Tonight, in the midst of cleaning the apartment and doing laundry, I sat down to do one of my original favorite pastimes of coming home from work while living in New York City: reading the New Yorker. Some of my all-time favorite articles and spotlights on quirky famous individuals have come from this magazine. Nora Ephron is one of them. And she just happens to be a Wellesley alum. In this Personal History piece originally published in this publication back in 2010, she wrote:

“I always hoped that he (my dad) would show some interest in my kids, Max and Jacob, but he didn’t even remember their names. One day, Jacob answered the phone and my father said, “Is this Abraham or the other one?” I consider it a testament to Jacob that, at the age of seven, he knew it was funny. Still, it made me sad. You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were or back into the people they used to be. But they’re never going to. And even though you know they’re never going to, you still hope they will.”

You know what’s so funny about this? This is kind of how I imagine my dad will be with my future children, his grandchildren. I imagine that my mom will remind him of their existence by her endless obsessing over them, but that without her, he’d be clueless and not really outwardly care. Like Ephron, I also still imagine my parents will be something else they aren’t, think about things they don’t think about, and want to do things they have zero desire to do. These thoughts come into my head at the most random times: when I am running on a treadmill, perusing books at a bookstore, or even hiking in Cape Breton. It’s like hopeless undying hope.