I’m just adding my voice to those who’ve already cheered Roger Ebert‘s re-appearance from his sick bed yesterday. “I won’t be back to full production until sometime early next year,” he said. “The good news is that my rehabilitation is a profound education in the realities of the daily lives we lead, and my mind is still capable of being delighted by cinematic greatness.”
The recovering critic assures us he “will eventually walk, talk, taste, eat, drink and live, more or less, normally. But it will be a struggle, involving another surgery to complete what began in June.
My favorite passage: “I have discovered a goodness and decency in people as exhibited in all the letters, e-mails, flowers, gifts and prayers that have been directed my way. I am overwhelmed and humbled. I offer you my most sincere thanks and my deep and abiding gratitude. If I ever write my memoirs, I have some spellbinding material. How does the Joni Mitchell song go? ‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’? One thing I’ve discovered is that I love my job more than I thought I did, and I love my wife even more!”