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We love Roger Ebert, and I’m not using the royal “we,” I’m talking about Kaiser and me, and probably Bedhead too although I didn’t double check. The guy is awesome. He lost his physical voice along with half of his jaw to thyroid cancer about five years ago, but even though he can’t talk or eat he’s still talking smack and making his opinion known. Ebert was interviewed in a taped segment that aired on The Today Show this morning. He’s promoting his new memoir, Life Itself, and given his story, and how masterfully he writes, I just know that it’s going to be a bestseller. I was thinking of covering what Roger said on the Today show, but instead I’ll just include a brief passage from his book, which was poetic and lovely and pulled me in immediately. Somehow in this flurry of words he takes you there, he reminds you of your own childhood and he makes you yearn for all those sweet fleeting things that make up the whole of your past.

I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not neces­sarily. I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me. At first the frames flicker without connection, as they do in Bergman’s Persona after the film breaks and begins again. I am flat on my stomach on the front sidewalk, my eyes an inch from a procession of ants. What these are I do not know. It is the only sidewalk in my life, in front of the only house. I have seen grasshoppers and ladybugs. My uncle Bob extends the business end of a fly swatter toward me, and I grasp it and try to walk toward him. Voices encourage me. Hal Holmes has a red tricycle and I cry because I want it for my own. My parents curiously set tubes afire and blow smoke from their mouths. I don’t want to eat, and my aunt Martha puts me on her lap and says she’ll pinch me if I don’t open my mouth. Gary Wikoff is sitting next to me in the kitchen. He asks me how old I am today, and I hold up three fingers. At Tot’s Play School, I try to ride on the back of Mrs. Meadrow’s dog, and it bites me on the cheek. I am taken to Mercy Hospital to be stitched up.

Everyone there is shouting because the Panama Limited went off the rails north of town. People crowd around. Aunt Martha brings in Doctor Collins, her boss, who is a dentist. He tells my mother, Annabel, it’s the same thing to put a few stitches on the outside of a cheek as on the inside. I start crying. Why is the thought of stitches outside my cheek more terrifying than stitches anywhere else? The movie settles down. I live at 410 East Washington Street in Urbana, Illinois. My telephone number is 72611. I am never to forget those things. I run the length of the hallway from the living room to my bedroom, leaping into the air and landing on my bed. Daddy tells me to stop that or I’ll break the bed boards. The basement smells like green onions. The light beside my bed is like a water pump, and the handle turns it on and off. I wear flannel shirts. My gloves are attached to a string through the sleeves because I am always losing them. My mother says today my father is going to teach me to tie my shoes for myself. “It can’t be explained in words,” he tells me. “Just follow my fingers.” I still do. It cannot be explained in words.

When I returned to 410 East Washington with my wife, Chaz, in 1990, I saw that the hallway was only a few yards long. I got the feeling I sometimes have when reality realigns itself. It’s a tingling sensation mov­ing like a wave through my body. I know the feeling precisely. I doubt I’ve experienced it ten times in my life. I felt it at Smith Drugs when I was seven or eight and opened a nudist magazine and discovered that all women had breasts. I felt it when my father told me he had cancer. I felt it when I proposed marriage. Yes, and I felt it in the old Palais des Festi­vals at Cannes, when the Ride of the Valkyries played during the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now.

[From MSNBC.com]

I want to be able to write like that, but more than that I want to be able to think and to remember like that. Roger said on The Today Show that when he writes, the memories come to him. He writes a little later in this excerpt “In these years after my illness, when I can no longer speak and am set aside from the daily flow, I live more in my memory and discover that a great many things are safely stored away. It all seems still to be in there somewhere… When I began writing this book, memories came flooding to the surface, not because of any conscious effort but simply in the stream of writing. I started in a direction and the memories were waiting there, sometimes of things I hadn’t consciously thought about since. ”

This isn’t just a book about how he grew up, it includes so many details of his past that are interesting in their own right. EW has a positive quick review along with some interesting anecdotes from Ebert on the first time he met Oprah and how he once had lunch with Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols.

I have to also mention that I was so happy to see him walking with his wife, Chaz, in footage shown on the Today Show. The last time I saw him, on Oprah last year, he was still wheelchair bound.

Oh and MSNBC has a list of the best lines from Ebert reviews. It’s a fun read, especially when he’s scathing.

Photos are of Roger and his wife Chaz earlier this year.

Credit: WENN.com