a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils
In the opening minutes of You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998), Tom Hanks reads aloud an email from his character, Joe Fox, to his anonymous online pen pal, Kathleen Kelly. “Don’t you love New York in the fall?” he writes. “It makes me want to buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.”
The first burst of cold air through the kitchen window the other night ignited something in me that I had honestly forgotten—a sense of pure and total excitement for fall. I had an impulse to put on a sweater, go outside, and drink in the breeze. I love to smell the air as it sharpens into focus, to crunch leaves under my feet, to indulge in all the usual small joys of autumn. I think of the pecan festival at school, the jack-o-lantern display at Chelsea Market, the chaos of the Halloween Parade, the synthetic smell of decorations. This year is different, of course. So I find extra comfort in watching my favorite scenes from movies—scenes that communicate a feeling so clearly I can almost feel it too, just from watching.
Few cinematic depictions capture the fluttery feeling of fall in New York City better than the opening sequence in You’ve Got Mail. Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly step outside their apartment buildings out onto the street, while “Dreams” by the Cranberries seeps into the background. The music crescendoes, filling the sonic plane as we drop in on a series of shots of morning in the city and watch Joe and Kathleen weave in and out of each other’s lives amid amber trees and fallen leaves on the concrete.
Joe and Kathleen walk by a movie theater marquee that advertises The Big Lebowski and an awning that proclaims, “Pancakes make people happy!”. A man hurriedly delivers Tom Cat baguettes to a storefront. A hot pretzel vendor rolls his cart into place. Shopkeepers raise the metal gates on an eyeglass store, a bakery, a pharmacy, a locksmith, a cobbler. The final shot of this sequence lingers for a few beats on the Broadway Nut Shop, its neon sign underscored by writing on the window that reads: “Nuts roasted on premises.” Glorious.
