Sandi Kahn Shelton

Okay, it’s summer.
We aren’t supposed to be sitting at our laptops blogging all the time, are we?
We’re supposed to be out laughing and eating pie and riding in the car with the top down singing at the tops of our lungs.

So, if you’re in need of a laugh–watch this. Just be warned: do NOT have liquid or food anywhere near your mouth when you watch it. (And you might want to empty your bladder first.) Just sayin’.

I am sorry to have to tell you a sad story about pie. I know you have your own troubles, and you don’t need to worry about pie.

But we all need to band together to stop the declines wherever we find them.

Here’s the thing: last week I had to drive out to Essex along the shoreline to do an interview with a woman who had redone her house. I am fine with people redoing their houses. I can stand around and look at celery green walls and new wallpaper swatches with the best of them, and then crawl home to my mismatched dishes and old Turkish rug that lives in the kitchen because it can’t go anywhere else…and never again think about what color my walls SHOULD be, unless I get in one of those moods.

But I was excited because…because…well, to drive to Essex means that you get to go through Old Saybrook, which is the home of a tiny little farmstand right out of the 1940’s. I swear, this place has vegetables that just call out your name, they are so fresh and round and plump and delicious. But best of all, while you’re there, you start to sniff the air and by god, you’re right, it’s the unmistakable fragrance of…PIE!

And in the back of this falling-down little farmstand, a woman in an apron is manning a rickety little oven running on extension cords, an oven that couldn’t possibly hold more than two pies at a time, and she’s pulling them out of the oven, so golden brown and crusted with sugar…and OH MY GOD YOU HAVE TO GIVE ME ONE OF THOSE PIES I WILL DO ANYTHING YOU SAY ONLY GIVE ME THAT PIE.

If it’s early in the morning, chances are you can actually have one of those pies. It’s blueberry and she just made it, and it’s still warm in its little pan, and it’s all you can do not to just sit in the car and eat it over the steering wheel.

Believe me, all summer there have been mornings when I have awakened and thought: OK, should I jump out of bed and drive 25 miles with gas being $4.39 a gallon just to see if I’m early enough for one of the fresh blueberry pies, or should I go to the gym and then come home and write my novel and behave like a responsible citizen?

I am ashamed to tell you that I have always chosen Box Number Two, and so I have had no pie. THAT is how overdeveloped my sense of responsibility has become lately. A tragic turn of events.

But then! Then! I get to legitimately drive to Essex, on account of work and all, and yes, it’s a little bit early, but not really, really early but maybe the fates will smile on me, and I will get a pie.  I am salivating as I head out of the house.

And yes–the farmstand is still there. Young boys in jeans are dropping off piles of corn on the cob into a wooden bin. Fat, red tomatoes with no diseases are glistening in the sun. And omigod, I ask the young woman behind the counter if she has any blueberry pie left, and she gives me a funny look and says, “Sure.”

I exclaimed to everyone in the place how they had to buy a blueberry pie, too, on account of these being the best blueberry pies anywhere on God’s earth…but then it was weird, because the lady working there kept giving me quizzical looks, looks that say, ”Who IS this crazy woman?” and “Are we going to have to call the authorities?”… and then when I went to pay for it, she said, “You know, we’re getting more in tomorrow and they might be better…” and you guessed it. When I got to my car and opened up my bag, inside was just a plain old ordinary, garden-variety, anybody-coulda-made-this blueberry pie with the machine-fluted crust, packed in a PLASTIC DOME BOX–something you could have bought at Stop & Shop–NOT the spectacular homemade pie with the little broken-off pieces of crust. 

And I hate to overdramatize this or anything, but I think we can see this for what it is: evidence of a further decline of civilization, as far as I’m concerned. When I told my friend Tammy, she said it is just one more thing that George W. Bush and this administration are going to have to answer for. We don’t know how or why, but I’m sure there’s a connection somehow, and Tammy is going to be looking into it to see if civil action can be taken.

First they do away with the fourth amendment, and now the fresh blueberry pies from farmstands.

Meanwhile, I am simply going to have to make my own blueberry pie. Which probably isn’t such a TERRIBLE thing to have to do, but it’s hot in the house, and my blueberry pies…well, they’re just not as good, frankly.

Does anybody have a great recipe for blueberry pie to pass along?

I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather write than on a train. In fact, if I were rich, I think I would just ride back and forth all day long, typing away, pausing to look out the window at the scenery rushing past.

My friend Louise was asking me why train cars make such good offices–and I really couldn’t tell her for sure. Maybe it has something to do with all that clickety-clackety forward motion that makes the plot of a novel seem that it could also zoom right along.

Most likely, though, for me, it’s the fact that I am forced to sit in one seat for a period of time with my fingers on the keyboard. Left staring at a blank screen for some time, I find that words eventually come pouring forth. And by the time I get to where I’m going, I don’t want to get off. I need to keep writing.

All this is by way of saying that today I went to New York for the day, which meant that I had three glorious hours of train-writing. I wrote an argument between a mother and daughter, a description of a cross-country trip for a just-married couple, and a sex scene.

Just want to say: interesting to write a sex scene while multitudes gather around. At one point, I was typing faster and faster, probably breathing fast, when a woman watching me leaned over and said, “You must really like your work. You look so happy!”

Yeah.  

I might as well admit it: September 1st is creeping ever closer. It is now, in fact, LOOMING. Which means that I should be finished with at least the first draft of this novel. I mean, I don’t think that editors are going to come to my house and seize my laptop or anything…but I would like to have something finished by then. I want to have written THE END at least once.

But then, because one cannot write all the time, I discovered the blog of Joshilyn Jackson here, a verrrrry funny writer who is also on deadline for a novel and so has declared July National PJ Month. How funny is that! Here I was, celebrating National PJ Month too, and thought I was the only one who can’t get dressed anymore and who wanders the house muttering to invisible fictional beloveds.

So today, being Saturday, I bounded out of bed and rejoiced just a little that my family members all had Exciting Things To Do that didn’t involve me, and that I could sit around in my PJs and write, write, write my little heart out.

But instead it turned out to be one of those days ruled by the crazy hamsters who live inside my head, the ones that think anything I’m currently doing is not the right thing at all. I hate those guys!

So far I’ve swept half the kitchen, ruled out going to the gym, started a letter to my stepmother, read five pages of the second pass of the edited manuscript for Kissing Games of the World (due at the end of the week), read the first three pages of the new novel I’m writing and turned the first chapter into a prologue and then changed it back, talked on the phone to my friend Deb for a half hour, read four pages in a book about publicizing books and decided to learn how to make a book trailer and a podcast, checked out three new writers’ blogs, set up a special bookmarking section for publicity sites, read the weatherbug to see when this heat and humidity will lift (answer: never), answered five emails, watered all the plants on the porch that could be watered with one fill-up of the watering can, petted the dog, ate five grapes, contemplated getting dressed and getting a haircut, ruled that out, contemplated cutting my own hair without getting dressed. And now I am blogging.

Heaven help me, but September first REALLY is going to come, and I’m already exhausted.

I swear that I’m not simply going to keep feeding you You Tube videos…actually, I’d planned to write about the lovely hostas in my garden that look like girls in big skirts, but then my friend Beth sent me this wonderful video of a man who, in my book, is a genius. Genius trumps hostas every time!

I wonder if this trick works on babies? Jenny, Amy, Allie…I’ll bet you would hire this guy in an instant!

No doubt you’ve already seen this and have been happy for WEEKS…but I have just discovered it.
Now that my baby birds have flown away, this is my new way of cheering myself up. Watch it and enjoy–be sure your volume is turned on!

Summer writing is very different from winter writing, I’ve found. This summer I am stationed out on the screened porch…which looks, I know,  like a very calm and placid world. I mean, as long as it’s not raining, of course.

I sit out here and work on my novel, drink iced tea, and every now and then jump up and spray soap solution on my plants. (That plant in the picture, for instance? The one that looks so lush with its purple flowers? It’s currently a patient in  my special Soap Hospital for Plants and has about a 50% chance of survival, I’d say, due to an infestation of aphids that I am every day at war with.)

But my main job, now that I am out here on the porch viewing nature’s ways first hand, is as a nanny to a family of cardinals who are living in the bush that is just on the other side of the screen on the upper right of this picture.

I have always been partial to cardinals due to the fact that my father loved birds, and when he was dying, nearly 20 years ago and I was sitting at his bedside, one of the last conversations we had was about a male cardinal who kept coming to the window and looking in at us. It was one of the few times I saw my father smile during that last horrible illness–kidney cancer–and so I have always associated his memory with those beautiful birds. It’s amazing how many times when I’ve been in a tough spot, I look up and there’s a bright red cardinal just flying close by, and I can’t help it, I always feel as though my father is looking in on me, making sure I’m okay.

So this year a couple of cardinals chose to build their nest right on the other side of my writing porch–and believe me, I got the message. These were birds sent by Dear Old Dad just to keep me working at my novel.

After a rather impressive time of building the nest, the female cardinal sat there for day after day, all by herself. She looked in on me as I wrote, and I kept watch over her eggs when she had to fly away for a few minutes. I felt we were creating a bond somehow. She didn’t even startle when I would get up and head to the kitchen for more iced tea, or when the dog would wag his tail against the screen. Clearly, we were friends.

I was puzzled as to why her husband never had to take a turn on the nest—I mean, fair is fair!–but one of my kids told me that I shouldn’t make too much of their domestic arrangements. “Every species makes its own deals,” said my son.

One day she left the eggs for quite a little while, and a bunch of cowbirds came flocking by, hopping up branch by branch, getting closer to the nest. Really? I thought. Am I going to have to police this nest? But just as I was getting up to go have a stern word with the cowbirds, the male cardinal, in all his splendorous red-itude, came charging into the tree, chirping and chattering and sending those cowbirds packing. It was quite an impressive display of fatherhood, let me tell you. 

And then last Sunday, just when we were all exhausted with the waiting–baby birds hatched!

We porch-dwellers were elated.

(I took this picture of them with their little beaks in the air, and you will see why I have to write novels for a living. I am clearly no nature photographer.)

UPDATE: right now, as I’m writing, both the mother and the father cardinal are on the nest, feeding the babies together. I am pleased to say that the father and mother cardinals are turning out to be exemplary parents, flying in and out at all times of the day, at least 35,000 times during my writing hours here, bringing worms and other delectables…and that the minute there is any kind of danger of other birds moving in, the father swoops down from out of nowhere and chases off the intruders.

He seems to be a good protector, and I notice that he brings by some pretty heft worms, too. So maybe he had it written into his contract that he wasn’t responsible for the egg-sitting stage.

That’s the father, there on the left, peeking into the nest while the mom is away…she probably had to run down to the Save & Discount for some Worm Helper…and on the right, there’s the mother, having returned.

It’s astonishing how much drama there can be on a summer day on screened porch in essentially the middle of Nowhere, Connecticut: epic warfare with aphids, the domestic lives of birds playing out before me, and…oh no! Now a cowbird has taken to flinging itself against the screen multiple times, clearly exhibiting bird psychosis. OMG, now it is lying on its back on the porch ledge, legs in the air and feathers all ruffled up. Perhaps this is a bird death scene (a swan song, as it were)…or merely a temper tantrum over not being able to get at those cardinal eggs.

But no. Now the cowbird flies away, the mother and father cardinals go off to dig up more worms. Little bunnies are hopping around in the garden, and a nice breeze is riffling through the screens, making the dog lift his head and smile.

Except for the busy aphids, all is well on the porch. Back to the novel, where things need to have their own dramas.

I have been having such a terrible problem, one so dicey that I haven’t wanted to bother you with it, you lovely person out there in cyberspace living your happy life.

For weeks now, I would be writing my novel…and my computer would just SHUT DOWN. No warning, no blue screen, no apologies. It would simply go black.

We writers are over-sensitive people, and somehow it always felt like a rebuke when it happened. As though the computer was saying, “DON’T write that! For God’s sake, you don’t think THAT’S interesting, do you? I’m sorry–I’m going to bed. Use paper and pen for all I care.”

I called the people you’re supposed to call at a time like this, tech support, otherwise known as The People In India Who Knows Things. The person I talked to was named Dharma (swear to God), and he knew immediately what I must do: pack up the computer and mail it back. Hard disk failure.

“No, please no,” I said. I’ve done that before. Your computer comes back with everything gone from its mind. It’s horrible. Like a lobotomy. You can never find your email addresses again. 

Instead, I called my son who knows many things. He said it might be the hard drive, but it also might be the cord was shorting out something inside the computer. I should replace the cord for $28 instead.

The guy at the power cord place said over the phone that he’d heard of this kind of problem before, and what was really wrong had to be that the motherboard had a crack in it. Bad, bad things were in store for me, he said mournfully. We shook our heads over the sad state of the whole computer industry. The motherboard would eventually have to be replaced, and in the meantime I would probably end up shorting out everything and losing my entire novel, all my music and pictures, and possibly my sanity. 

And then…in the midst of my sorrow, and with my computer going dark on me approximately every 30 minutes or so, I went to the fabulous internets, and there I came across the answer.

DUST. And possible golden retriever hair.

Yes, simple dust apparently gets into the teeny tiny vents of our laptops and collects on drives and fans and wires and who-knows-what-all-is-in-there, and it coats these components like a mohair sweater, and makes the fan wheeze and cough until the computer has to decide whether to burst into flames or shut itself down. That’s what the internets said. People even remarked, “Why is it that no one ever tells you this is a possibility? Why is it always ’send your computer back for a lobotomy’?”

So last night I hauled out the vacuum cleaner and held the hose to all the computer vents for 30 seconds each…and then I turned the computer back on and…well, voila!!!

Ever since, the computer has run like a champ. It purrs. It hums. It no longer runs so loudly that it drowns out ordinary conversation. Just to make sure, I have also started typing with my laptop placed on the wire rack that I used to use for cooling cakes, back when it was cool enough to make cakes. This gives it even more air flowing through those bottom vents.

Who knew that a vacuum cleaner could work in such an amazing way? I may have to see what it could do with our rugs and floors!

It is summer, and despite the fact that airlines are charging passengers now for the oxygen they breathe and for the right to sit squished into a seat, thank goodness people are still getting on planes and flying around the country.

Two weeks ago, Bloglily, whom I only know from reading her very delightful blog, came to the Northeast on vacation, and we spent a day sitting in Atticus Bookstore near Yale, eating lunch and talking as though we had known each other all our lives. It was a little bit like a blind date–going off to meet after only knowing each other through our written words, but within exactly five seconds of meeting her, I knew we were BFFs. We told each other our life stories…and then we told the stories in the books we’re writing, and then she effortlessly solved at least 13 plot problems I’m having with the novel I’m trying to finish, and then we walked around the town and talked some more. (The hardest part was learning to think of her name as Lily, when to me, she’s always going to be Bloglily.)

Then this week my cousin Jennifer popped in, having gone away to California some four years ago and not managing to get back until now. (Well, okay, she did come back for her grandfather’s funeral that one time, but it was a sad occasion, not conducive to the kind of shenanigans that Jennifer and I used to partake in on a regular basis when she lived in Boston and would come down to visit us for weekends and then forget to go back home.) I could describe all the shenanigans for you, but most of them don’t translate well because they involve laughing so hard that tea would come out of our noses. But suffice it to say that Jennifer, who is the daughter of my late uncle, who was a fabulous hippie rock star back in the 60s–did what a lot of flower children’s children did when they grew up: tried to find sanity in her life by becoming part of Corporate America. She used to dress in suits and pantyhose and go to work for uptight law firms in Boston, where they made her miserable and sad.

Those were the days when she would come to our house, where the standards are decidedly low. We cooked tons of food, listened to the rock star’s old music (except for the times it made us too sad, since he had died by then), and played Double and Triple and even Octuple Solitaire on the living room floor, dragging in whoever we could to make them play with us. We sat up late talking and dancing and singing and trying to figure out her life…and then one day she came for a visit and said she was ready to quit her job and take her chances moving across country, where some friends had suggested she come and join them.

It was the right thing to do, even though it made us crazy to say goodbye. So she left four years ago, and now she has a fun job and tons of friends, and a great place to live, with hiking trails nearby, and a GUY. I don’t think she even owns a pair of pantyhose anymore.  She doesn’t think that playing Double Solitaire with me is the pinnacle of happiness anymore, which is probaby a good thing over all.

Here we are together on the morning that she was ready to leave, when we finally realized we needed to somehow commemorate our visit by taking an actual photograph.  To see us together, you would never know that we are related, but the truth is that we share the same grandmother, and Jennifer has our grandmother’s laugh and her great boobs, and I’ve got her hair color but that came out of a bottle. And maybe a little bit, we both have her smile.

Next month, the airlines are going to bring my friend Diane and her daughter Maisie…and I have about 150 pages of novel to write by then so that I can play without guilt.   

I do not know why it’s so tough to do the things I need to do. (I think we all know what we’re talking about here: settling down to work, performing the yoga stretching exercises, paying bills, cleaning the dehumidifier, weeding the garden, flossing the dog’s teeth, washing the bath towels…that sort of thing.)

I have a sign up over my desk that says: “Hard work may pay off in the long run, but procrastination pays off RIGHT NOW.”

This is a bad attitude, I know. I should take it down and replace it with something like: “What? Do you think time is going to wait for you to get around to the things you need to do?” or better yet, something succinct like: “GET TO WORK!”

There are times when the only way I can get anything done is when I do something by accident while I am procrastinating from doing something else. In other words, I can only wash the bath towels if I’m, for instance, hiding from settling down to work. And the garden is only going to get weeded if I’m avoiding flossing the dog’s teeth. (No, I don’t really floss the dog’s teeth–but you know what I mean.) And as for yoga stretching–that just ain’t gonna happen.

But I hate being this way. I am too damned old to be avoiding things this way. I should have developed some true self-control by now. Shouldn’t I? My yoga teacher once told me that I should see this resistance, as he called it (that’s a fancy yoga word for procrastination) as the same as a paper sheet. All I have to do is press against it a little bit, he said, and I would break through–and find myself doing the downward dog without even a second thought.

Then yesterday I ran across this post by Allison Winn Scotch, about how she has beat procrastination! Her advice seems so simple, and yet so profound at the same time:

Something flashes in my brainscan and rather than waste the energy of thinking of when I could do it another time, I just did it! I wrote three blog posts, I started going through my proof pages, and best of all, I actually sat down - right when the impulse struck - and drafted the first scene for my new book.

It was so energizing! I can’t recommend this more. Normally, I’m a list-maker - I jot everything down and axe it as I go. But right now, it seems like the only way for me to accomplish stuff is to seize the moment. Try it! It might work for you!

Okay, I am so on board with this. I am seizing the moment! That means…writing this sex scene that has been eluding me for days and days. I know. Poor me, having to think up a sex scene. It’s not like I have to go weed the garden or even do the downward dog.

But I’m about 25 pages behind schedule in this novel…and by God, I’m going to catch up this weekend! I am not only going to seize a moment. I’m am seizing the whole entire weekend.

Allison, THANK YOU!