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Roger Ebert won a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism in 1975. Unheard of for movie critics, for writers there is no more distinguished citation.
And yet, when he wrote his memoir, Life Itself, published in 2011 (a book I highly recommend by the way), it wasn't his Pulitzer that he placed at the top of his professional honors.
When Ebert was in high school in Urbana, Illinois, he covered Urbana High School sports for the local paper, the Champaign News-Gazette. (You may know that Champaign and Urbana are twin cities in central Illinois.)
In the fall of 1958 the Urbana football team was rampaging through their season undefeated with two games left and Ebert, the youthful journalist, was along for the ride.
Anticipation was growing that they would meet their archrival Champaign in the last game of the season undefeated.
But, alas, maybe with their eyes peeking forward to that potentially epic clash, they were beaten in their second to the last game of the season. They and their fans were left devastated and disappointed.
The seventeen-year-old Ebert started his article the next day with this:
"The glass slipper was shattered and broken, the royal coach turned into a pumpkin, and the Cinderella Urbana Tigers stumbled and fumbled and fell."
His boss, the news editor of the paper, told Ebert that that was as good a piece of writing as they'd had on high school sports in a long time.
The following summer, unbeknownst to the teenager, his boss entered his article in the Illinois Associated Press writing competition. Ebert won first place in the sports writing category.
But that award, and the celebratory night he won it, was not the reason for Ebert's fond and wistful memory of that honor.
You see, earlier that spring his dad had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Now in the summer his life was ebbing; he was just weeks from dying.
Roger gathered in his award, this framed certificate from the Associated Press, and brought it the next day to the hospital to show his dad.
"And he was proud of me," Ebert writes. "I would never again win anything that meant more."
But...but Roger Ebert won a Pulitzer.
Indeed, there was one thing his Associated Press award had that his Pulitzer did not...that was a moment with his dying father.
What he remembered warmly was not an award, but a moment. As prestigious as the Pulitzer was, it lacked in significance because it didn't have that moment.
It's the moments that matter most don't you know?
It's the moments we remember. It's the moments we cherish. It's the moments we savor, turning them over in our heads when we sit alone reflecting.
It's the moments that bring warmth to our souls, pleasure to our minds and softness to our hearts. They are as cozy as a crackling fire in the chilly night.
It's the moments that stand out in our activities and magnify our accomplishments. It wasn't the framed certificate, but the moment.
In the midst of all of your workaday business and the holiday hustle and flurry, in the midst of all the stuff, I hope you find these moments. They are the substance that stays with us forever.
Activities fade, moments remain.
Better than any Pulitzer.
Because of the holidays I will be taking the next two weeks off from writing to you. Have a terrific holiday season, and I'll see you next year.
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