree with that at all, I came away with a better understanding of the profound closeness of a family in which every meal is given its time to breathe and every possible conversation is explored-- no rush at all.
Sir,
You write with the power of a great orator. My day was just made better, and knowing that I'm off to dinner with friends tonight, followed by Gilliam's _Parnassus_, was just given greater weight and significance than it had this morning. I have been a steady reader of your reviews and columns for several years, but this blog of yours is what impresses me the most every time I visit your site. I love the way you branch out and remember and write and become something more than "just a critic." With great respect and admiration, from Copenhagen, Denmark,
Daniel Logan
Thank you Mr. Ebert. This is why I look forward to Thursdays. Reading this made me smile and think and appreciate what time I have here on earth. I'll never look at a meal the same way again.
Well, some of us realize it, Roger. And we're very pleased that it's such a frequent get-together.
Just a quick thanks for having us over to share at your table.
Uncle Ebert's: Huge tables, good portions, great company. Thanks for inviting us.
I sometimes wonder why I'm eating a thing that I've eaten a hundred times before, and I think you touch on something. Maybe we sometimes have a distant, pleasurable memory there that's not quite accessible, but it's teased with the food we were eating when it was made. Or even that taste is tangential to a spice that reminds us, or the proper temperature or texture.
I'm betting if one remembers it's not just the food, then maybe one can find other routes to those old memories and feelings, and not worry so much about the gob stuffin'.
I used to blame my wife for my partly kicked chocolate habit (and she proudly blames herself), but I should be praising her. Not for introducing me to the chocolate here, but for making me so happy that the chocolate pointed back to the early days of our courtship.
And happily met.
Food is one of those things that we've had for so long. Life has been eating (in one form or another) for billions of years. Our enteric system (our gut, basically) has more nerve connections than the spinal chord. It's the precursor to our "high seat" of consciousness. It's where we get our gut reaction. Our guts "feelings" are informed by our sensory perceptions. It always has been that way. But now it's got to go through our brains first. Trust our gut, all the time? Not really. Sometimes, the gut isn't enough. A memory is more. Leads to more. Fills you more. Food. Eh. Memory. Now that's to savor.
Interesting how so much of what constitutes nostalgia in the last 100 years revolves around commercial ephemera like logos and food and packaging. Conventional wisdom is that memory is most closely associated with the sense of smell, but the 'A&W'-like experiences in our lives are full-on sensual experiences - the taste and smell of the food, the intentionally heightened visuals, the tactile (who among us, of a certain age, cannot imagine the feeling of touching formica, or the vinyl and chrome of a diner stool?). Throw a jukebox in the corner playing songs from the period, and you've got your sensory full house.
Now add in the emotional quotient - remember when a trip to a fast food joint was a TREAT? Fast food has become such a staple (we call it 'filling the hole') that your own predicament re not drinking or eating is not far off my own experience of the McRestaurants of the world. Taste is besides the point.
Hi Roger,
As always your writing is inspiring to me. Today you helped to remind me how lucky I am and how much of this world there is to enjoy. Everyone has their troubles but it is how you deal with them that defines you and not the troubles themselves.
Keep going Roger.
Thanks,
Derek
A beautiful entry, Mr. Ebert, and one I do feel some kinship with; I've always thought I was the only one when I happened to eat dinner alone at a restaurant with a book open in front of me. You're right, of course, that meals become spectacular in memory when they are accompanied by good friends and good conversation, which makes it sad to think how many meals today are wasted as people shovel food into their mouths while keeping their eyes glued to the TV screen.
Roger, thanks for this insight, it's a great read. Appreciate your sharing. Also, a shout out from Old Timer's - that's my photo; I'm the guy in the green.
Ed
Ebert: Just a coincidence you saw yourself? Must have been a surprise.
Have you ever noticed that dinner scenes in the movies have a tendency to stay in one's mind? That when you watch, say, The Godfather, you actually anticipate the scene where the family sits around silently eating Chinese food while they wait for the call from Sonny's guy in the police department?
My Dad said that he used to get RC or Pepsi and put peanuts right in the bottle. Then I heard it from others of that era (growing up in the '50s). What's with the allure of peanuts in cola? Sounds revolting to me.
Ebert: Oh, yeah. Salt makes it explode.
Thanks for the memories, Roger. For the loss of your sense of taste, I think you've been compensated with a heightened sense of gratitude and appreciation.
P.S. Nowadays, I always think of you when I stop at a Steak'n'Shake.
Fascinating bit of writing, Mr. Ebert
I am a sound engineer and musician, and have wondered, if I lost my hearing, could I be satisfied with the memories of music and sounds.
I went on a week-end silent retreat a few years ago, and found different songs and pieces of music would flash in and out with my thoughts, sometimes so brief they were just 2 note fragments.
Would earworms satisfy me enough?
Think of the opening guitar line to the Beatles "Day Tripper," and now try and STOP hearing it in your head!
Your experience gives me pause. But then, so does most all of your wonderful writing.
It's too absurd to mention to you, "If life hands you lemons," so I won't.
Love
David
A perfect blog entry, Roger.
I enjoy the conversation also. For different reasons, but for the same effect. I treasure it.
Great entry... very poignant, as usual.
But I was just wondering, since you are no longer able to eat, does Chaz notice a difference in her own eating habits or desires for food at home? I always find that when my wife is away for the evening I now lack the desire to cook anything for myself that isn't completely simple, like a tuna melt, for example.
Memories beget memories.
Every night, as he falls asleep, my four year old son asks me for a story about when I was little boy. I think for a little bit and then start talking about whatever comes to mind: an inventory of toys on my grandparents' porch, the time they drained the frozen pond and my Dad and I walked under the ice, the way my Mom did voices to Charlotte's Web when she read to me. It's all in there and it moves me to recall these things. It reminds me that one of my main jobs in life is to give him and his brother magical memories too. I keep a blog for them, for that, and truthfully for me, because the breathless rush of now too often overwhelms memories of then.
Bruce Chatwin wrote a book called the Songlines about Australia's native people and the way they mapped their landscape and history with songs. I think about how every computer has a cache, where the last web page visited and images viewed are stored in some form. Future archeologists will sift through the fragments of hard drives and explore our time and intentions.
Roger, thanks for sharing.
Well said, Roger - please pass the metaphors.
Mr. Ebert, thank you so much for your personal essays. This one has been resonating in my mind all morning.
How fascinating. I suppose you must use some sort of direct nutrient injection system to your stomach? Forgive me, I'm an engineer, these things are compelling.
There is something theoretically satisfying to me, as well, in the thought of being free from ingurgitation. Something ascetic and monastic not only in my own imaginations, but I think also in your writings.
Is it true then, the enlightenment is freedom from desire?
Ebert: This explains it:
http://j.mp/7dpGuh
Yours is one of my favorite restaurants.
Thanks Roger. I recently lived in a small town that didn't have Hostes products. I missed them terribly. Now that I live in a larger town I never eat them or even think about them. I realized that I missed the memory of eating them as a kid. I enjoyed your article. Writing is your greatest gifts and I hope you can do it for many years to come.
Beautiful piece, as always. By the way, that suspiciously iPod looking graphic of your reviews. Is it accessible by any means or jut a cute widget mock up. Just got back from Seoul and loved the food. A surprise to me as Korean cuisine isn't so common here in London. So healthy! Six small dishes of vegetables, some rice and maybe an egg stirred in. All for £2.50. The saddest site, of course, were all the Western food outlets. Everyone one offered food that was fun, but much less healthy than the local dishes. Cakes, brownies (yep, I am talking Starbucks), milkshakes, filled bagels. Is there a Western (meaning American/British) fast food that is actually good for you, or has that gone from our diet for good?
I enjoyed reading your memories of how simple foods brought you joy. But I don't understand how a reasonable man can enjoy licorice. They say there's no accounting for taste, but you've got to draw the line somewhere.
I spent a short time living in Sweden and nearly came to the conclusion that its society represented the pinnacle of civilization. I was thoroughly disgusted, however, by that nation's overwhelming fondness for licorice, especially a particularly execrable variety called salt licorice.
This kind of ties into your older post about how losing your speech has allowed you to sharpen your writing to a finer point than it's ever been.
Off-topic: I just now read your blog about how to use that rice-cooker. It was funny, I laughed out loud a couple times. I think you probably could have been a comic, if the movie-writing hadn't called you.
My father rarely spoke to my brother and me in loving, sincere, heart-felt words--but he did so most memorably on a family vacation in a Tex-Mex restaurant along the San Antonio river walk about ten years ago. Last summer my girlfriend and I enjoyed such a splendid evening dining at the Pied Cow in Portland that we decided the east coast probably has room for another hippie-holdover cafe which we plan to open in a few years. And last week I asked that woman to join me in marriage in a Las Vegas hookah lounge following the finest Mediterranean dinner. The most profound and intimate connections of our souls are indeed made at table.
I'm socially awkward so things as simple as eating in public are weird to me. I'm more concerned about the technique of ingesting the foods with elegance than the simple pleasure of enjoying it when eating out. I generally find it more traumatizing than pleasant, especially having to traverse the unspoken rules of dining conduct (like do I finish my plate or do I not? Should I eat this with my fingers or utensil? etc). I will say though that many foods have haunted me- the sort that you know you'll never have again cos it was a one-time deal but it was one of the best things you ever ate. Like the honey glazed sea bass I had at a wedding in the bay area last summer. Things like this cannot be replicated. But it's okay cos I had the experience of it and now just the memory of it.
Cheers, Mr. Ebert. You've long been on my list of the top three people I'd like to dine with, living or dead. Little did I know -- this whole time you've graciously been fulfilling one third of my ideal supper ensemble. Now if only Walt Whitman and Woody Allen would start blogs...
I still eat. Too much, most of the time. But I live 1500 miles from Steak and Shake. I dream of double steakburgers and fries served on heavy, weapon-like china sometimes. In Sight. It Must Be Right
Roger,
I'd be interested to know your thoughts on Jehovah's Witnesses. I was bought up as one and always interpret my realisation that the reality I'd been bought up with was false aged about 15 as an 'escape'. Some of that's because everyone's personal drama seems epic to them however it might relatively be quite small beer. But since then, despite being some of the loveliest people around, I think of it as a creepy sect who apply a form of information control that binds in it's members, causes them to mentally isolate themselves from non-JWs, and reject anything that questions their beliefs without thinking critically in any way.
They seem, in short, to me, as close to a cult as a relatively mainstream, superfically fairly normal religion can be.
Oh and to not selfishly talk about myself, it's nice to hear precisely what happened to you, I don't think you've explained it as a narrative before, just mentioned bits. Maybe this is selfish and I'm just nosy :D
"I never felt alone in a situation like that. I was a soloist."
That is very pretty. How did you come up with this phrase? What is the process? Did it come to you fully formed out of the blue, or did you think about it? Edit it?
Ebert: It was said by somebody once: "I'm not a loner. I'm a soloist." I can't remember who. But I found it...in there.
I have often wondered about this for you. Not eating at all made me think of the spiritual practitioners who would fast as much as they possibly could in order to obtain enlightenment. What they wouldn't have given to be able to stop eating altogether! How much of human moodiness is tied to food coming in and going out, anyway? Would breaking the cycle of eating and drinking liberate your daily chemistry and bring a deeper, more profound peace and understanding? A transcending of desire?
Thank you Mr Ebert. Your blog is a continuous source of delight. We are of two generations and countries, but the way you evoke your memories never fails to stir my own. I hope your new found form of dinner conversation goes on for a long time.
Roger, Thanks for this. I am glad you have found peace with what you were dealt. Something I always wished to happen was to one day meet you and sit down and share a meal and discuss films. This blog and your review site are the next best thing.
Reading this, Roger, I took a journey through some memories so clear it was as if I'd just tasted a number of things from memory right here at my desk--chiefly, the now defunct Bluegrass Grill in my hometown. The Flying Saucer hamburger with the "special sauce" that every drive-in had; the crisp, slightly burnt onion rings in a greasy, warm, wax paper bag; the cherry Coke with bits of cherry in the bottom (they made a cherry Coke by putting in a tablespoon or so of the same cherries in syrup they used for desserts); the coconut cream pie with the flaky crust and two-inch high meringue, toasted strips of coconut on top.
Of course, it was a drive-in, but we'd park outside and eschew the carhops, because when you went inside, there was a table and conversation like you describe. The best eating and drinking are about the gathering, the location, and the talk. I believe it's the latter that make the former memorable.
Roger:
I think your experience of surgery has given you a new voice. You clearly spend much of your time just thinking, and this has produced some of the most engaging writing you've yet written in your long and prosperous career.
Like astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, who recently stated his plans to share thoughts about the universe through Twitter (as opposed to gossip or updates on his every motion), you are helping vastly improve the Signal-To-Noise ratio of the Internet—a pervasive, cluttered medium in which it's a full-time job to sift through so much garbage just to find meaningful discourse.
I think in our information-overloaded, deadline-ridden lives, we have so little opportunity to just think that it's a rare occasion when old memories do burst their way to the surface in such magnificent detail. Here you have achieved the artist's greatest feat, to transport us directly into your mind, your senses. Many thanks for sharing...
Footnote: Until recently, I'd never been in the vicinity of a Steak N' Shake. I set foot in one for the first time a couple months ago here in McKinney, TX. Thanks to you I can smell the #7, Western BBQ and Bacon steakburger beckoning me at this very moment.
Mr.Ebert;
I don't know what to say except I am fighting back tears after reading your post. Roger, if I may take the liberty, your blog is my first and favorite stop on the internet. You are a very important part of my life. So for all that you had to go through to still be here, thank you.
Now what's for dessert?
I, too, am from downstate Illinois (a little farther downstate than Roger, though I did my time in Urbana). I lost my mom to cancer about two weeks ago. Reading Roger's reminiscences in these blog posts remind me of the stories she'd tell about growing up in the '50s and '60s, and remind me that, though she was too young when she died, she still lived one hell of an enjoyable life. So thanks, Roger, and keep it up. I'm drinking an A&W for you tonight.
One of my earliest - and definitely, my fondest - memories is loading the family into the station wagon and heading to A&W for a root beer. I always got a float. And, being the youngest, I was able to sit up front on Mom's lap to drink it. The opened glove box was my table. It was my job to roll the window down to just the right height to accommodate the tray.
Once in a while we'd buy a gallon to take home. That large, heavy glass jug is unforgettable.
Even today I frequently enjoy (store-bought) A&W. And I always serve myself in my A&W mug.
I have been dining with you for over a year. This is my first comment.Thank you my friend for every post, I learn something about you and myself.
Beautiful! This is probably the most powerful blog entry I've ever read. You're facing what you miss most with this entry instead of turning a blind eye to it. I respect that. I respect the courage you have to write this.
I honestly believe that when you lose something, you win something else. You may not know it but it's there. It's like a man who lost his sight but can hear what those who can see can't.
I closed my eyes once for a full ten minutes, my intention wasn't to sleep but to listen to all the noises around me. I discovered that I had never noticed the sound of the squeeking door, the sound of the wind hitting the window glass etc. You lost you're ability to eat and drink but gained back some memories...isn't that what counts most? I can tell that you're getting back good memories and we tend to crave great memories. The recollection of a night out with a friend or a simple stop at a gas station to get a drink is in a way just as tasteful as the first sip of a cold beer.
I'm sure you miss the conversations and dining rather than the food, I can understand that. I never thought of this before and your story makes me appreciate what I have. Just now my brother came in and told me "El Ghada gahez." (Dinner is ready.) and it made me smile and grateful.
I do have one question though, what about the smell of food. I'm sure you sometimes pass by places and can smell the food. This would drive me crazy.
You're a very strong person, I can now tell that from what I just read. These failed surgeries probably made you stronger and wiser...at least it developed a strong inner strength, I can feel that from this blog entry.
Do you still sit at dinner tables at all? I'm wondering because at least now you'll hear the conversations more clearly. So much is lost from people talking over other people's arguments we hardly get the other person's point or hardly give him a chance. I suppose that's not the case with you.
"Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now."
That did it for me, I'm all teary eyed. This sentence made me feel right at home and whenever I check your blog that's how I'll feel thanks to that sentence alone.
You are so right, when traveling I find the best moment to take group pictures is during meals. I guess because everyone is suddenly so happy.
I do wonder if back then (2006) you had had to choose between the talking job and the written one, which you would have selected. I suspect the last one.
With all the chatter about what's good or bad for you, there is almost no discussion of the dissolution of the meal as a social institution. I've been of the opinion for a long time that meals prepared specifically to be gobbled down in haste -- and the act of eating in such a distracted fashion -- are a big part of what causes obesity and ill health related to diet.
A lot of this revolves around habits, which can be broken as much as they are created. When I was with relatives over the Christmas break, I was the only one who bothered to shut off the TV (which blared almost non-stop) before mealtimes. The TV was right near the dinner table as well. I grew up in a household where the dinner table and the TV were as far apart from each other as was possible given the geography of the house, so to see this sort of thing is always depressing.
The meal needs to come back and replace merely eating.
Of all of your entries, this is my favorite, so far. Chicken wings usually are the best way for my friends to have a "State of the Friendship" address.
Great entry Roger, personally the test of an eatery for me is the club sandwich. Everybody has one, but how good it tastes to me is the benchmark for everything else on the menu. And since I finished reading your "Great Movies" review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (one of my favorite movies of all time), I'll give you a quote that I like (from IMDB of course):
Joel: Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.
All of your articles are excellent, but this entry will stand the test of time as one your best pieces of writing.
As an aside, I moved away from Chicago for professional reasons several years ago. I miss Old Timers too. If I knew I was never going back at the time, perhaps I would have ordered the Francheezie, rather than one of the healthier options such as the Tuna Melt or the Reuben. Sieze the Francheezie!
Ebert: Yes, I believe the Tuna Melt and the Reuben are high on the list of health foods.
Roger:
As I was growing up reading your reviews, and watching "At the Movies," I always had you on my list of famous people I'd like to dine with.
Thanks for the opportunity.
See, when I started reading this entry (and I haven't finished it yet), I had a weird thought: "Gee. I was just thinking about that this morning."
I am aware of how odd it was to be thinking about Roger Ebert's inability to eat. Why would that just occur to a person? Here's why.
I'm heading to Atlanta in exactly a week. There are a few things I'm going to do to enjoy myself when I'm there. One of them is to revisit the only Steak 'n Shake restaurant I've ever visited. I wouldn't have known anything about Steak 'n Shake except for having been a reader on this site.
I was in Phoenix last month and tried In N Out burger for the first time. I told you about it; we agree which is better. Now, heading back to Atlanta, I recalled you made some specific recommendations to me from the Steak 'n Shake menu, chili I think. And something else. WAIT! Let me go check.
Yeah, okay. Not in your reply to me (which referenced a caramel shake), but in the main body and some comments you recommended the Chili Mac. To the Pope, even.
(Let me copy and paste that into my BlackBerry. Holy smoke, that was almost exactly a year ago. How the time do fly, hmmm?)
*pause* You know, to the standard observer, all this may indicate I'm Ebert-obsessed, which isn't exactly the truth. Not exactly.
From this post there are bound to be a wide range of emotions that will be both conveyed and concealed. There will be expressions of pity and sympathy that (from the theme and tone of your writing) I expect you might have no time for.
I'll just say I appreciate you telling me about the place. It isn't a big thing in life, it's a little thing but it's a pleasant little thing made even more pleasant linked as it is to reading and interacting on this blog site, hip bone connected to the thigh bone. Does that make sense?
So I shall go to the Steak 'n Shake at that spot on the outskirts of Atlanta - exactly one week from today - and I shall dine there, if not in your honour (too pretentious!) then certainly thinking about you. And maybe I'll go back again on Friday.
I know me going to the Steak 'n Shake doesn't improve your nil by mouth experience, but maybe reading this fires up another good memory.
Or maybe on some weird space/time/quantum level/alternate reality ... it does. What side would you like?
Dear Roger,
You have expressed admirable and certainly defensible reasons for not missing the food and drink so much (weight control, agreeable digestion, etc). How I wish I would adopt such an outlook. But when presented with more than I can eat, certainly more than my body needs, I keep eating. I have convinced myself the act itself is pleasure, and I have conditioned myself to feel "done" only when I feel uncomfortable, even miserable. This is the biggest problem facing America...
Almost five years ago, I had surgery on my neck (artificial disk replacement). I was told about a number of things that could go wrong. It was an outpatient surgery. At first, it was difficult to get out of bed. For many weeks, my only exercise was walking and swallowing took some effort. My neck is still weaker than it once was, but as the doctors noted I was more active than most (high risk activities like dancing). It took a while to walk upstairs because it requires your head to move slightly forward on your neck.
I was alone at home for about a month and discovered the Internet (blogging and groups) and eBay as well as my friends' DVD collections. While we sometimes went to movies together, there were movies that I had never thought about seeing that my friends liked well enough to buy DVDs for.
It was a while before I actually enjoyed eating foods that required chewing and even now, when I am sick, I prefer noodles.
After surgery and my rehab, I found that I didn't like sitting around eating so much, but I wanted to be out dancing and moving my body. I think too many people take things like walking for granted.
You don't always have to be able to talk and you might not be able to speak the same language, but you can enjoy dancing and the music together. Some day, I will not be able to dance, but while I can, I want to go out and kick up my heels.
I do believe in God and that we have choices. We can see obstacles as opportunities. I will admit it is a struggle to stay positive sometimes (like the last few weeks), I do believe nothing can be gained by being bitter.
Looking at your blog and your Twitter entries, I sensed that this was an outlet for you.
More recently, I've noticed you've added international writers which is what I actually thought should have happened at my former company, but never did. I think this blog and the new writers constitutes an amazing opportunity and this blog is not only a wonderful dinner conversation, but the inspiration for many more.
Roger, I have always enjoyed your scrumptious "words", on TV, newspapers or books.
Thanks for inviting me to dinner for so many years!
Losing any sense is always a great loss. Being Deaf, I will never be able to experience the full joy of listening to "Moonlight Sonata" or an album of old Hindi filmi songs that my mother enjoys.
but a loss of sense can force you to use your other senses in a much more efficient way. for instance, I am very visual and I like to soak in as many sights as I can.
Ebert: So...you are also an Indian Muslim Anarchist? Of course you are. I raced straight to your blog. I've booked-marked it to go back for a thorough read-through. I meet the most astonishing people here at dinner.
You remind me of the last few months of my mother's life. She lived with me while she had treatment for a tumor that blocked food going into her stomach. She had a g-tube through which we fed her. But it was her habit and pleasure to watch me cook meals for me and the hubby. She'd pull up a bar-height chair we have and watch me chop vegetables, slice meat, shred cheese, or whatever else I had to do. She liked to watch me plate the meals, and talk about what I was doing. Mom wasn't a very good cook - not that she couldn't have been, but she just wasn't interested in it - but she enjoyed how good I had become and relished why I had such a zestful love of cooking. That's my great food memory.
As for the diner experience, it seems to be something that increased sophistication in our city is starting to kill. Just learned that Standee's, a long-time diner in Edgewater, is being moved out and its sign deep-sixed by the new Edgewater Chamber of Commerce's storefront design standards. It's hard for me to enjoy diner food now, being a vegetarian, but I sure do know what you mean about the conversation. Who doesn't? You need to get a small device that will "speak" out texts you write on it. Then maybe you can get back into the conversation the way you used to.
Ebert: I use a voice to read what's written on my Mac. But it's hard to type quickly enough to keep up with the flow.
For whatever reason, when I first heard about the consequences of your surgery years ago, the first thing I thought of was a movie.
Specifically, my mind lept immediately to the image of Metatron in Dogma - spitting out Tequila in a Mexican bar.
Odd how the mind works?
Of course I can't imagine living without eating, but I feel like I understand what you mean about the idea of food. The memory of it is almost more powerful than the real experience.
I've lived in Korea for a while now, and in my first years here I would often daydream about some unobtainable treat from home. When I finally did return home and make a pilgrimage to the supermarket, I ended up buying very little. All those special foods that I had craved from afar seemed too sweet, too fatty, or just generally unappealing when I actually had them in front of me. It felt like eating them now would ruin the idealized memory.
I always enjoy having dinner with you, Roger. That's what I enjoy about these posts -- yours is a writing style that really carries with it the sound of a voice. This particular one is a good reminder to really focus on the next Coke I drink -- I'll pay attention to the burning fizz of bubbles in my throat and dedicate the sensation to you.
Are you still based in Chicago? Are you there now? Lordy, it's cold and nasty down here in Omaha. Stay warm.
Although I have been a somewhat regular reader for a while, I had no idea you had been going through all this. I am sorry. I am also grateful that you have a tremendous writing talent which gives you a voice and the gift of all these vivid memories blossoming. Thank you for this beautiful post.
Beautiful and moving piece. However, I noticed that you didn't really mention the olfactory angle. Is your sense of smell the same as before your surgeries? Do the various scents of food affect you as before?
To your larger point, I started remembering the truly great meals of my life, and in about half the cases, I couldn't even recall what food was served. But I could remember to a person who was there for each of them!
Best film whose setting is an actual meal: My Dinner With Andre? (Of course, it's probably not a huge pack of contenders.)
That post made me sad, but in a good way. Perspective is a powerful thing when you have it. I just gained a little this morning.
Funny how memory works...your entry today somehow reminded me of a greasy spoon on Madison in Oak Park called "O'Gus's", with its famous motto "We Doze but Never Close."
As you say, it's all in there.
Ebert: O'Gus's. And the ethnicity of the owners?
Wow. Such a beautiful and honest essay it has me crying. Thanks, Roger. But I see one typo in the first paragraph: "public speaking" you have "pubic speaking." (At least I _hope_ that's a typo!)
Ebert: Thank God I still retain my pubic speaking ability.
That was a great blog entry. At first it was hard for me to comprehend not eating or drinking, but by the end I was moved. If someone was to make a movie about your life, how would you approach reviewing it? Would you? Just wondering.
Roger,
It has been several years since I last physically heard you speak (I cannot recall exactly except to say you were hosting your show with Richard Roeper). But I indelibly "hear" your voice throughout every review and blog entry I read. For me, your writing is your voice. And its such a unique voice that's permanently shaped the way I watch movies (yea me and a million other people).
I am in my mid 30s now and you've been a fixture in my life ever since I can remember. As an adolescent, film reviews were hardly the reasons why I watched a movie. In fact, I loathed most critics views mostly because I believed either they were BS movie PR, or that the reviews were generally bland, non-specific, and meaninglessly often boiled down to a tagline ("a wild ride", "mind-blowing!", "edge of your seat thriller" etc). Instead, you always offer reasonable observations and interpretations, many of which blew my young mind. I stopped looking for what I wanted to see, and tried to understand what the filmmakers were trying to achieve (seems like a "no duh" epiphany but isn't that growing up is about?). I stopped being a selfish film watcher, and that changed everything. You are obviously serious about film. And I was hooked. My mind was once again an open sponge.
Its all just movies...so some would say. But to me, its not popcorn entertainment any longer. But about thought, concept, and visual/aural artistic execution. Your writing has opened channels in my head I had not realized were there before. And after every film, I always have to ask myself "hm what does Ebert have to say about this?". Even on non-film subjects I find myself sometimes asking the same question.
Your voice has done so much for me and influenced my thinking in so many good ways I can't even attempt to quantify. Obviously I don't agree on every bit you write, but in the very least you make me put myself on the other side of the discussion. Something which nowadays is hard to do without complete polarization in blogworld.
To many more years of wonderful prose and thought. I look forward to it. Ok I'm done.
What an evocative and moving post. So often, food is memory, because memory is so closely tied to smell and taste. Thanks for remembering for us...and for allowing us the privilege of dining with you.
I've never seen the Books of Kells, but I read about it in R.A. MacAvoy's novel of that name. I think you would like that book, if you haven't read it already. I recently read Sean Williams's "The Grand Conjunction", in which one of the characters is named ChiRo in honor of the BoK (but I don't recommend that book highly, SW has written better ones since).
Sometimes these days I wonder what I'm still doing here, but then I remember that Scott Turow, Martin Cruz Smith, Richard Russo, and the list goes on, might have a new book out any time now. Besides, there are probably lots of good books out which I just haven't found yet. (I hope RAM's "The Book of Kells" might be one such for you.)
I've never seen your tv show or any media appearances. But by following your blog and online reviews for a while now, I can imagine your voice in my head and its dreamy. Almost a cross between Leonard Nimoy and Prof Indiana Jones. I almost don't want to find you on YouTube now.
PS: Sorry for sounding like a star-struck teenager.
How very odd. Decades ago, my mother, dying too young at just 51 at a Mayo-connected hospital in Rochester, Minn., in a morphine delirium repeatedly asked me for a bottle of Nehi Orange soda. I had never known her to drink it—she was all about DietRite—and hadn't eaten any food in several weeks. Orange Nehi was all she asked for.
Roger, the restaurants I recall that fit your bill and mine too include Cambridge Pub, Ohio east of Michigan, a Greek-owned formica coffee shop with a long and tasty menu. I loved going there with John Drummond when we worked at Channel 2. John would stop by my desk and say, "Let's clean up our meat hooks and put on the feed bag at Cambridge."
There was Jerry's, Wells south of Wacker, for the Channel 5 crowd at the Merchandise Mart. Jerry himself would kibbutz as you waited in line for a table. Feature reporter Barry Bernson was the best company.
During the earlier newspaper days there was the Corona, north of Riccardo's, where Studs would continue his walk-around, muttering to himself or cackling at a joke he told.
The Bagel, at Kedzie & Lawrence in the mid 50s,for the Roosevelt High School crowd flashes in my memory. It had a long counter with maybe a dozen red vinyl-topped stools. The cuisine was the basic Jewish K-rations -- knishes, knaidlach, kippers, corned beef and challah.
It's still pretty much the same but with many formica tables at The Bagel on Broadway south of Belmont. The diners make up a diverse group of fressers (big eaters)including whole familys with grandpa and the babies, aged Jewish widows and their young Philipina caregivers,and boys from Boys Town.
Just up the street at the corner of Broadway & Belmont was Ricky's delicatessen. Rich Melman's dad named it for his baby boy and that boy cut his teeth there.
I still feel at home at just about any hot dog joint that sells Vienna products. Somehow the gigantic Portillo's even fits the bill.
A dear friend wants to take me out for dinner on my upcoming 70th birthday. "We'll go someplace really nice," she says. I think of the coffee shop at Montrose and Western. It's like eating in a friend's kitchen.
She thinks I'm kidding.
Ebert: Marshall, I miss the Corona. Entering off Rush St. it was a white-tablecloth restaurant, but they had that side entrance where you could sit on a stool at a counter and they didn't care how you were dressed. Jim Hoge would dash in there, one block and a world away from his staff at Riccardo's. As for the Cambridge, I'd call it an Old Timer's in the high-rent district. Parking literally next door. I haven't looked in a while; like half the neighborhood, it's probably been replaced by some god-damned condo or yuppie boutique.
Oh geez, and the Cracker Barrel. I bought a bunch of candy to bring home to my son (I think you know his name), including the Bit O'Honey which he didn't enjoy but I did. I'll probably go do that again too.
And without knowing you were going to go to mention the social aspect, I unknowingly acknowledged that as well. Yes. We will commune together. You and me and a lot of the other folks that are reading this right now. It's going to be a pretty big crowd around that table for soloists like us.
I met you at a book signing in Hawaii about 15 years ago, and you told me how the first girl you ever loved was a vicar's daughter named Moira. You were gracious & lovely to talk to then, and your blog posts are an amazing extension of that. No matter how difficult the subject, your joy for life shines through...thank you for sharing with us.
Ebert: I liked her a lot. Red-haired Moira. But she wasn't a vicar's daughter. Actually, her dad owned a pub.
Was once given a choice for a literature course, write a paper or take an oral exam. Chose the oral. Not the most comfortable situation in the world, but gamely handled by both of us.
The focus was Lady Chatterly's Lover. We explored the novel as Lawrence's farewell to his body, and particularly to sex, since he was by then in a weakened condition and not long for this world that he celebrated. The novel he left behind as a gift.
Today's post brought that memory back.
Reminds me of The Odyssey "Family Restaurant" back home in Wisconsin that was host to all of our achingly-important conversations in high school. Mug after thick, curvy mug of coffee, club sandwiches, gyros, waffles with peaches, the somewhat hilarious drama of the saganaki en flambe, the reassuringly consistent pickle spears.
Crushes bloomed and faded in those naugahyde booths. Dog-eared Dostoevsky and other crumpled Penguin classics underlined. All under the bemused, arched eyebrows of the waitresses who still wore the outfit.
Thank you!
you made me remember working as a waitress in the artistocrat restaurant in boulder, colorado in the 1970s. it was owned by a greek family who prepared huge omelets,screamed a lot, periodically fired everyone and taught me the only greek word I know (not repeatable). thanks for a lovely article.
Thanks for dinner, Roger. I miss your conversation, though I found it through my tv, too. I'm glad I found you on twitter.
Tuna Melts!!! Was a better sandwich ever created?
Always enjoy our conversations over dinner, Roger!
Cheers!
Chris Ortman
hi roger,
more to say later, hopefully. but you can always call on me to visit you at a diner (that has wi-fi). we can sit face-to-face with laptops and instant-message each other. we'll pick a day that i'm fasting, so neither of us will eat/drink, yet we'll be merry.
to pay for the space, we can order some food-to-go and give it to someone who is able to eat and needs to.
of course, despite my seemingly astonishing coolness, i'm as lame and boring as all hell, so...
be well.
omer m
Wow. I suddenly realize I've been wasting a of a lot of meal times just eating. I realize now maybe I should be dining.
I'm from Danville and lived for many years in Chicago, so this really resonated with me: all the way from Steak and Shake to Frances. When my dad was first diagnosed with cancer, he was too ill to eat, but as the radiation started helping and he could eat, the first thing he asked for was a steakburger and a shake.
Also, knowing that someone loves both Ozu and Steak and Shake is my new definition of sympatico.
Ebert: Ozu would love Steak n Shake. I just know.
I wonder, how has your writing changed since all of this happened? Do you write differently, more personally, or merely more often?
Mr. Ebert, memories are a funny thing. I sit here reading your blog, your tweets, and your reviews and there's one thing that happens over and over - I hear your voice.
Your voice has lept off the page or screen for the almost thirty years that I can actually remember whenever I read your words. When my friend, Carrie, who worked as an intern for you (or Gene - I can't quite remember that detail) for a spell in the 80s, would tell me stories of her experiences that included you, I could always hear your voice in her words.
In fact, I am unable to hear anything but your voice in reading your words. Your inflections and mannerisms scream out of your printed words and are unavoidable. So, to think that you are physically unable to speak has always struck me as the oddest of paradoxes, because to me your voice has never been louder or clearer.
"You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now."
Actually, I started to feel that way about midway through your lovely post. I'll come back to sit at your table again and again.
A book in the offing?
I loved this entry!
I will have to remember soloist. My friends used to make fun of me for going to restaurants alone with a book, but I enjoy it.
I didn't realize you had Nehi that far north. Here's what you do in summer: Take a can of sweetened condensed milk and put it into your ice cream maker. Then fill the canister with peach Nehi. Heaven.
I have to quibble with you about the Necco Wafers though. Next to Circus Peanuts, that's got to be the worst candy ever created.
Ebert: You're forgetting the most obstreperous and unnecessary candy in history, Jujubes.
http://j.mp/6gyrIO
Thank you for the fascinating dinner conversation. Your writing is like recess for my mind. It's both thought provoking exercise and fun. I miss your extended conversations with Steve Dahl the most.
I feel moved to quote one of our fellow dinner guests (Preston - a few posts above me - or, rather, a few chairs down the table from me)
"Perspective is a powerful thing when you have it. I just gained a little this morning."
It's a pleasure to "dine" with you through your blog, Roger . . . and your Tweets make great snacks too :)
God DAMN, Roger Ebert! What a great essay!! Did I use enough exclamation points? No! God DAMN, Roger Ebert!!!!
I joined this blog, sir, because of a dream I had about you in the spring of '05. That dream was also the reason I sent you a fan e-mail in August 2006. Will tell you about it in person if you like.
More later. DAMN, what an essay!
Ebert: I'mm honored to be in your dreams, but scared of who else I might meet there.
Wow, never thought I would have dinner with you! Food for the mind, something really worth savoring. What an attitude of gratitude, the only way to digest what life dishes out. Praise the Lord and pass the memories.
Cheers.
Not the taste of a bottle of Nehi, but the memory of the taste of a bottle of Nehi,triggering not a couple thousand pages of ormolu, thank G-D, but scores or hundreds of thousands of memories, a Vulcan mind-link with lots and lots of people. And much, much more.
Still a little intellectual, though.
Like many others who have posted above, I eagerly look forward to your blog entries Mr. Ebert. I treat them as a wonderful conversation in which I am just listening. I hear your voice in my head as I read these words you write for us.
Your words brought to mind one of the many "what-if's" that come up among me and my friends. The question is, "If you had to lose one of your senses, which would it be and why?"
This question always perplexes me. I am a visual artist (painter), and sight is something I hope never to lose. I adore music, and collect wide-ranging genres, so my hearing is something most dear to me. For every sense, I have something I value, so ussually my answer to this query would be my sense of touch. I may have been wrong in this answer. Touch allows one to feel the love from someone, whether in a kiss, a huig, a carress, whatever. Touch is invaluable for happiness.
I always assumed that taste would be too, but you have shown me the error of my ways. I now understand that the loss of any sense is not unbearable, as long as one has the mind to recall the joys that sense brought to you while you still had it.
When people say to enjoy your life, to live as if it is the last day you have, too many people regard this advice as suggesting they go crazy, and fulfill all whims, and spend all the money and generally live a debauched life.
This is not the case and you are a prime example Mr. Ebert.
The ability to enjoy the seemingly un-important things, the handshakes, the conversations, the greetings, the company one keeps, the smell of your favorite person, the sight of a friend laughing, these are the things that MATTER.
I am rambling now.
Thanks again for your insight and your words.
Please pardon me if I'm suggesting something you would find humiliating, sir. However, it strikes me as likely that your typing speed is exceptional, given your line of work.
If you miss conversation, why not buy a netbook or a tiny notebook, and install text to speech software on it? Some of the newer stuff coming out of AT&T is quite sufficient in terms of rendering quality for use in discussion, and I imagine the delay involved in beginning typing to be negligable by comparison to the international telephone delay.
Hi Roger.
You probably don't remember me (although you seem to be remembering a lot these days!). We had a few brief correspondences about Kubrick back in the mid-90's, and I believe I was the one who informed you about the premature death of the promising young Quebecois director, Jean-Claude Lauzon.
I met you once, briefly, at the Toronto International Film Festival, in the bathroom of the Royal Cinema. I wasn't crude enough to interrupt or ask for a handshake, but you were nice enough to nod and smile.
Anyhoo, I just want to say that I've been thinking about you a lot since you began going through this years-long trial by fire, and though your *speach* may be gone, I believe your voice just keeps getting stronger and stronger.
I read your journal often, and always look forward to your reviews, even (especially?) when I disagree.
I hope you are able to witness more of what's in store for us now that the naughty 'naughts are behind us.
Most sincerely,
Mark T.
Toronto
I responded very well to this article, Roger. I thank you for taking the time to write it.
I've had an eating disorder for the past four years (anorexia), and my relationship with food has become very strange, as you might imagine. I often recall the times when I could eat, as they say, "normally". It brought back some interesting memories.
What kind of feeding tube are you hooked up to? When my weight plummeted, my stomach too out of function to digest whole food properly (I was quite near death at this point, the doctors said), they fed me through an NG (nasal-gastric) tube. It was pretty annoying at first, especially the insertion process, but it was better in the long run because I didn't have to endure the process of eating which was the issue in the first place.
I'm eating better now, but my weight is still quite low for my age/height. I'm working on it. That's all I can do.
Here's to both of our recoveries.
I'll drink a cool, frosty A&W for you.
Thank you for a wonderful column. I am glad we were able to get together!
We eat for a lot of reasons, hunger being only one. For someone trying to lose weight, as am I, that is starting to sink in.
I remember the A&W drive ins also. The Baby Burger, Mama Burger, and Papa Burger. Also, you cold get a gallon bottle of root beer to take home. I also seem to remember an inverted paper cone that would hold a quart or so of root beer.
I'm starting to see it more clearly also.
My husband is from India, and he always says the thing he misses most is the food - food for him is closely tied to the emotions. When we first got married, I was completely mystified as to why he would wait to eat until I could sit down with him - even if I got home late in the evening. Since I could live happily eating microwave popcorn and diet coke with a book propped open in front of me, I just didn't understand. As we've gotten to know each other better, I've come to understand how much he values the connection of sharing meals, and how lonely the years were for him in a foreign country with no one to eat with. When he talks about his childhood and life in India, he always describes the food, because that's the easiest way for him to talk about emotional yearning. He describes the food his mother cooked, the fruit trees, the street vendors, the feast days, and when he talks about these things, I know he is really describing the saddness of memories you can taste but cannot swallow.
It's not the same thing as never being able to eat again, but I think homesickness might be a similar kind of grief.
Thank you for posting your journal each week - I never miss it, and I find myself mentioning things you've written with other people as though you were a personal acquaintance (I hope that doesn't sound strange).
By the way, I have just discovered Cormac McCarthy - I previously avoided him before because of the violence and dark subject matter, but after reading The Road, I am just entranced by him, and am going to read Blood Meridian next. Maybe someday you could do a journal entry about his writing? I'd love to hear some of your reflections.
Ebert: Man, is that one dark. The Judge...
After seeing "Up In The Air", this blog article seems fitting for some reason. I can't figure out why.
Pure poetry. All the best to you.
-- Adam Shaw, Chicago
Donning my amateur psychologist hat, I'll say that your increased knack for remembering food seems like textbook compensation for the loss of the actual experience. Your ability to vividly elucidate those sensations in your writing, however, is utterly your own talent. This entry is as delectable as any meal.
And forgive the geekery, but this piece reminds me a little of Swamp Thing (the early Moore comics, for anybody who cares). He finds that he no longer has to breathe, which is such a peculiar realization. Breathing, like eating, is so normal that we often forget how integral it is to our shared experiences.
Roger,
I'm a first- time visitor to your blog, and want to say thank you for such a poignant, thought-provoking piece.
I was sitting here feeling sorry for you, thinking, "How can he live without ever eating again? That would drive me mad!" when I started laughing out loud. You see, I'm 20 years sober and have a very similar relationship with alcohol. It's a "never again" for me, and I live quite comfortably with that "restriction."
In early sobriety, I couldn't think in those terms - "never again" "deprivation," etc. Yet these days I can talk about what I loved about alcohol - the camaraderie, the ritual, the sociability, the romance of alcohol. I remember fondly the taste of Bailey's, champagne, cognac warmed in a snifter, those dark and biting red wines of California, meals in the south of France with course after course of fabulous apertifs, wines and dessert drinks.
It doesn't torture me to remember this. I remember alcohol like I do an old lover - fondly, with some sadness and nostalgia, and also with the knowledge that our continued relationship would have killed me.
Sobriety for me has been about how to live differently - how to take pleasure in other sources, without the instant buzz/satisfaction of a drink. Your post brings up the same kinds of questions -- How do we find pleasure, company, satisfaction, joy and connection when our usual avenue/s for that disappears?
My friends who still drink feel terribly sorry for me, and can't really understand how losing the ability to drink has expanded my life in unfathomable ways.
Thank you for writing about this with such grace and elegance. It's a treat to be seated at your table.
Roger (after reading these posts over the past few years I feel on a first name basis with you),
I feel this blog redefines the term "fine dining." Fine dining was on many a sign for restaurants that I thoroughly enjoyed. Tons of good comfort and recognizable food came with a smile, a wink, a "Here you go, Honey," and a love for the diner. Fine dining = the food of home (where ever that is or whatever that means) + the comfort of companions and conversation (whether a book, friends, or family). Well, I have to go now. Thanks for dinner, I really enjoyed it.
So beautifully written.
Thank you so very much for reminding all of us about the importance of appreciating every single bite and the gift of community around the table.
"Maybe that's why I enjoy this blog. You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now."
Roger, I just have to let you know that I do realize it. I look forward to every one of your entries on your blog and site with much anticipation. You look at the world and at films in ways that very few people do and in that I find that we are kindred spirits of sorts. Though I'm only 20 I find that I can relate to your thoughts and ideas more than I can to many of my friends and peers. I'm not even sure if your schedule combined with the sheer amount you receive allows you to read these comments, but if you do read this (at the risk of bordering on gushing): thank you for pouring into my life the way that you do, our "dinner conversations" are many times the highlight of my day. And before I head off from this one I also want to let you know how exited I was when you announced Synecdoche, New York as your film of the decade. I too was very affected by that film and its intricacies and am glad to know that you were too. You are in my prayers, thank you for all you do, looking forward to our next dinner -Rodney
I thought your situation was like this, but I didn't know for sure because I am so clumsy, forgetful and ADD with anything I read and just wasn't sure if I was following correctly the little things you'd said here and there about your health these last few years.
I want you to know that I pray for you. Not all the time, not regularly, but that is because I do not pray all the time and I do not pray regularly. But I find that when I do pray, I am often praying for you. I think of you a lot. I feel like I have all these feelings inside my heart and jumbled words in my head about life and stories, but I can't put any of the words together to make sense. Then many years ago, I began reading your column, and found I didn't need to. Thank you for handling your life with such authenticity so publicly the way you do - it spills over on to so many people.
I will now pray irregularly for you and Chaz going forward! Thank you again for your generous soul.
You were so right about meals being the centre of our life experiences. This was a really inspiring post and thank you for sharing those memories with us. I have watched my grandmother's memories come and go as she battles Alzheimer's and so much of my past is part of her and it is sad, but I can still share and remind her of our memories which is a blessing. Thank you for having me over for dinner, Roger.
This is an amazing blog entry. I'm currently sitting in my friend's apartment here in Chicago, visiting. The snow was daunting me, but I've decided to brave it and go up to Evanston for a Potbelly meatball sammich, for both of us.
Thanks Roger.
ending this entry with "You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now." = a little elevation for me.
thanks!
I can feel the subtext in this particular post that says so much of challenge, loss and bravery. It seems an upside to know that your eyes and ears - your pathways to the film experience - function well.
One question... can you still experience smell-o-rama?
This reminds me of the late Warren Zevon's quote upon being diagnosed with cancer: "enjoy every sandwich."
I hope that isn't a tactless comparison to make.
Ebert: It's excellent advice. We spend time in foolishness. I know people who watch hours and hours and hours of TV sports. And hours. I started out as a sports writer. My three rules in his area: (1) Only follow one team per sport. (2) Not during losing seasons. (3) Only for important or symbolic games.
I need three rules in a lot of areas.
I have a friend who had esophageal cancer. For a long time, she used an NG tube for nutrition.
One day while she was recovering, two coupon-book salesguys knocked at the door. She wasn't interested, but they were very persistent.
Finally, one of them says, "There are tons of restaurant coupons...C'mon, everybody eats!"
That's the point at which she pulled the IV stand out from behind the door and said, "Actually, I don't."
Their eyes got big and they literally ran away, scuttling up the icy driveway like crabs being chased by a mob of seagulls.
Roger,
This entry is why we write and read, and why the ability to share things like this is the greatest gift humans possess.
Roger, if only you and your online fans could video chat over dinner. We eating and conversing, you writing your observations. It'd be nourishment for both mind and body.
Great food can sometimes make the circumstances better, but great circumstances always make the meal better. When I think back on the best meals of my life, it's not the taste of whatever dish I was eating, it's the memories of where I was and whom I was with. If you couldn't remember the taste of that root beer, it would be no great tragedy. But if the memory of you and your dad at the A&W stand was returned to you after 60 years, you are in many ways lucky.
What a great piece of writing--and living.
This is my first visit to your blog--although I read your reviews in our newspaper--but I will be back.
You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now.
Bon appetit, Roger, bon appetit! And can you pass the repartee? :)
I was eating lunch while I read this. I'm glad we had a chance to grab a bite to eat together, Roger!
Thank you for this. It made me think of Proust, as well. The blog (which I have admittedly been reading reading for just two months or so) often does. Although I was drawn here initially by your film criticism, I've most enjoyed your reminiscences. I've never commented before--or even looked very carefully at others' comments--but the ending to the this piece makes me want to take part in your new form of dinner conversation. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
Great blog post! Thank you so much! It reminded me of when I was in college. I purposely arranged my classes so I would have 2 hours free for lunch. I would go at 11 and eat with one group of friends and then stay through the noon rush to sit with other friends. I didn't even like the cafeteria food, but it was the conversations that provided me sustenance.
Roger - very moving. Like Proust with his madeleine.
Mr. Ebert,
I've heard your name and your film ratings for my entire life, but I only began reading your reviews recently. I discovered an interesting thing, which I've never put into words until now: reading your reviews of films that I have enjoyed brought up the same fond emotions that I experienced when I saw the films themselves. That is a gift, sir-I mean 'gift' not in the sense of your personal skill in writing such things, but in the sense that I am personally grateful to be reminded of such feelings.
This is to date the only blog entry of yours that I have read, and I would like to share something with you. I understand now why I've enjoyed your writing so much. You are a true human being, and your reviews are so honest because somehow you convey precisely what you are feeling as you watch these films.
Thank you for your genuinely enjoyable work and thank you especially for your honesty today.
Best Regards,
Joel La Lone
You do speak, Roger. I know your voice well enough from all the years that I've watched you that I can hear it when I read your journal. It's just as clear as ever.
I know what you mean about memorizing the taste of food. Years ago, my mom and I dined at La Tour d'Argent (the trip to Paris was a college graduation present). It may have been the beginning of my roots as a foodie, because I can tell you what every course was and how it tasted. The first was an appetizer of five different styles of seafood. The second was an amazing sole mousse. The dessert was a dark chocolate cake with raspberries. Everything was as fresh as I had ever tasted. I don't want to eat there again because the meal wouldn't live up to the memory of it.
Thank you for telling us your food stories. And the photos are marvelous.
Actually, I had dinner with you and Gene many a Sunday of my childhood; it's when you were on the air in Los Angeles. I still remember the crispness of the chicken skin while the two of you were arguing--when I was very little indeed, and my dad was still alive, we'd sometimes have a cut of meat where we could share out the marrow. Oh, how many of my memories of my father involve food!
When I graduated from high school, I moved to a town that didn't have either of my two favourite fast food restaurants. Oh, there were a couple of good local places, but there's a texture to Carl's Jr. crisscut fries which no one else ever seems to duplicate, and the one up here in Olympia only opened last year. It was the first place I'd visited the last time I went home to my mother's. I am a french fry connoisseur, and the texture and flavour stays in my brain to be called up any time I want, if they're good enough. It's hard to imagine not being able to actually physically taste them anymore, though.
Roger, I will still have dinner with you any time. I'd even promise to stop talking long enough for you to write or type a response!
Perhaps it is because the two centers are close to each-other in my brain.
but that article made me sad. and hungry at the same time.
i understand your pathos, i have had some great
conversations with many people over my meals.
i remember one time while sitting at my favorite
local diner (the corner cafe in Tulsa)
we began talking about movies. we got in a
debate about Tarentino.
i don't remember what exactly was discussed.
but our conversation was apparently interesting
enough to get the guy sitting across the room from
us to join in.
while my brother smoked ciggarettes
we discussed reservoir dogs and pulp fiction.
i don't know why. but people open up when they
are waiting for their food.
it is a brief period of camaraderie and friendship.
but still. if i we're in your shoes.
it would be the big juicy platters i would miss.
the steaks and the shakes.
i applaud your perspective on it though.
i would recommend you don't give up on surgery.
but then again i'm not you.
And what an honor and a pleasure it is to have been seated at your table!
In an odd bit of synchronicity, I took my Book of Kells coloring book out the other day for the first time in a long while. I look forward to seeing the real thing someday...
The tennis player Pam Shriver wrote in her autobiography that she thought a woman eating alone in a restaurant was the saddest thing. I read that (probably eating alone in a restaurant) and was baffled: I was at the time a full-time traveling solo musician, and I ate in restaurants by myself a lot with books. LIke you, I thought of it as being a soloist, not being somehow deprived.
That said, I find the substitution of memories for desires interesting, and an idea that might be valuable in dealing with daily frustrations. :)
As far as food itself goes, though, I think the thing I'd miss most - from the sounds of it, much like an amputated limb - is not any of the foods of my childhood, which though expertly cooked and served, were basically fairly bland European - but *Chinese* food, especially dim sum.
The late John Diamond, the British journalist who wrote about his throat cancer for the Sunday Times (some of it later republished in his posthumous book, Snake Oil), I think also found the loss of speech the hardest thing (he actually could speak, but apparently to most people not intelligibly). He lived to argue - and although he didn't often mention it - I think he found it a relief that he could continue to do so online even after he was limited in social gatherings to a notepad and pen.
wg
Dinner was great Roger and best of all for this tired lady...no dishes to wash!
love your reviews and blog, you are like the movie popcorn to me Roger, a deliscious part of the whole movie experience
A friend and I were having a discussion the other day about how amazing the mind is. Our conclusion was that the beauty of how it works is not its ability to remember, but to forget. If you had to remember everything you would live in a flooded head, a mind littered with tattered memories and hauntings. However, after reading your blog, I see now that the mind having the ability to recall past memories, even those that had seemed lost forever, when they are truly needed most also adds to the minds amazing complexity. Thanks for the great read... can you pass the Tabasco please?
"You don't realize it, but we're at dinner right now." - Roger Ebert on blogging
That is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful sentences I have ever read. I've always said to friends that I enjoy food, but the reality is I enjoy Dinner. What good is food if you can't talk about it with others who are sharing the experience? The food adds to the conversation and the conversation adds to the food.
This was made clear to me when, last New Year's Eve, I spent time in Rome having dinner with Romans. This group included a disparate group of friends that included a concierge who was much too intelligent to be a concierge, a Carabinieri, a waiter, and a woman I loved. Most spoke as much English as I did Italian (not much!) but somehow the conversation still flowed smoothly from topic to topic from politics to who makes the better lovers, Italians or Americans (Answer: Americans!). The Dinner was going so well that we completely lost track of time and had to race to get to the Colosseum and arrived mere minutes before the stroke of midnight to ring in the New Year. Your blog is like a dinner in Rome.
I've watched you on TV for a decade and read your reviews online since they've been online. You've always had a talent for writing. But this blog is something different. It's as if, by losing the ability to speak, you have finally found your voice.
I look forward to our next dinner together.
Eating for me has been more of a chore than anything. Since I'm not an Epicurean, I don't really care about food. For the longest time I've been wondering why we don't have food in pill form. You swallow it, the cellulose expands to fill the stomach and slowly release its nutrient rich payload. Imagine how much more I could get done if I didn't have to stop and eat!
Now, after reading your article, I see how short sighted I had become. You reminded me of the simple joy that is savoring a piece of candy, something I would surely miss should "space food" become the norm.
I'm not much for the flavor of liquorice, so my personal favorite is the under appreciated Good 'N Fruity.
Your type of 'public' versus 'pubic' would have been more interesting had you been talking about 'public relations'.
As I read your words I go through a swirl of emotion. I had my tongue and larnyx removed many years ago and still managed to learn to eat and drink again, even wrote for Colman Andrews at Saveur magazine about food. My cancer returned, small and weak, 30 years later and I am now in the 10th month of a liquid diet. Cancer-free, but seemingly myself-free too, having reinvented a me that ate and drank and gloried in it. I think I understand. Thanks for writing for us!
What an interesting article, and it rings all-too-familiar for me. I went through a period of about a year and a half during which I could neither speak nor eat properly. I have now regained the power of communication, and can also eat enough to survive--just barely--but food has changed its place in life in a similar way to that which you experienced.
It's no longer as much of a shared experience to have a meal with friends; I can eat something, sure, but the large majority of the time is spent watching others eat. I can no longer order up a huge plate of food and greedily eat it all, or say "I'll finish that" to someone.
What I find to be the biggest change, though, is not in my reaction to others--it's frustrating, but not all that big of a deal--but their reaction to me.
I find that I constantly get asked if I don't like things, or if I'm really, really sure I don't want more, or the like. I also find myself worrying--sometimes rightly, sometimes not--that my presence is bringing the table down. Whether my sitting there not eating is making others enjoy what they are eating a little less, inserting maybe a sliver of unnecessary guilt or pity into an otherwise happy occasion.
That's the hard part more than anything.
Though it would sure be awesome to order a massive hamburger, fries, and a jumbo shake, and finish it...
Dear Roger:
Your writing is worthy of E.B. White, and I don't just mean that little grammar textbook.
Warmest regards,
Christian R Szabo
Toronto, Canada
Ebert: Oh, if I could be worthy of the Little Book.
Advise to all readers: "Read the Little Book!"
I feel sheepish even suggesting this, as I'm sure it's been mentioned a thousand times, but have you considered other forms of communication other than vocal and written - perhaps learning ASL? Granted, this doesn't solve the issue of speaking with (current, unless they know or learn) friends at lunch and dinner, but it may open other dining conversation options...
Very nice post, Mr. Ebert. I feel like you're writing from exile on a desert island (or, in your case, a dessert island) somewhere, and you managed to smuggle out something beautiful to the rest of us. Thank you!
*Hand up* Runner! Me!
*pointing* It's Sandra Schwartz's fault. Her full name wouldn't fit on my Call Display so I'd always greet her when she called with, "Hello, Sandra Schwart!" realling hitting the "T" at the end and we'd both laugh. She's dead now and a big part of the reason for why I run: http://roomin8.blogspot.com/?zx=e00a8d093f5887e3
I had a brain-stem stroke seven years ago, causing paralysis to one of my vocal cords. I never knew the role the vocal cords play in swallowing.
For about six months, I had a feeding tube but was able to swallow water - if I was very careful.
Both in the hospital and at home, every day I would pick one of my favorite local restaurants (yes, including Steak N Shake and Pappa Del's Pizza) and fantasize about eating some of my favorites. The doctors and nurses were amazed at what a good attitude I had, but I think that daily memory exercise also helped my brain.
I love reading your random blog postings just as much as your movie reviews. You have a somewhat freakish ability to always tap into my childhood or psyche, which is probably why I love this blog so much. Best of luck!
I haven't read through all of the other posts, but I wanted to say that instead of sad, not being able to eat or drink (not having to) sounds liberating.
Your memories are incredible and true. I haven't had a piece of candy in 6 years, but I can certainly remember the tastes. :)
Take care.
The internet exists for this. You may not be able to speak, but I'll bet your writing is now read by more people than at any time in your career.
I read every one of your tweets, and I often follow your links. Through your writing I'm exposed to more gradients of life and interesting culture than I ever was with any other medium.
You may not be able to speak, but your voice has never been stronger.
Roger--You don't know me but I live with an old friend of yours, Jim Finefrock, with whom you once visited Marx's tomb. He sent me your blog to read and I'm so glad he did. It was the antidote I needed to something I've been pondering; why so many posts attached to published articles on websites are not just negative, but unbelievably rude, hostile and often, deliberately untrue or slanderous. Then I read the comments on your blog, and I'm filled with hope for the online world. You should be proud to attract such thoughtful,kind and loving comments (and friends.)
Loved your blog though it made me sad. I must say that I sort of live to eat, so I cannot imagine how I'd live without it. But it never occurred to me how much those tastes and textures--as well as the context in which they occur--are stored and perfectly preserved in the mind.
Thanks for this blog.
Yep, just a coincidence. I read your blog regularly, and was pretty enthralled in what you wrote. Then I saw myself and my friend Bill and was like, hey wait!
You should know in full disclosure that that was taken on St Patrick's Day (hence the green) 2003 and that our breakfast at Old Timers (yum; I go there every time I'm in Chicago) was to steel Bill, his wife and me for a daylong pub crawl that turned pretty epic.
Ebert: Waitaminit. Waitaminit. BOTH of you guys just HAPPENED to see the photo of you standing in front of Old Timer's?
And will you please tell the audience that I've never met either one of you before? Right?
Sometimes I get the eerie feeling this blog exists at one degree of separation.
Just sent this to my dad who is (thankfully) recovering from a radiation/chemo course to treat a nasopharyngeal tumor. I (and each of my siblings) spent a week with my parents during his treatment, and one of our primary tasks was trying to pack as many calories into him as possible. He was an unenthusiastic participant in the effort, thanks to the medications, his dulled sense of smell and taste, throat and esophageal irritation, and feeling awful thanks to the treatments.
During "my" week, he was hospitalized with aspiration pneumonia and was "Nil by mouth" until they could do a swallow function study. He was very out of it while we were in the ER and during the admission process. But the second—the very second—the big NPO sticker went on his chart, he began asking, "Aren't they going to give me ANYTHING to eat?"
I had no idea you couldn't eat or drink, and questioned whether or not you could talk as of yet or would ever again. I miss the old show and would be some what disappointed if i missed it back then.
Roeper still carried on with it for a little while longer but then it was no more. Everyone has their burden to bare and you've always seemed to be a man of strong beliefs and opinions. Now I'm sure your taste buds still work, could you be able to drop a drop of liquid on your tongue to taste or rub a piece of food on your tongue to taste? Or would that be unsafe as some liquid other than your saliva may get down into regions forbidden?
I always hope that people with food allergies and animals that can't eat certain foods, because they would be hazardous to their health, would be able to enjoy such amazing tasting foods and the ability to do so in Heaven should it exist. I convey the same for you to enjoy a nice meal after meeting up with loved ones on the other side and going to eat :o)
I hope to eat a good meal too whilst asking questions about what things i would like answered, i wouldn't want to go up there and just suddenly know the answers. I want to be able to ask the questions and hear/see/feel the answers, etc.
I have nothing else to add (besides unformulated thoughts) except, Best Wishes Always!!!
Marc ,27 years young, (Mechanicville,NY)
Roger, you've been one of my heroes for so, so long. Your passion for movies (I'm a movieholic and have been known to see three movies a night whenever I can), your fierce intellect and your humor are just wonderful. When I was on Readerville, a writers' site which is no more, we used to thrill because there was a rumor that you were lurking there. EVERYONE wanted to know you.
Dinner with you was delicious, and I didn't have to worry about my table manners.
Can I interview you for my blog? I just did Gail Godwin, so you would be in excellent company, though truly, you are one of a kind, and that is a high compliment. Of course I understand how busy you are, so don't feel obligated. I will still show up for dinner next time and I promise to fold my napkin.
A group of friends and I (we all sang in the same choir) would gather at the old Ann Sather's restaurant once a week before heading for practice. No discussion topic was off limits and it was always about music, companionship and laughter - and the too legit to quit cinnamon rolls! Rich, yeasty, buttery with a aroma of cinnamon better than Channel No. 5. I have not lived in Chicago for ten years now, but your post brought back very warm memories for me. Thank you, and take care.
Ebert: Ann Sather's. Yes. Yes. Is this by any chance the cinnamon roll you refer to?
http://j.mp/6Y07NV
And here's a place three blocks from me that I know I would love:
http://j.mp/62aGLl
So I noticed you called soda "pop." Are people in Chicago as vehement, almost violent, as people in other parts of the country are regarding the "soda" vs "pop" debate?
(And I realize there are other variations, such as people in the South calling it "Coke," but I think if there's one thing the "soda" and "pop" people can agree on, it's that people who call it "Coke" are bonkers.)
Ebert: I'm bonkers. I call it Coke. Downstate, we call it by name ("Pepsi," "7-Up") or say "pop." In Chicago people seem to go both ways.
I'm sometimes partial to "sodeee pop."
Ebert: I'm honored to be in your dreams, but scared of who else I might meet there.
---Don't worry, Rodge, the weird ones show up only here in reality. Except... well, never mind her.
Thing is, I've been through what you have with not eating, tho' in a microcosm. In my own "Bodhi Tree" days as a youth, I'd fast for a week or two now and then. Quit for years. Then as a grownup in the past some years I went for a month, sometimes more.
There's a big difference between doing it of one's own free will and not having the money to eat (been there). Looks like you've been through a mix of both. The same hunger -- which even in 33 days doesn't get any more than mild -- can seem either a pleasant, even delightful thing or can bring up feelings of rage.
Walking around not eating on purpose is a hoot. Every kind of food smells WONDERFUL! Just fabulous. Even a stick of gum. But no thenkyew! I'm all spiritual now! Eat all you like, you earthbound saps -- as charming as you really are for it. It's a legitimate feeling and worth the trip.
For just plain not having the money to eat, I use the term "rage" from a letter from Jack Kerouac, where he hadn't eaten in four days and that's how he felt. Me too. It seems to just creep up on you. Some vestigial instinct, maybe. Ready to just kill somebody to eat. Multiply that by some million and that's what's really going on in Africa and elsewhere.
Speaking of eating, there are four horses gathered 'round licking at the windows. Better go feed 'em. They don't understand fasting.
I had the pleasure of taking a film history class you taught in the late 1970s. Your class affected me greatly and helped to change the course of my life. During the class you often mentioned the wonderful dinner conversations you had with students after class. I always regretted never partaking in these dinners. But your blog post today has given me the chance to share in one of those dinners.
Your post also triggered a memory of a diner somewhere between Lake Michigan and the Univ of Chicago that had a terrific slogan: "See your food. Eat your food." You can't beat that.
Thank you for addressing this subject with an entry. I've found myself reflecting and wondering about your inability to drink, eat, and speak often enough that I've wondered about my wondering. Some of it was feeling sorrow for you and some was imagining that you had come up with ways of coping and even getting past it. Not that you had a choice, right? I supposed you could have spent the rest of your days railing against the loss, but that sounds exhausting and no good at all, not to mention quite against what little I've gleaned about your nature.
We cope because we must cope. You have found a particularly beautiful way of doing so. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be at your table, sir.
Hey Roger, as a critic who specializes in film AND food, I found this entry particularly touching. Thanks for writing it.
Dear Roger,
I hail from Portugal, and I've been a fan of your writing since forever.
This is further proof that an amazing writer such as yourself can write about anything.
Thank you - Obrigada ;)
Saki
"Ebert: I use a voice to read what's written on my Mac. But it's hard to type quickly enough to keep up with the flow."
Roger, several years back I programmed an app for a PowerBook G3 that allowed for a stenographers keypad to translate key-words into keystrokes, thus to words and a final signal to speak the text aloud. As development progressed, we added a buffer-monitor to begin speaking the words when enough filled the buffer, such that one need not hit 'enter' to begin speaking what had been transcribed, and what you continued to enter would be spoken until it caught up with you.
This was before the almighty Alex-quality we have today; and it still worked fine with sexy Kathy, and allowed a blind-deaf-mute to engage in some pretty rigorous and lively scientific debate.
Point being that real-time, "vocabulary-rich" conversation was only a bit slow, akin to having a relaxed, thoughtful conversation with a septuagenarian; whereas day-to-day speech-pace was hardly discernible as anything but normal. Cadence still fumbles now and again, still today, so poetry might depend just a bit on the audience's indulgence.
Do you have the chops/will to learn/create a shorthand that would allow you to generate entire words from single keys or linked-syllables to form words? If so, you can save roughly 60-70% of the needed keystrokes for roughly 35K words in the American English language, and my guess is a mind as sharp as yours could whip up plenty of wit and wisdom in ready time even in a crowded diner.
Love your writings; wish I could see you at the CoWA in Boulder again someday; the week we spent on Pulp Fiction in '95 is amongst the greatest highlights of my film-buff experience.
Thanks for all you write here; I, too, take a quiet pleasure and respite from some pretty heavy stuff in my life when I attend your court. Thank You, Roger, for all you give to us.
Ebert: I'd be willing to give it a try. Where can I find it?
I had been telling someone recently that reading your blog was akin to sitting down to tea with someone - basically the only two places where I slow down, tune out the outside world, and really get excited for the conversation that's about to flow. I often log on quite late at night, and see your new posts, before anyone has commented. Seeing a new post, I grab a beer, put on some music, and set out to take it all in. I love that you think about this in much the same way - dinnertime conversation with your 10,000 closest friends. If you're missing that lunchtime conversation, just know that there are hundreds of thousands of us out here who look forward for our noontime chat with Roger. You're part of our daily routine.
I feel sad for your loss of having dinner conversations with close friends, but now that you have conversations with some newly discovered friends around the globe, as if they were sitting besides you, listening to your every thought with great care, and appreciating that you do likewise, doesn't it somewhat expand everything you have worked for your whole life?
You have been writing great text, and finally you have your loyal readers responding to you, and interacting with each other through a global dinner conversation, hopefully giving you back something you have given to us for all those years.
Yours is the world's largest dinner table.
Bless your heart, Roger.
A little off-topic, but I just noticed your anointment of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" to your Great Films Collection immortality, and I wholeheartedly agree -- it's one of my favorites -- but I noticed one large error (and two typographical errors) in that review that you might want to change.
The big one is you say that Clementine (Kate Winslet's character) is the one who quoted the Alexander Pope line where the film gets its title. This is incorrect; it is actually Mary Svevo (Kirsten Dunst's character) who says the quote (from her Bartlett's). After you insert the quote, uou write: "This passage comes well into a very long poem which I doubt the character Clementine would have memorized. The audience needn't know that; many may know no more than she does when she calls the author Pope Alexander." Mary screws up the name while talking to Mierzwiak, flustered with her (recurring) school-girl crush on him. Clementine never speaks of the quote. There should also be a comma before "which."
Also, in the six-to-last paragraph, you misspell Gondry as "Gombry."
Also, I notice you make no concession about how you gave the film 3.5/4 in your original review. Obviously you gave it a very positive review, but for its greatness, I thought you shortchanged it. Any comment?
Either way, I think it's important that you gave it the praise it deserves. Your Great Movies Collection is to films what the Hall of Fame is to baseball players.
Ebert: Fixed, with many thanks.
I always look forward to your thoughtful, insightful reviews. You've got a real gift and seem to reflect your time very well. Your work is much appreciated.
http://foryouredification.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/youth-in-revolt/
I was born without a sense of smell. How about we team up? I do the tasting, you do the sniffing, and we take turns listening. If you don't want to bring your robo-Mac Hawking-talker, we'll do one better & listen in on the next table over.
Hi Roger,
I've long enjoyed your articles, your television years, and especially your books.
Hope this isn't too creepy a connection, but your essay reminded me of the description of Hannibal Lecter's 'memory palace' in Thomas Harris' "Hannibal".
It is fascinating how many corridors and doors are waiting for us.
With many thanks and best wishes ...
Ebert: I need three rules in a lot of areas.
Can't help but wonder if "pubic relations" is one of them...
Thanks for quoting my Old Timers piece, Roger - glad you enjoyed it. Funny to stumble across words you've written a while back and have it take a few ticks to remember..."that sounds familiar. Did I write that?" It's a great place to experience, and I would have loved to have had a lunch with you there at some point.
I love those grittier joints around the Loop - I know it's been a while since your drinking days but did you ever check out the Sky Ride Tap? Same kind of rough-edged joint, contractors rubbing elbows with traders while downing bottles of High Life with that "this is real Chicago" kind of vibe.
Ebert: Now I'm really spacing out. BOTH of the guys in the photo AND the restaurant reviewer I quoted HAPPENED to see this entry?
You guys all got together on this, right?
ou guys got together, right?
Like a few people above, I was a fan since the early days of AT THE MOVIES in the late 70's (I remember a double-header with the original Muppet show, but that may be cloud of memory). In any event, I have always loved your passion and dedication to film. I was a video store clerk through high school during the 80's video boom and saw how your thumb worked "in the trenches", often giving a pimply teen the authoritative back-up necessary to get a conservative renter to go out on a ledge. I went to film school, I bought lots of your books (recently, ROGER EBERT'S BOOK OF FILM - which is an anthology unlike any other, highly recommended!!) I now work for a major studio (although not in a terribly sexy position) and have a life I just only barely knew how to dream of while on the shag carpeting in front of a TV that also operated as a piece of furniture (as opposed to a sleek piece of wall art, as my kids have come to know them). Your passion for filmmaking and the intellectual rigor you bring to bear (even when reviewing films that seemed to have little such reflection applied to their own scripts), creates ripples that you could not possibly fully appreciate. I've seen both of my parents fight cancer (both are surviving, thank goodness) and know it is no picnic. Weirdly, through the internet, those that touch are lives are more easily approached, so I felt compelled to just reach out after your brave personal post and say "thank you", on behalf of me and the millions more like me.
I remember to this day being a young college student, eating nothing but cookies out of the vending machine, and wondering if I could eat like that forever.
Turns out...no. :)
I do remember vividly sitting in a darkened lecture hall a CU Boulder in 1992-93 watching 'JFK', and listening to Roger Ebert telling us how to really watch a movie. I remember eating those crappy cookies that I'd snuck in.
I remember graduating in '93 from there, and Roger at my graduation ceremony - my parents took me out for one of the best meals of my life afterwards, with some of the worst food. :) Best for all the reasons Roger describes. I remember thinking 'I wish I could just be eating those crappy cookies with all these great people, rather than this overpriced stuff'.
So thanks for the times I shared with you from a distance, Roger, and yeah, I love food, but I love meals more.
Ebert: I got back to Boulder last year, and am going again this year. CWA is very special.
It is the same thing as when you smell a perfume on a woman and it brings back memories of an ex lover....
Happens to me all of the time, and the funny thing is I can not remember which woman it was.
just the sweet smell reminding me of being a teenager with not a care in the world.
It is amazing how our minds can be so powerful.
Thanks again Roger for your great insightful
posts.
good god, ebert!
Dont't tease us, what did you always order at S'n'S?!?!?!?
Ebert: Single Steakburger with CMP&O, fried, Chili Mac, diet coke. Sometimes a shake. Or in honor of my father, a chocolate malt.
You can get fat that way.
Roger, I like you lost my ability to swallow after surgery for cancer. It has been two years now since I last had a meal. You are right, what you miss is not the food but the dining. So much of what we do to conect with other people, in dates, with friends, with relatives, around holidays, and on business occurs around meals or drinks. While I feel comfortable enough to poor my formula down in public, and have done so at meals at conferences, I still find that my loss some of some speaking ability limits my ability to converse in a crowded noisy room.
The loss of swallowing creates an isolation that can be overwhelming. I took to writing a blog, Courier, Express and Postal Observer, and enjoy the connections with the 20 - 30,000 people who want to know what I think regarding the future of this industry. Seeing people reading what I write, allows me to have a connection with others, which is even stronger given that I know many of the readers from my work in the industry over the past 25 years. Still, connecting to people on line is very different and a lot less satisfying that making those connections in person. It is this isolation that is my biggest challenge in trying to stay well.
I can still talk, even though most of my tongue is gone and that allows me to reach out on the phone and on occasion even make presentations at professional conferences. Having understandable speech is a blessing but still having to cough up saliva every so often and spitting when one talks makes conversation in noisy or close quarters impossible.
Finally, I would recommend that you contact the Oley Foundation. The Oley Foundation is a foundation for those on enteral and paraenteral nutrition like us. I went to my first conference last year. It was incredibly warm and welcoming and I learned a lot about what others are going through that made it easier for me to keep on going forward. This years conference is in Saratoga Springs, NY and I plan to return.
Hello Roger Ebert
I am a big fan of you and Jim Emerson. I have admired you since the 8th grade and was shocked you couldn't eat anymore or speak. If you don't mind, I would like to join the party of food-related experiences.
As a sophomore in college, I enjoyed ordering pizza and having it come at 9:00 PM. I then proceded to leave it alone for two hours and then eat it. In the words of my Physical Chemistry Professor, cold pizza is the breakfast of champions.
I have one more question. Can you taste the food with your heightened memory?
Isaak
Dear Roger,2009 was tough.My Dad at 85 is losing his memory.Both his short and long term memory appear comprimised.On the positive side everything is new and interesting and we have decided to stick with the positive.But before this happenned Dad would often admonish me not to worry about a big family meal preparation by saying "it's not about the food,it's about the fellowship."
I have said this so often to my friends they now will say uncoached "as Howard would say...
Thanks for the dinner invitation Roger.
For a few weeks I had to be on a feeding tube, as the muscles in my throat would not flip that valve that allows me to send food and drink into my stomach instead of my lungs. I became obsessed with thoughts of food, to the point of clipping coupons out of the Sunday newspaper in anticipation of getting to eat again.
I don't know if you feel the same way, but I always enjoyed the sensation of flushing my tube with water after a liquid meal. Because it bypassed my mouth and throat (and so was not warmed before entering my stomach), it was like a cool pocket of refreshment forming in the center of my body.
Thank you so much for having us to dinner here again.
I come to Ebertfest alone and always go to Steak 'n Shake. We've only just recently gotten one here in Raleigh, but I swear it's not the same. My ritual involves the orange freeze. In the '60s, my mother and I used to sneak away from my father and my younger siblings and go for orange freezes back when Steak 'n Shake was on Green Street-- or maybe it was Springfield-- what I perceived to be "downtown" back then.
So for all the wonderful films we watch each April, my week there is also all about solitude and quiet contemplation. I drive past my former homes and former schools and I get my orange freeze and come watch movie after movie and soak in the amazing panel conversations.
Your writing here reminds me so much of the essence of Ebertfest-- at least for me. For me, it's all about the way that your love of the town and the movies and the conversation shines through every year. Thanks for all the wonderful "dinners" you have shared here and there.
I hope you'll keep writing. Your condition has opened up a world of pertinent material that you would never have had ability/reason to access as a film critic. Your work has more gravitas now - I'm pretty sure that's not just my imagination.
Of course, would that this had never come to pass. You should have had an uncomplicated life as a film reviewer until one day you were unexpectedly hit by a meteor.
You're showing a courage and integrity I could not have known in you. I think I would have assumed you'd act like most folks faced with adversity (maybe me included) - badly. Oh, BTW, don't let the religious types come around to tell you why God did this. They have NO idea. It's Man's lot to suffer, and it rains on the just and unjust alike.
You don't eat any more, but you lay out for your readers a word feast of epic proportions in this blog. That is when compared to the beautifully crafted nouvelle cuisine of your reviews. Those have their place, but me, I'm happy to pull a chair up to the buffet table.
Beautiful, fascinating and inspiring. I'm so glad to be able to hear your voice here via the internet. Thank you for the dinner conversation.
Thanks for this, Roger. Your prose is my nourishment: “And from that time I began to replace what I had lost with what I remembered.” While I think to remember is to acknowledge, however reluctant, that something has ineluctably passed, has been lost, nevertheless, I could sense and admire the poetic logic of that statement, which to me meant something hopeful. A kind of brilliant resilience. And a reminder of memory’s redemptive capabilities. Indeed, as long as I got my taste bud memories in tact, I can have my cake and eat it too! :o)
Aaand you ran in circles where at anytime spontaneous poetry recitation was possible? I would love to run in that circle! For Roger’s dinner-blog, I offer a little ditty by William Carlos Williams:
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
That was...touching. It's nothing I can relate to, but it's something I can easily understand (or at least, think I can) and can agree with. It really makes me think about all the little things I take for granted. Arguments and discussions over a meal, be it with family or a group of friends. I think when I'm eating lunch tomorrow at school I'm going to think a little bit less about the tuna sandwich and a little bit more about cherishing every moment I have.
Also, this is unrelated and I know you've said in your Answer Man column that you don't like doing homework, I'm just asking for your opinion on this matter: What would you think about an essay focusing on how Bergman's films are rooted in existentialism? I've seen two Bergman's (Seventh Seal, Virgin Spring) and enjoyed both and noticed some motifs of existentialism in each (especially Seventh Seal), and since I know you know film and you're the only reason I can at least think I do, I'd like to know if you think this is a topic that can turn into a quality essay.
Hi Roger...
Purple Neccos are far from being space fillers - for me anyway. One of the few places you can taste clove in candy! Except maybe Clove Gum! The white Neccos were my space fillers. Never quite new what to do with them.
All such lovely thoughts and memories. As my cirlcle of friends has grown smaller, I've noticed the time I spend with them over dinner has grown more dear to me. Thanks so much for the post and thoughts.
I too look forward to Thursdays.
Take care and keep on typin'!
KJ
Ebert: Clove, Beemans Pepsin and Black Jack are back on sale!
http://www.hometownfavorites.com/clove-gum.asp
Hi. I think you are remarkable. Just so.
Love you,
Blanky
You're a WRITER. That was beautiful and strong.
It's an honor to share a memory meal with you, and to be part of your virtual conversation. Thanks for this.
Roger, you've written eloquently as usual on a complex subject that has a deceptively simple summation: We do what we have to do.
I see people missing limbs, or blind, or deaf, and wonder how they can conquer their limitations and keep going to live full lives. Your situation is no different, or less mysterious, to me. While on the surface it seems that being mute would be easier to deal with than never eating or drinking again (I assume your sense of smell is shot, too), who is to say except each individual who experiences these things in their own way.
The folks who can't deal with the ways their lives play out often either go crazy or kill themselves. I think I can speak for everyone here when I write that we are all endlessly pleased by your ability to deal with your circumstances with good humor and intelligence. And by continuing to write.
Foregoing possible additional operations is an interesting choice--again, who but a person in such a situation could understand how to make such a decision like that. Is it heroic? Foolhardy? Neither?
We do what we have to do.
Caroline Leavitt! I know Caroline Leavitt! What a good dinner this is.
Here, everybody: http://www.carolineleavitt.com/
She's a pal of my pal Karri Sriram. She has said wonderful things about Sriram. Deserved, too. Let's hope a certain third party has overheard them.
Just thinking about how many people watched Roger and Gene over dinner. I'd forgotten that I used to, too. Crispy roast chicken, usually.
What a thought. Roger has millions of people who think of roast chicken whenever they think of him. He can now writing anything and we all think it's crunchy, chewy and yummy!
And pop! I used to love pop. Then we moved to upstate NY and they all called it "solda." It wasn't as good, even with the same label. Nolt. (that's how you pronounce "no" up there.)
Ebert: You know everybody.
I googled them both, and you really do.
Would anyone here who doesn't know Tom please turn themselves in?
Thank you so much for your most recent posting. I enjoy our dinners every week! My aunt, who just passed away a week ago, lost her ability to eat a year and a half ago after receiving tracheotomy. Towards the end of last year her daughters asked her what she wanted the most in the New Year. She mouthed "to speak". She was in very bad shape health wise, receiving dialysis 3 days a week, unable to walk and suffering from heart and lung failure. It was her inability to speak that affected her the most. The rest did not matter much.
Well, as always, it is a pleasure to dine with you. Your words are delicious.
Thank you.
Many blessings.
"And meeting Kitty Kelly sitting inside the pub, who became famous in our stories as the only whore in Dublin with her own coach."
The Legend of Bagger Pantsless
Dear Roger,
I do not know if you will end up reading this, I just wanted to say to you that your words have really struck a chord on me. I love reading your movie reviews -it's, actually, the first thing I do after watching ANY movie-. I had no idea what had happened to you and the things you have been going through.
I am so glad you are still writing and doing what you like. I just do not know what else to say.
Yours truly,
Garret
Mr. Ebert, I have loved your commentary since first I saw you and Mr. Siskel way back, back. Nowadays, every Friday, I look forward to your insightful (and pithy) reviews in the Albuquerque Journal.
Thank you for the decades of enjoyment (mostly). I hope for nothing but the best for you.
I don't think I have any memories of eating dinner, dining, I mean. My life is kind of like
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (which I haven't seen) in that I have just about no memories of my life. Like "a playful wind" in the movie "House of Flying Daggers":
Jin: Just call me Wind.
Mei: Wind?
Jin: I wander around all alone, come and go without a trace.
Mei: Like a carefree wind?
Jin: No, a playful wind.
Wow, I can't really imagine what it must be like for you to live as you do. It doesn't sound terrible, but seems so incredibly nostalgic.
Mr. Eber, this is going to sound trite, but you have grown into a genuine literary treasure in Internet age. Your writing has always been excellent, but the breadth of the subject matter you cover - and the skill with which you cover it - seems to have exploded lately. Not that my opinion matters in the least, but in my estimation your name deserves to be included in the list of Chicago's great writers alongside Studs Terkel, Saul Below, Carl Sandburg and Theodore Dreiser.
I am sometimes skeptical about the value of the Internet. That it gives us immediate access to your journal is an excellent argument in its favor.
I'm so enjoying all the food and eating related metaphors and analogies this has spawned. Lisa Paul, I find yours particularly wonderful.
And that William Carlos Williams poem has piqued me since I was a grade schooler. I've never been able to make up my mind if it's genius or shite, although the world has formally pronounced it genius. Maybe it's genius is in making someone ponder it for thirty years.
In the spirit of bursting into verse, I offer this one that mentions food and drink -
Easter
Grandpa looked over
and yelled for a beer
and I got it 'cause
I was his favorite
and Grandma said
carve the ham dad
and I could almost
touch the ceiling
in their house if I
jumped
Ebert:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
I loved reading this, and I love your tweets! Thank you for all your continued sharing, thank you for all the inspiration. You lift up the quality of life for all of us.
What a wonderful dinner conversation indeed. I think you should be scared by Tom's dreams too, Roger. A dark and twisty place I'm sure, but interesting. Fasting pushed to pathology is anorexia. There is a power in not eating. I've seen too much of it in the world. A friend, seminary dropout many years ago, likes to fast for a day a week during Lent. Lapsed Catholic, but as I told him once, the church doesn't recognize divorce :>)
Oh, and thank you @Rafael Ibay
I had been thinking of the plums poem all afternoon, prompted by this post I'm sure. Could not call it up completely or even remember the author's name.
However, Roger's cupboard is always fully stocked!
Hurray
What a wonderful dinner conversation indeed. I think you should be scared by Tom's dreams too, Roger. A dark and twisty place I'm sure, but interesting. Fasting pushed to pathology is anorexia. There is a power in not eating. I've seen too much of it in the world. A friend, seminary dropout many years ago, likes to fast for a day a week during Lent. Lapsed Catholic, but as I told him once, the church doesn't recognize divorce :>)
Oh, and thank you @Rafael Ibay
I had been thinking of the plums poem all afternoon, prompted by this post I'm sure. Could not call it up completely or even remember the author's name.
However, Roger's cupboard is always fully stocked!
Hurray
Mr. Ebert,
Thanks for another wonderful essay. I've been a fan and a reader since the early 70's (I lived a 1/2 block from Ann Sathers for many years). And reading your blog has been one of my delights for the last 2 years.
No great thougths from me, it is just way past time for me to say thank you for your well-crafted writing, and personal insights. Your writing feels like a special gift that has been given to me and I feel very fortunate to have been on the receiving end.
I did have a chance to say thanks once before-you very kindly gave me a jump-start in my beater Toyota around 1980 in sw Indiana, I believe you were drinving a red BMW. You were phenomenally gracious even though you resolutely refused to be drawn into conversation about writing (I didn't even try to talk about movies).
Thanks once more and the very best wishes.
Now you've got me thinking of Green River and Junior Mints.
Bill
Thank you.
And thank you for being no small part of my film education as a little kid. If I recall correctly, the first episode of At The Movies I ever saw featured a review of Sweet Dreams (1985).
Strangely enough, you had me in this entry with your remembrance of Steak & Shake. When I was growing up in Chattanooga, a trip to Atlanta (the Big City) was always better if it was topped off with a cookies & cream shake. Now that I'm an adult, living in just that Big City, I can have a Steak & Shake shake whenever I want. And sadly, I've been taking that joy for granted.
So thank you again for reminding me that there is magic in our memories of seemingly mundane things.
Hi Mr. Ebert. It's José, or Pepe, as we Joses also go by, all the way from not so sunny Mexico. I almost never cry, and yet I can't even count the times your words have brought tears to my eyes. Thank you.
You have my undying gratitude for teaching me the proper way to eat a Steak & Shake burger: Mustard & Onion only. After reading the lovely paean you wrote regarding the chain, I gave the "Ebert Style" burger a try. Now, that's the only way my wife and I will have one.
Just so you know, we never eat at S&S w/o thinking of you!
Ebert: Uh...you forgot the ketchup and crunchy pickle slices. But to each his own.
I hardly know what I'm doing with the blogging platform business. I just find Blogger the easiest to use. Indeed that's my graphic art but they're just jpegs I made on Photoshop plopped in there. But shucks, your mere morsals of feedback are enough to keep me going for the rest of my days. Totally flattered. ; ) Kisses from Toronto!
as a buddhist; heres hoping you return as a restaurant critic
just curious;.;.;when you and Chaz are home alone do you sit with her as she eats?
Thanks for writing this post.
It's interesting how loss sharpens our sense of what we have and what we had. I have all my senses, but this awareness certainly affected me when my mother died.
I suppose it's because we take these things (whatever they may be) for granted, from our parents to our friends to our senses to - whatever it happens to be.
Of course, then, as our lives continue and our number of dead and gone outweighs our living, it stands to reason that our capacity for memory and our willingness to journey through our past increases. The elderly have an amazing ability to recall the adventures of their childhood and youth that I wish I shared, and one day know that I will.
It does sadden me that to properly understand myself and where I came from and who I came from, I must first lose those people and places in my present.
Dear Roger,
Thanks for yet another beautiful and touching post!
For me it's the smells of foods rather than the tastes that bring up old memories.
No where else but on your blog does the internet world feel this small and close. Especially with all the coincidences of this entry!
Looking forward to your next post :)
Cat
I love this post. You are such a fantastic person.
I have was in the hospital for several months once and for a few weeks I was not allowed to eat, as they were trying to allow a perforated portion of my small intestines to heal itself with rest and medication. I was still hungry and every commercial on TV was for food. I was starving and I never got over it the entire time. Eventually I got less hungry because I think I just got so darn depressed, but I never got over wanting to eat.
I don't see how you remain so wise and so positive. Your blog is a great gift to us all.
Frances Deli. Best grilled cheese sandwich I have ever had.
I can't help feeling gratitude when I read something as beautiful as this essay of yours.
On the one hand, there's nothing I can say, because you've said it all. On the other, there's a hundred things I want to say and all at the same time, because you've brought them all to mind. I'll only say a few.
Thank you for this dinner, and for all the other meals and snacks here at this blog. You write about things that matter to me. And your writing goes right to my heart and at the same time, it fills my imagination with all the scenes and thoughts and smells and sounds and images you write about.
When I was at my sickest last summer, I wouldn't have been able to read your essays and reviews. For weeks, I couldn't watch movies, I couldn't read, I couldn't browse the internet, I couldn't hold a decent conversation. It was scary. It had never occurred to me, before, that a physical illness could affect my mind like that. All I could do was listen to a little music or flip through the pages of coffee table books and field guides, looking at pictures. Or lie on a blanket by the garden while my husband weeded our vegetables. I also could hardly eat.
Ok, enough of that. But it's a reason to feel especially lucky and grateful tonight as I read your essay.
Earlier today I was reading Julia Child's book, My Life in France, and her memories of the best meal she ever ate in France – white wine, oysters, salade verte, sole meuniere, baguette. Now sitting in my mind next to Steak n Shake and A&W root beer!
So on to cravings. Now that I have them again, they are all foods I can't eat. Cheetos – even though I know they're junk. Smartfood cheese popcorn. And bread, pasta, pizza, or my homemade sourdough rye bread, which I don't make anymore, with a bit of sweet butter.
But most of all, a grilled cheese sandwich, made with good bread and real cheddar. I've even dreamed about this one a few times. With maybe a little tomato, a little horseradish or mustard. A slice of avocado. Or, ok, a little tuna, make it a melt. It's my favorite food to suggest when my husband or son is scrounging in the kitchen. Mmmm. It looks good. It smells good. It makes such a delicious crisp sound when they bite into it. And that gooey cheese. It's just so satisfying.
Ebert: I was always baffled by the appeal of Cheetos, but not immune to it. Alas, in this polite company I can't tell you a great Cheetos joke.
This is just to say
I do not know Tom Dark and
I do not find
your moving essays even
slightly
Proustian.
Geez, thanks for making me cry.
I have a memory of your voice from about 1970. I was in high school, and we students were arguing about what the song was at the end of "Dr Strangelove..." I announced, 'Roger Ebert will know,' and I called you at the Sun-Times, while my friends waited. You answered your own phone, took the question, and then you sang the song to me. One of my favorite moments ever.
Dear Mr. Ebert,
I just want to say that I'm 34 years old, and I can count on one hand the number of movies I've seen that did not have a good review from you. Thousands of movies that you did give thumbs up or a solo good review... I enjoyed each and every one of them! People think I'm a little crazy because I only watch movies that you give good reviews to. But, it's never failed me and like I said before, I enjoy every movie that you enjoy. It's amazing what you are doing, and I can't thank you enough for 'pre-screening' the movies before I watch them! Please take care and I hope I will see many more mutually enjoyed movies in the future! Your blog was touching about not being able to eat or drink and I'm sorry to hear this. Thank you for all you have done as the worlds best Critic (only one as far as I'm concerned)! Thank you very much!
Justin Graybill
Would anyone here who doesn't know Tom please turn themselves in?
---One day Jerry Berliant himself may crash your party and say "Tom Dark was asking about you." But I may be late. Getting to know all six billion one at a time is no picnic, y'know. And the way some can yak, land's sakes!
Great post. I've read and watched you since I was in single digits. You helped expand my film vocabulary. Tomorrow, I turn thirty; it's been a difficult 6 months. I lost my dad to cancer and I'm in the process of getting a divorce. Two people (father and wife) with whom I often just sat and ate and spoke with. No longer. I'm sorry for your loss, but I'm trying to look at a deletion as an addition to another life to live. You are the embodiment of that life; your written words will now be your testament only, and I look forward to continuing to read your wisdom. Thank you.
Reads like you are still gaining acceptance, Roger. I can relate. We are going through the same thing with our son.
I hate it when people give me unsolicited advice, so I make it a point not to give any.
I also hate it when people ask how he's doing as a courtesy, you know, like a way of saying "How ya doin'?" and just expecting, "Fine. How are you." So I don't ask.
If it means anything, the conversations you hold here have given me respite from some very hard times in the last couple years. I didn't even refer to our son's illness for the first few months that I started responding to what you posted and....that was okay.
I'm guessing there are others like me here. I've realized recently that my closest friends are loners in one way or another. Most
adidas shoes outlet of them are artists, teachers, musicians, conspiracy theorists, cranks, thinkers, runners: Control freaks who function best on their own & who share the inability to emote or relate to others in normal ways.
It is so rare that I feel compelled to comment on a blog entry, but this was so powerful. I love the idea that we are at dinner now. It is, for me, one of the reasons why this medium is so incredible; it brings people who would never have met and shared conversations together so instantaneously and evokes emotion, memory, response in very personal way.
The A&W story reminded me of a similar story, but my 5 cent root beer was from the Dog and Suds - didn't remember that until tonight! Thank you so very much for giving me back a memory!
I need some blog mentors; You, Mr. Ebert, for the writing part, and Jenna up there for the design! Together, you two could be unstoppable.
This is, once again, a great piece. If I'm ever 1/100th of the writer you are I'll consider my life a job-well-done. Oh, and thanks for the mention of my blog on your blog a few months ago... Thanks to it, I'm up to 19 followers! Score!
"Could be, when the Lord took away your drinking, he gave you back that memory." That's a pretty wonderful thing to say.
I used to eat jujubees in the theatre and hold them up in front of me so the light from the screen shined through and I could see what color I was eating. Also miss good n' plenty. They used to make them smaller and harder, guess I was the only who liked those.
You remember Raymond K. Hessel from Fight Club? Well I'm going to savour every bite of my next meal, man. I'm going to be grateful for whatever it is.
"Let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man." -- Colossians 4:5
Thanks for passing the salt.
Your memories brought forth memories in me too. And food consumed in dreams is always the most satisfying.
If you're looking for a better blog engine that is more adaptable, and which you can edit by drag and drop, look at squarespace.com.
Roger---
Back when I was a soldier in Vietnam, in the spring of 1967, I was living in a room off a street named Cong Ly, in the old French city of Saigon, and every morning at 7AM I would leave my room and walk the mile or so to work down its lovely shaded streets, reading in the patchy sunlight a book that you’d once insisted that I read called “Go Down, Moses,” the extraordinary novel by Cormac McCarthy’s precursor, William Faulkner, the one in which Old Lion and The Bear and Sam Fathers ended up running together, until finally all of them died at the end of the hunt, in the last scenes.
I know this might sound somewhat curious, but your essay today, on memory and food and you, evoked this whole world of sounds and fragrances in which I once lived, beginning with the scent of my father’s cigar---Arlington Park Racetrack, 1956---to the glorious aromas emanating in the morning from the French bakery along Cong Ly, where little men in white smocks were baking croissants, and I would come in and pay five cents for a long roll of French bread and devour it, warm and butterless, on my way to work, in eight or ten of the most memorable bites ever taken by man on this or any other earth.
Strange how desire and memory mix. You said you remember your father ordering you root beer at that drive-in while he smoked Lucky Strikes. Down near where you used to live in old Chicago, on a street called Larrabee, there was a beer hall in the 1940s called Siebens, where aproned men swept from table to table http://www.prismnet.com/~tweek/Siebens/ carrying multiple steins of beer and root beer.
My father and mother used to take us there. He inhaled Luckies, too. “Give the kids a root beer,” my father would say. “Wife and I will have two beers.”
And so they arrived, over baskets of twisted pretzels born by these bewhiskered men whom my father paid in silver coins out of his brown trouser pocket.
Many years later, like you, I used to stay up late to study, grow famished over the texts, and at 1 A.M. take off to eat fries and double cheese at you know where, plunging through the door into the arctic light of the old Steak ‘n Shake on Green and Third in Champaign. There was almost nothing, outside of the French bread on Cong Ly and my father’s cigars at Arlington, that even remotely compared to the rising scent of a double cheese on a Steak ‘n Shake grill, chased with a strawberry malt.
I miss all that. I do, I do. The aromas, the flavors, the words, the coffee at the Illini Union, the echoing verse:
“Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher…”
Most of all, though, I must say I miss your own imperishable voice---the fun and timber of it, the laughter and the poetry, the stories about Robert Mitchem and Groucho Marx, the way we talked 50 years ago of Robert Frost and Albert Camus, of Yeats and Exley, of Lewis Carroll and Robert Jung, of Adlai and Ike, of cabbages and kings.
You may not realize it, Roger, but we’re having a coffee at the Illini Union…right now.
Ebert: Aww...Nack. Nack. And the Walrus, who got off at an early stop, before we had even really gotten underway. I see him now. That smile telling us something. Damn!
Ebert: It's excellent advice. We spend time in foolishness.
Any suggestion about how to restrain and optimize the part of our precious lives we devote to movies?
Ebert: As nearly as possible, see only good ones.
Unfortunately, a movie critic can't do that.
Your essay was very moving. I never cease to be amazed by how life’s losses inevitably seem to open doors to new dimensions of discovery and joy. A little over 6 years ago I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and as devastating as that diagnosis was, it has allowed me to perceive the world through a new and fascinating lens. The greatest revelation for me has been an enhanced understanding of time. It feels to me as if all time exists in the same moment; that is to say that with each moment I move forward into the future, a new layer of the past’s complexity is revealed to me. The best way I can explain this is to relate an experience I had while in the midst of the ordeal of diagnosis.
A year before my MS was confirmed my mother died. I had called my wife from the hospital and told her the news and now I went to pick her and my boys (Ben, nearly 5 years old and Alex, 4 months old) up. After I collected everyone we went home. Once we were home we broke the news to Ben. He took it pretty calmly. During the course of his life, my mother’s interaction with him had been limited due to her emphysema, so he had not developed an especially close relationship with her. What bothered him most was that he could sense that I was sad. I explained to him that nanny was my mother. “Don’t you have any other mothers?” he asked. “No,” I explained, “She was the only one I had.”
Now, as it happened, Ben was scheduled for a dental check-up on this afternoon. He liked going to the dentist, because he got a small toy for being a good patient. So this is how we came to be heading out of the house together. As we walked down the steps, Ben reached out his hand to me. He didn’t do this because he needed me to hold his hand. He did this because he sensed that I needed him to hold my hand. And as we walked hand in hand to the car I was overcome by a tremendous melancholy. And in that melancholy I had a moment of recognition.
I remembered Sunday afternoons in August when I was eight years old. On these Sunday afternoons my mother and I would walk downtown and over to my father’s mother’s house on Bergen Avenue near the Little League park. On the way there we would always stop at Nolan’s Delicatessen and my mother would buy me a box of Cracker Jacks. It wasn’t so much the caramel coated popcorn and peanuts I loved, but rather the cheesy prize that came in the box.
When we got to my nana’s I would go out and play in the yard while my mother and nana talked. What I didn’t realize at the time was that they were talking about my parents’ rapidly unraveling marriage. But a part of me must have realized something and had filed it away for another day. Now as I walked hand in hand with Ben I felt the same melancholy that I’m certain my mother must have felt when we made those long walks to nana’s house. All those years ago I had sensed her sadness, but as an eight year old I couldn’t completely understand it. Now, at forty-two, I understood it perfectly and like a bittersweet gift I was finally able to unwrap and share that moment with my mother.
Memory is a wonderful and fluid thing I believe. The memories you’ve shared here are beautiful, but let me assure you they are far more tangible than you may realize. Munching on a handful of Cheez-its, reading each word you’ve written aloud in my head, I hear your voice and I can’t help but feel that I’m having that dinner conversation with you that I’ve always fantasized about. Bon appetite friend.
Ebert: You made me realize that our childhoods make a lot more sense than we realize, if we let them.
I could feel that little hand in mine.
What a beautiful and inspiring essay! The truly great heroes and role models include the people who experience tragedy or serious dibilitations and emerge with a positive outlook that exhilarates, motivates and inspires friends, acquaintances and strangers.
It's always been a treasure to follow your insightful reviews and writings but now this blog with its marvelous essays and wonderful discussions provides us with so many more riches. Thank you for breaking bread with us in this most uplifting manner.
The recognition of Stanley Tucci's two great roles this year and this article brought back fond memories of watching Big Night.
Roger, you make us feel like you put as much effort into preparing your 'meals' as Primo and Secundo did in that great movie. We're honoured to be able to attend each week.
Dear Roger,
I agree with Bud. Please take care of yourself. You can no longer eat, drink or speak, but you can write and your writing is the only critic's I'll ever read. My favorite thing about all of your writings and your reviews is the humanity at the center of it. No airs, no talking head. I read other reviews from time to time, but it's not the same at all. Suspect I'll never like another critic again if you stop writing.
Jenny
Roger, if the memories of which you wrote are a tenth as vivid as the prose with which you encapsulated them, you are no doubt enjoying the finest meals of your life these days.
As for dinner conversation...well take a look at the number of responses to each of your entries. You've managed to fill the equivalent of a banquet hall with intelligent discourse (and none of it business,a feat in and of itself).
Carry on, man. Carry on.
(By the way, I have no idea who Tom is. Just thought I'd clarify.)
I love this posting. For one thing, I teach about cultures and sometimes teach about the role that food and eating play. I have used your reviews in class whenever you review a film that involves something that I am teaching. Secondly, I am reminded of the time that one of my closest and most loved friends lost his taste buds after tongue cancer surgery. He is a great cook and had to rely on smells and memory to be able to cook exactly as he did prior to the surgery. Lastly, for the last 5 years, I have decided to stay home on New Years Eve and have some vodka, watch a Quentin Tarantino film and eat Steak'n Shake!
Funny, your last sentence is one of the ways that I think of your blog too. A dinner party filled with conversation, lead and presided over by a great host. Pass the gravy! I really like your food and travel articles. You get down into the simple good stuff.
When I was really young, knee high to a grasshopper, I remember something my aunt would make me. Eggs n' a cup! Does that require an exclamation point? Yes! All she did was soft boil an egg and put it in a cup and slice it up fine with a sprinkle of salt and pepper. She would hand it to me along with a piece of buttered toast (and when I say buttered I'm talkin' old school now). The toast was sliced up into strips so you could dip it in the cup and scoop up some egg. Brilliant woman, my aunt. Both an amusing and delicious way to have breakfast. That is one of my first food memories.
I also have the Sunday Chicken dinner memory buried deep. My mom bought her chickens whole and she chopped them up herself, I don't think people do that anymore, I sure don't. But back then dinner was a ritual to be followed, and it had it's preamble. On Sunday it was always the same. The sound of the first few pieces sizzling in that black iron pot, then the smell of garlic and frying chicken in the air. The sound would warble loud and quiet as she lifted and lowered the lid, turning pieces over for a fresh burst of sizzle on the other side. My brother and I stretched out on the floor, watching WW2 documentaries. Sunday afternoon always had WW2 documentaries in those days. Hunger pangs tortured and twisted our guts until the blessed hour of relief. Fried chicken with golden crispy skin, a big scoop of flavored rice, both buttressed with bubbling gravy. A fresh baked bun to squeegee the wayward bits back on the fork. Probably a salad and veggies too, but those details don't record in a child's mind.
Then I went through a sickness where I couldn't eat much of anything for a few years. Just the thinnest of soups, always hungry, always hungry. Head pounding, light stinging my eyes, jaw clenched tight and locked shut. Arthritic and alone. Solitude, books, thin soup. I had an operation too, seemed to help. Then a few more years of incremental improvements, and food rediscovered.
Later in my teens, the burger joint. I had to take the bus to meet my friends at Sals' for a Nip, they didn't call them burgers. You could get the onions raw or fried, I always got them fried. With a side of fries and coleslaw, and an ice cold coke. Then a car and freedom! A 67' plymouth valiant, bench seats, blue, four doors no waiting, roomy. Head out of the city on a hot summer night til' you smell the canola in the fields and see it's bright yellow canopy in the beams of your headlights. Windows rolled down for the cool blast of air. The road follows the river, turning left and right. Just when your mix-tape reaches the end you finally arrive. Skinners! Home of the world famous hotdog smothered with ketchup, mustard, onions, some hot peppers and a long slice of pickle. Served up with a smile from a local girl, all rural and pretty with her hair out the back of her cap in a ponytail. A dozen more like her darting around putting orders together. They gave you a number and you sat nearby in the bustling mass of people until they called you over the loudspeaker "187...ONE-EIGHTYSEVEN!". Behind the restaurant the river and the bridge that gives the town it's name of Lockport. A scattering of picnic tables and patio lights. You grab your little toolbox of extra condiments as you exit the building to find a seat. Your vinegar and ketchup, your salt and pepper, hot sauce, bbq. I'm old school, just a dollop of ketchup in the corner of the basket of fries, and sprinkle of salt and few dashes of vinegar. One hotdog devoured, and a slow finish on the milkshake. Some people get adventurous, I stick to strawberry. Maybe a chocolate dip ice-cream for the ride home, hell yes I want peanuts on top. It's hot out, better finish it quick and get to that crunchy cone.
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2066/2104455485_f881dcf13f.jpg
My guess is you're not much of a comic book reader, but your brilliant post coincides with a comic book I just picked up called Chew. It's about a "a police detective who is 'cibopathic,' [fairly certain it's a made up word] meaning he gets psychic impressions from whatever he eats" (Src:wikipedia). In the 3rd issue he meets a Saboscrivner (another made up word methinks) named Amelia. "That means she can write about food so accurately, so vividly and with such precision, people get the actual sensation of taste when reading her restaurant reviews...(Src: chewcomic.blogspot.com)." You sir are a Saboscrivner! In a fun twist Amelia gets dissatisfied with her job so she eats a D-rated diner, writes about it, and then half the city gets sick :).
On a serious sidenote, my mom recently passed away after short 6 month battle with cancer. She was an amazing artist (shundor.com/art/paintings2.html). Feeding tubes will probably forever remind me of her final days. However it sounds like you're taking it all so well. You continue to be an inspiration, and I wish you the best. Thank you for everything!
audrey curley comes to mind as I read through your post. as you know, she could still eat, drink, and speak, but not the way she could before the accident. I admire your openness and honesty and ability to find a way through this, I'm not sure I could.
Your last line hit me so hard. You are a beautiful writer and a shining soul. I'm lying in bed alone, my wife asleep at my side, at 1:30 in the morning crying for the losses we tally and the accomodations we make.
I am a physician, currently looking after somebody who may be headed towards not being able to eat soon.
As a person, totally into food, I have enjoyed reading your wonderfully evocative writing here.
You have such insight and humanity----I hope to take some of that with me as I round on my patients tomorrow.
"Keep calm and carry on".
http://www.pri.org/theworld/node/25182
BTW I love the little bit about your brother-in-law--I envy him his certainities.
when a stoke took away my mother's ability to eat, drink and talk, she decided it was time to go, even though she was just 75. She kept pulling out her feeding tube until even her doctor decided it was enough. There's some sad things that have happened that I'm glad she didn't have to witness, but with babies born and on the way and oh so many other wonder-filled things, I sure wish she had stuck around just a little longer. Roger, you're doing your best work ever. Thanks for sharing and inspiring us all.
I just want to say this here because if I don't, I might not ever get to say it: thank you for everything you have done in life. You're a great person. You write so well about so many topics, not to mention your great experience with movies.
In spite of your troubles, thank you for being you.
Roger (if I may use the familiar),
I was directed to your blog while checking the address of a small Thai Restaurant I was writing up this evening. Your entry on losing the ability to consume food & drink, hit the food corner of my little universe and rocked it good. Those of us who enjoy eating don't often stop to appreciate it as the gift that it is.
You and I share many memories of shared food experiences, Necco Wafers, Black Licorice, and --score! -- Hot Tamales. There are others, like the Orange Nehi Soda of our youth, but you have elaborated most of those. Frankly I found this column, well, inspiring.
I've read your film reviews often over the years, your tastes and sensibilities often mirroring my own. You have been my trusted go to source for movie info, but I hadn't run across your other topics until this evening.
I enjoy writing myself, currently I blog about food, but I don't like to think of myself as a critic. When I took up the laptop, I didn't imagine it was just to find flaws or increase a particular restaurant's foot-traffic. I discuss food because I enjoy the ritual of dining, and I'm not sure I recognized that myself until you put it so eloquently into words. My food essays are about the experience of tasting the artistry of others, whether four-star or greasy spoon. If a meal is proffered with honesty, I'm up for trying it. I hadn't thought about dining as the fundamentally connective experience that it is, until you so eloquently pointed out how our meals tick off the events of our lives like the striking tones of a Grandfather Clock. Each meal an opportunity for the joy of the company of others, or the quiet solace of our own thoughts.
If I keep at it, perhaps some day I will be able to inspire others the way you have inspired me this evening. Cheers to you for celebrating the human experience with such insight.
Roger, as one who derives much satisfaction from conversation, I can imagine the frustration of the loss of voice. (My Dad is almost completely voiceless after a stroke 33 years ago; his anguish is clear every day.) While it is little consolation to you, I can bring your voice to mind at any moment. Just as Chet Atkins' guitar had his Tennessee accent, your writing has your voice.
You write so beautifully that I could taste everything. Wasn't the A&W root beer mug the best thing ever????
Sweetness — the sentiment more than the taste. Thanks, Roger. You are a fine writer and a delightful human being.
Smell is the sense most closely linked to memory. What with taste and smell having such a close relationship, is there any surprise that the simple act of eating with friends is that easily remembered?
I lived in Italy for close to a year, and the food beat the boring old Sistine Chapel any day of the week.
Also, I don't know Tom Dark, but I live in the Southwest and don't get out much, so for all intents and purposes I might as well be a hermit.
"And from that time I began to replace what I had lost with what I remembered"
You could say this about a lot of things in life. Is this also a Charlie Kaufman reference?
I'm curious. Wuzzit CIGARS whut did this dirty deed and laid this man down low?
Three separate (or maybe not) ideas:
1. In order to bring home the bacon, I work at a mexican factory owned by an american company based in Ottawa, Illinois. One of my american co-workers, who must be in his late 50s, speaks, in my mind, just like you. Or rather, just like I remember your voice from all the years I used to watch you and Gene. What a delight.
2. Last week I was talking to my mom on the phone, about what my wife and I would be cooking for dinner on New Year's Eve. I said I wanted to prepare some pasta and then she gave me the recipe of a family favorite pasta dish she used to prepare when I was a kid, about 40 years ago. While she was giving me the recipe over the phone, I started remembering not only the taste, but also the many special family gatherings where this dish was served over the years. She then told me, very casually, her mother in law (my dad's mom) had given her that recipe many years ago, even before I was born. I never knew that before. All of a sudden, my grandmother and her kitchen came into my memory as vividly as when I used to be around her house, for vacation as a little boy. I don't know how long it had been since I thought of my grandmother that way, instead of the really sad memory of her final years, consumed by Alzheimer's, of all things...
3. The other film blog I visit almost daily is my friend Ernesto Diezmartinez's Vertigo (http://www.cinevertigo.blogspot.com/), where he writes daily about film and his related thoughts, and takes -and replies to- comments from his readers. Another of the regulars there once observed that Ernesto's blog felt like an old neighborhood bar, where there's always an ongoing, interesting and friendly conversation, no matter at what point you come in. Yes, that one's the bar. This one's the diner. What good days we are living.
You've lost so much, but you've written a whole column for us, assuring us that you've lost only as much as you've gained. Someday, I'm sure I will lose things I love, and I can only hope that I realize what I gain in return, and that I can so graciously assure my loved ones that I'm happy because of it.
Thank you.
This is amazing. I'd just finished a tasty chicken rice and vegatable meal prepared in my rice cooker, thought, "thanks Roger,that blog entry solved a problem for me in an economical and tasty way" and logged on to check the blog.(!) It's always a pleasure to have dinner with you and this crew. Seeing a new post is like greeting and old friend, I've been reading/watching you since eighth grade, which was quite some time ago. Todays entry reminded me of Saturday afternoons spent with my dad in Ogden park. We would walk to a little burger stand on the corner of 63rd and Ada for what, to my mind, was the finest of gourmet meals - cheeseburger, fries, and a grape Nehi. Thank you, Roger, for letting me visit. For a guy with no (physical) voice you sure do speak in volumes, and it's all good. Thank you for being a good influence on me, if you can be so brave and smart and witty and inspiring, it's occoured to me that perhaps I too can try harder with things that need doing. Thank you to everyone here for making me think and laugh, and feel. Same time next week?
Roger - thanks for sharing this very personal, yet utterly fascinating article. I don't intend this as a eulogy, because I believe you will be reviewing movies for another 30 years, but I hope you know how important you have been to those of us who love film. Frankly, it was you and Gene that made going to the movies, talking about movies, loving movies kind of cool. My buddies and I would debate your reviews, and we soon divided into "Team Roger" and "Team Gene". I have to admit I was more of a "Team Gene" members, but often agreed with you, and always enjoyed disagreeing with you. (I finally forgive you for your negative Blue Velvet review - - on of the best films in the last 25 years). Anyway, I want you to know how much you are appreciated, how you still make the love of film "cool", and how much I look forward to years of reviews.
Cheers!
I think we, the readers, enjoy your blog so much for the same reasons as you. We get to discuss things--movies, memories, politics, etc.--that we don't always give deserved attention to in our daily lives. Well, I guess it's not exactly the same, but I feel the same about dining discussions.
There was a time when I would go to late night diners with a group of 10-20 friends every night and talk, write and laugh until 3 in the morning. We had word association writing contests (throw a few random words together and write whatever they inspired). He or she who got the most laughs won. I can hardly believe how long ago those days were. They seem so recent.
These are not blogs; they are short stories. I hope to see them collected and published in book form some day. That last sentence - so simple, so surprising, so human - caught in my throat.
But the black Necco wafers? No, no, no. Those were the ones I tossed, preferring to devour the chocolate ones first (and when the good people at Necco finally started producing sheaths of chocolate-only wafers, I was in heaven, even though I've been told Necco wafers are only good for skimming across ponds).
With all the writing you do these days (reviews, articles, blogs, responding to comments, Answer Man, etc.), I wonder if you sleep.
I read your blog this morning for the first time courtesy Linda Holmes of NPR (http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/01/morning_shots_roger_ebert_on_n.html). She admired your writing, particularly "Nil by Mouth". She's right, and now you've got another fan.
Ebert: Speaking of NPR, I think it's time to pledge again. What other station keeps you sitting in your car with the radio still on after you get to where you're going?
My first entry for 2010.....your Jehovah Witness relatives were so kind. What a nice comforting phrase that was. Your memory of the old A & W reminded me of traveling west on Route 14 from Madison, Wisconsin to Richland Center, every little town had a lit up A & W filled with cars full of teenagers...how I envied them that they had a great place to congregate like that on a hot summer's eve. And going in and ordering a burger and a "frosty mug" of Root Beer is (or should I say was?), better than any gourmet meal....the bottled A & W root beer today is not even close to drinking it in a mug from a real A & W where it was mixed on the spot. Thanks for another column about shared humanity....I have to say it again I have been a fan since the early days of your movie reviews....
Roger, once again you've given me that sweet pain deep in my chest. Thanks.
"Another surprising area for sharp memory is the taste and texture of cheap candy."
You are now officially the Necco Proust. And I wish I'd known you when I was a kid: You liked all the licorice ones I couldn't stand. Jean Shepherd describes the kid-experience of eating a Mr. Goodbar: Take a bite, suck all the chocolate from the peanuts (first treat), then crunch on the peanuts (second treat). The height of fine dining, circa eight years old.
As for diners, I'm from South Jersey, where the diner reached a kind of Olympian height (Greek joke). Bakery on Premises. Cocktail lounge off to the side--with a Ladies' Entrance. Massive laminated multi-page menu, scrapple to lobster tail. Olga's, Penn Queen, Hathaway's, Golden Eagle, Prince Inn. Newspapers spread at breakfast, gossip at lunch, everybody's middles at dinner. My hard-working parents took us out every other week or so--and it wasn't just about eating: We learned table manners (you're in public, so no swiping the plate clean with a dinner roll) and how to talk to grownups, and how to sit more or less patiently as the parents, meal over, ordered a second cup of coffee. I liked liver, and would amaze the waitresses when I ordered it--yikes: Am I the Proust of calves' liver with onions? So be it.
Thanks for another generous helping, Roger.
I think I quoted from Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping in a printed letter I wrote to you last year, but I feel like repeating it here:
"For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know something so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing -- the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again."
Nam myoho renge kyo, dude.