2010.10.6

Nora Ephron has amazing comic timing:

"My father by then was in the early stages of forgetting things, but one thing he never forgot was a phone number, and in his later years, he made at least a hundred phone calls a day, all of them brief. He never said hello and he never said goodbye. He didn't give anyone a chance to say, 'I'm busy,' or 'Lose my number,' or 'I don't have time to talk.' . . .

'I've just written my memoirs,' he would say, 'and I'm calling them "Me."'
'Great,' I would say.
He would hang up.

'I just called Kate Hepburn and I told her the name of my memoirs,' he would say. 'She loved it.'
'That's great, Dad.'
He would hang up.

I always hoped that he 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?'"

(The New Yorker, Oct. 11, 2010 issue.)