Points of View

Yesterday I met a friend I have not seen in a while for lunch. She has a corner office overlooking the river. When she went to the bathroom I snuck a few minutes in her desk chair, popped my feet up on the desk, enjoyed the view.

Things always look better from the outside looking in -- or, as the case may be, from the inside looking out. I was green with envy. The space was filled with her family photos, sparkling images lit from both windows by the southern midday sun. Her desk was just cluttered enough to make her look busy and important but not crazed. Accordion files filled to overflowing with documents lined the shelves not occupied by family photographs. Her briefcase sat on the floor, tossed there haphazardly with one flap slightly open, a testament to her productive morning in court. A borrowed space in a rented office, yet it seemed to me a most desirable piece of real estate.

She laughed when she returned from the bathroom. I jumped from her chair as if it had suddenly sprouted thorns. Tricky and alluring, like a rose. My friend's journey to the corner office has not been a fast-track-straight-shot vertical climb from one cubicle to another in the same firm in the same building. It was far more arduous. Traversing the hill may leave you less breathless, but it takes longer. She is smart and determined and she is good at what she does. I watched her, her face calm as she flipped through the pleadings sitting on her desk and signed each one. If I had only stuck with it I could be like her, sitting pretty in a swivel chair, surrounded by windows, signing documents, handing the stacks over to a waiting secretary who would take care of the less glamorous part of the process.

Minutes later, as we sat across the street in a chic Italian joint being fawned over by cute young waiters who kept calling me Senorita, she filled me in on the few years that had formed a gap in our friendship that was actually longer than the friendship itself. Struggles. Not the same as my struggles, not easier or harder. Just someone else's shit. I gazed back across the street at the imposing tower, the building housing that prime piece of real estate that is her office. The windows were as opaque as brick, offering up no hint of life inside. Shadows played against the glass exterior, the building seemed to sway. Solid and as impenetrable as a prison, yet flimsy as a house of cards. My salad was small; I left feeling hungry.

Hungry and full of "shoulds." I should reinstate my long inactive law license, I should re-enter a world that has survived and changed drastically since the last time I wandered through a courtroom door as an attorney, not a client. I should re-educate this brain that still cannot figure out how to coordinate all the remote controls for my family room television, train it to understand electronic discovery and databases and all sorts of research that never has you turn so much as a page. I should claw my way into the world of corner offices and swivel chairs and important looking documents that become extremely important when someone like me signs them. My friend did it, and she looks pretty damn good. I was exhausted thinking about it.

Back in bed with my laptop that night, my dog's ass on my pillow, his fat torso making all sorts of gurgling and threatening noises while his back end had my face in its cross hairs, it was not lost on me that blogging was never going to get me into a corner office, much less pay the mortgage. But then I received an email from another friend, a dear old friend (and, by coincidence, a successful attorney as well) who's known me since the beginning. It was a link to an article about Nora Ephron, written by her son in the months after her death. It was about Nora but it could have been about anyone with a passion. So many Nora quotes, words I wish I could have come up with myself. So much about life and what it's about and how awful it is when you realize you have to give it up. So much about how one person's passion and talent can live on in so many others she touched.

I thought about the corner office, but I brushed it away. I emailed my dear old friend, a friend who knew, somehow, how much this article would move me. We have promised each other a date, to go see Nora's last play. There will be no swivel chairs in the cramped theatre, no desk to kick my feet up on, no spectacular views of the river. But, more than anything, this is the view I need.