Professor Backwards Died Yesterday When His Cries of "pleH" Went Unnoticed

I have a plea for help. It's a bit of a long shot, but here goes.

I remember reading a story in The New Yorker or maybe the Atlantic Monthly about 12-15 years ago (when I still read the fiction in these mags) and for some reason this story popped into my head last week and now I am obsessing about it.

Because I can't ever remember plots, I have no idea what happened in the story, or even what it was about. If it was The New Yorker, probably nothing, you know, actually happened. But what I do remember, is someone talking about feeling both a quietness and a sense of expectation, a kind of prolonged about-to-happen-ness.

He likens this sense of quiet expectation to the first reel of a Deborah Kerr movie, when she's going about her ordinary life, before the Burt Lancaster character appears. We are living, the narrator said, "in the days before Burt."

I've got this stuck in my head and I can't find it anywhere. I've googled the shit out of every possible combination of words, and nada. I put it into a number of the university's periodical databases and nothing. I am starting to wonder if I made it up.

I know this is a totally random, but does anyone remember reading this?

The last time I had something like this nagging at me like this it was about some song that someone put on a "mix tape" for me 20+ years ago and all I could remember was that the lyrics included the phrase "fuck Mary Tyler Moore." After pestering my friends to see if anyone remembered this song, I finally did a google search and came up with some very unpleasant things (poor Mary!). But at last I found the song. Hm....all I can say is that the mid-80's was a weird weird time.