Winter Lion

Roger Ebert may be on his way to the big bijou in the sky but he's living life to the fullest through his writing, which is at his smart populist Midwestern best. Not only are his movie reviews as accurate and enjoyable as ever, if not moreso as there is a freedom in his writing that seems a heightened version of what he had before, but he's also dead-on politically again, opening his Thursday "A Letter to Rush Limbaugh" with:

You should be horse-whipped for the insult you have paid to the highest office of our nation.

He then excoriates the Satanic Limbaugh for discouraging contributions to Haiti via the Red Cross link on the White House website, drumming up paranoia that it'll put his listeners on the Barack Obama campaign mailing list.

But it's the poignant blog piece from January 6 that's being passed around the Net, where Ebert reveals his feelings about no longer being able to eat or drink. It's elegaic without self-pity, and even has a movie title, "Nil by mouth:"

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.

He writes about how many memories are coming back now, that it's all there, events long ago sparked by a scene in a movie that was shot in a location near the memory. He talks about not missing food and drink as much as the company, :

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.

And as a man who not only embraced the Internet but created the most thriving individual movie critic's website, he closes with a deep understanding of how it's allowed him to connect personally with his readership:

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.

Let's hope he hangs in there, without severe chronic pain or debilitation, for longer that anyone expects.

As long as he can type.