Sandi Kahn Shelton

I know. I know. I’ve been a failure as a blogger lately. It’s not even because the New York Times, bless their hearts, has discovered that being a blogger is hazardous to your health and written this story about the dangers of it .I couldn’t bring myself to read the full article since I am very suggestible and would have to be taken to the hospital by ambulance almost immediately, but, according to the concerned folks at the Times, it seems that bloggers are having heart attacks, the implication being that they don’t know when to stop blogging and go eat nourishing food and get some sleep.

Clearly I am in no danger since I know how to not blog.

Actually, though, life has not been exactly a stress-free dream around here.

Things keep coming up.

April and May are always the months when the world seems to come out of hibernation, and things start filling up the calendar. Last weekend I participated in a writers’ conference, which was fun, but…well, talky. I think I spoke nonstop for about six hours on the topic of how you find characters to write about, and by the end I had nothing left in my brain.

And now that that is behind me, it seems I have to prepare for a 45-minute talk on the “challenges of my writing career” to an audience of students at the 5th Annual Writers’ Festival at Tunxis Community College on April 23. I laughed when the organizer told me that they would love if I could bring any photos to illustrate the challenges of this so-called career, which could be shown on an overhead projector. Perhaps I should take a picture of me slumped over my desk, still wearing my bathrobe at 4 in the afternoon, and tearing my hair out while I down cup after cup of tea. Oooh, or perhaps I should show this picture, of the true way my writing gets done. I outsource it to dogs.

At any rate, the good news is: spring is at last coming to Connecticut. There are buds on the trees, the grass is greening up, and at night now you can hear the wonderfully creepy sound of the peepers, sounding like space aliens have arrived.

Excuse me while I go get another Tums and remind that dog he has a novel due on September first.

This is a picture of my mother in the hospital, with her little dog Bear, a few days before she died.

Bear is looking at Peggy, my mother’s friend who had brought him to the hospital for a visit. Peggy lived across the hall from my mother and she now (bless her) raises Bear. He was restless and agitated in the bed, and a few minutes after this picture was taken, my mother said, “Okay, he knows I love him. He needs to leave now.”

I have been thinking about her a lot lately. I miss her so much, even though in the last year of her life, all I did was worry about her all the time. She was always feeling sick and tired, and she was constantly ticked off at her friend, Mike, whom she said was too clingy and also smelled bad. They took turns calling the ambulance on each other, like two children tattling on each other to the principal.

Yep, it was a precarious life there in the senior housing complex in Clearwater, Florida, and she was always getting into scrapes. When I went through her papers at the end, I saw that she was often getting fined because Bear “would urinate on the rugs in the public area and sometimes on the other residents.”

I remember she would call me up in outrage that somebody in the hallway hadn’t moved out of the way in time when it should have been clear to anyone that Bear was lifting his leg! “And now,” she’d sputter, “I have to pay the fine because SHE didn’t get out of the way when Bear was going to pee!”

“Why don’t you teach him not to pee on people?” I’d ask her, but she had no idea that was the kind of thing that dogs and humans could ever negotiate. Dogs do whatever they wish. Didn’t I know anything?

It’s odd how when someone dies far away, you almost can’t wrap your head around the fact that it’s really over. I still go to the phone, thinking I have to call her, I have to make sure she’s okay, and then I remember a split-second later that she’s gone. I feel sadness mixed with relief. Ohhh…she’s not in the hospital again. She hasn’t gotten evicted. Whew.

As though those things would be worse somehow than what IS true: that she’s dead.

I’m so glad I had those days with her in the last month, but of course they don’t feel like they were anywhere near enough of what they should have been. I guess the mind looks for meaning somehow, and there was no meaning. Looking back, it boils down to the fact that one ordinary Wednesday afternoon, she called me up crying and said she thought she had cancer all over her body and that her doctor was making her have a colonoscopy to find out for sure, and then two days later her surgeon called and said, yup, that’s pretty much what we found…and then I went to see her, and for a while it seemed like she might have some time left, but then the time ran out more quickly than anybody expected, and the last days were very hard, and then there was a moment at the very end when she looked up at me and talked to me in such a way that I could remember that once, a very long time ago, before a lot of the bad stuff started happening–the mental illnesses and the separations and the charging thousands of dollars on Home Shopping Network–I had been her beloved child, the one she loved so much and took such good care of.

And then, just when I remembered that, she closed her eyes and died.

I spent two days cleaning out her house and giving her possessions to her friends, and then I came back home. And when I came back home, there were these new babies to cuddle, and a book to finish, and a whole rich life going on right where it had been going before, and after a week or so, it was almost hard to remember those days in Florida when I was there with her, pushing her in her wheelchair and talking about what the end might be like, and whether she should have another cigarette before we went back inside, and wasn’t that a funny time when my uncle sang that song in a bar. All of those conversations–the mundane and the tragic–all mashed up together.

One night when I was there, I had to do a phone interview with a book group that was reading “A Piece of Normal,” and my cell phone would only work outside the hospital. My mother wanted to come with me outside, but I didn’t want her to. I was worried that she would be too cold or too bored, and she’d be stuck outside with me until I finished being interviewed, but no, no, she wanted to come. So I pushed her wheelchair, and we sat outside while I talked to the book group, and it was the first time I had ever had any book-related thing to do with my mother present. My books were sort of abstract to her. She read them, she said “how nice,” but she never heard me talk about them. I was interviewed for about 45 minutes, and she just sat there beside me, in her wheelchair. I was surprised to look over and see that she was smiling and listening–really listening–and when I hung up from talking to the group, she started to cry. She said, “I never knew what your life is really like…I didn’t understand how you felt about your books.”

So there are all these things, these little memories of her, that rise like bubbles to the surface of my mind, and then pop. My mother was the only person left whom I had known for my whole life, and some days now are heavy with the knowledge that there was so much we didn’t get to yet.

Tomorrow, though, I’m going to call Peggy and see if Bear has peed on anyone lately. I’d like to think he gave that up.

Just when it seemed we didn’t have enough procrastination possibilities, now scientists have come up with a whole new area of tests we need to take time out to administer. We need to study our dogs’ tail wags.

I know. It’s too much.But today the New York Times New York Times reported that there is a new study that says how your dog wags his tail shows how he feels about you.

Apparently, if he loves you and appreciates that you’ve been feeding him all these years and letting him sleep in your bed while you’re at work (oh, you didn’t know he did that?)–his tail will primarily wag to the right when he sees you.

If he’s not all that into you, he’s going to give you the left-direction tail wag.

Who knew that tails are like Ouija boards? But that’s what the scientists have discovered, and they ought to know.

Golden retrievers, of course, have no choice but to love us. It’s built into their molecular structure, and they are powerless not to try to do everything they can to express that great love by slobbering on us, lying down where we are trying to walk, and putting as much of their fur on our clothing as they can.

Even so, I needed to test this out. It’s important when you’re home writing a book to take time out for the Important Things in Life.

Jordie is nearly 12–which is about 5,198 in dog years–so he probably would have been just as happy to forego this kind of testing, but it had to be done. He got up and came over when I called him, wagging a straight-down-the-middle wag. Very non-committal, I thought.

“Come on!” I said to him. “You and I are better friends than that!”

He collapsed so he could think it over better, which is when I took his picture. This it not the picture of Dog Love, in my opinion. It is a dog saying, “Why did you wake me up to get me to wag my tail?”

So I sat down next to him and reminded him of all the lovely, yummy tissues he’s taken out of my trash can, and of the times I’ve let all 75 pounds of him sit in my lap when he’s needed to watch television, and of the times the two of us have hung out in the hallway in the middle of the night, during scary, nerve-rattling thunderstorms.

I got two wags, one sort of right-leaning, the other middle-of-the-road.

So then I had to bring up the big guns, his favorite food: carrots. I explained again how I’m the provider of carrots right out of the refrigerator, and how the Other Adult in the Household doesn’t think a dog should be rewarded with a carrot for, say, every little thing he does, like breathing and allowing himself to be petted behind the ears. And how I disagree with that and think that dogs should get carrots whenever they want them.

“Carrots!” I said. “CARROTS!”

His ears perked up and he gave me about 200 big wags to the right. BINGO! It was love.

The phone rang just then. It was Stephanie, calling between classes from New York to say hi. “What are you doing?” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Actually, I’m running some tests on whether the dog loves me, based on his tail-wagging direction.”

There was a rather long silence. “Oh,” she said. “Well, as long as you’re keeping busy.”

Technorati tags: dogs, tail-wagging, New York Times

Marmaduke is asleep on the floor, having binged until he passed out. His owner-man explains to a suit-wearing houseguest and his jowls that this is Marmaduke’s version of photosynthesis.

I may be slowly losing my mind, but this site, called “Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke” always, always makes me laugh. Often we’re talking tea-out-of-the-nose laughing.

A guy named Joe Mathlete includes the day’s Marmaduke cartoon which he painstakingly dissects and analyzes in 500 words or less. While the cartoon itself has never once been funny, the explanation of it can make you lose muscle control for a time. 

That’s all. Back to work now.

Recently I posted a picture of the corner of my living room where I write. Mostly.

Of course sometimes–like now–I have my laptop in the kitchen and I am perched on an uncomfortable kitchen stool while I write this. (Writing on an uncomfortable surface can make one hurry up, and I do want to finish in time to see “The Daily Show.”)

One day I tried to take my laptop into my bed to work, but the predictable thing happened: my legs went to sleep, and then I did, too.

In my history as a writer, I have written–with various degrees of success–at Starbucks, McDonalds, Dunkin’ Donuts, Cilantro’s Coffee Shop, the Saturn dealership, and the place where I get my oil changed.

And then last week I got invited to go along with a friend’s writing group to somebody else’s living room for a writing day…and now I have discovered Writing Nirvana. It turns out that writing at somebody else’s house is just the perfect solution. People are always asking me why I can’t just settle down and write at home, and although sometimes it is true that actual sentences and even chapters have been formed at my own house, there are factors at home that can make it difficult. They are: the dog; the dust bunnies wheeling throughout the house, calling out to be vacuumed; the telephone; the internet; and the fact that there is a bathtub with running water beckoning from just two rooms away.

At somebody else’s house, there are still all those things present–and yet, and yet…you don’t have to be responsible for any of them. Other people’s dogs don’t come and put their dejected little heads on your computer and give you pleading looks until you get up and give them carrots. Other people’s dogs don’t even shed like your own unkempt, unbrushed (for weeks now) dog. Other people’s dust bunnies are gone before you arrive. And if the phone rings–you just keep your head down and keep working. It is not, trust me on this, your mother calling to ask you why you never call her.

And no matter how comfortable I get at somebody else’s house, I am unlikely to ask permission to take a bath.

So for two days recently I have been working with others in somebody else’s living room. We all bring our own lunches and don’t even stop working to eat together. When you get hungry, or bored, or in need of a good pacing, you just walk yourself to the kitchen, pour another cup of tea, cut a slice of bread, or munch on grapes. The house–even with five writers in it–is quiet and calm.

And, the way other people’s houses are, it is oh, so clean and perfect. 

Best of all, you hear the steady tapping of keys. The muse is standing in the kitchen, and she gently leads you back to your work. Sit here, child. No, you’re not going to ask to take  a hot bath. Turn on your computer again and get back to page 176. There, you can do it.

Bloglily has asked her readers to send in pictures of where we all do our writing. And people have sent in photos of the most inspiring spots: library carrels, desks at home that are surrounded by bookshelves, lovely neat surfaces and comfy looking chairs.

Here’s my entry. I spent the day today sitting right here in my living room, curled up on the couch, propped against the pillows with that red throw over my shoulders and the laptop warming my lap. Even so, today it was so cold and the window behind me so leaky that there were times when my hair was actually blowing in the breeze. See the beautiful flowers on the table? They’re from Valentine’s Day, and they smell wonderful. I kept stopping to sniff them. And to drink more of the pot of Earl Grey tea I had made.

Many days lately I work at Starbucks, sitting in an armchair by the window, where the sun shines in so brightly that I feel quite comfortable drinking venti black iced tea with extra ice, over and over again. Sometimes the only moving around I do is to go and order a refill. Writing at Starbucks works for me because there is enough background noise to keep me focusing on what I’m doing–and yet there is nothing there that I’m in charge of or that needs cleaning, so I have no excuse for getting up and doing other things.

Still, today it was nice to be at home, just the dog and me. It was too cold for him to want to go in and out, in and out, in and out. We were both happy just to sit under the blanket and think about our work. (My work is a book; his work is tearing up a stuffed snowman that he loves.) At four, I got up and made carrot soup and a loaf of bread, and then came back to work. That pile of papers on the end of the couch is my novel.

Well, once again I am thinking about dogs. It may be that I am in a Dog Period of Life.

This is Shep, my friend Leslie’s dog–and as you can see, he’s an aspiring writer. I was over at her house one day, working on my novel on her wonderful screened porch. (This was back in the fall, when screened porches could be used for things other than storage.) Leslie was over on the other couch, working on her novel, and our friend Nancy was on still a third couch, doing hers…and then, as happens when so many people are working together all claiming words for themselves out of thin air, I started noticing something.

Leslie and Nancy were typing furiously away, and I was…not.

It was clear to me what was happening. Arlo Guthrie had explained this phenomenon once in one of his concerts, when he was talking about going away on a retreat to write with Pete Seeger. He and Pete Seeger were in a little cabin together, and Pete was writing away fast and furious, writing song after song, and Arlo was coming up with nothing, just nada. And then Arlo realized that all the ideas, you see, were coming in through the cabin’s front door, and they were landing on Pete’s paper before they could even make their way to Arlo.

I don’t know what Arlo did to rectify the situation, but in my case, I did what any sane person would do: I suggested lunch.

We went into the kitchen and made a feast of chicken salad, carrot soup, homemade bread Nancy had brought, chocolate, huge pots of Darjeeling tea. We talked and laughed and told funny stories and traded recipes, all the things we always do.

And when I looked out on the porch, this picture that you see before you is what I saw: Shep, who had been sleeping next to my feet the whole time, had taken over my novel for me.

I particularly like the way his paw is poised on the keys, and how he’s staring off at the doorway, watching the ideas float in–clearly now just for him, just for my novel which even a dog could see was needed them desperately.

When I came back, all he’d actually typed was lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll, but I knew it was a message to me: A dog can be a writer’s best friend.

Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

This is Jordie, who is 11 1/2 years old–which means that he doesn’t want to hear much about anything new in the world. Frankly, he’s got enough responsibility to deal with just handling his rather demanding snowman doll, the occasional Kleenex that needs rescuing out of the trash can, and of course, lobbying for more carrots.

Despite this, I bought him a bed.

I put it on the carpet next to our bed, where he has slept since he first came to our house when he was a puppy.

I said, “Here, Jordie, come here! Come here and look at your new bed.”

He came and looked at it. Then he looked at me.

I said excitedly, “This is your new bed! Look! A brand new soft bed for you!”

He looked at me and tilted his head to the side, obviously wondering if I had lost my mind. Do I not have enough to keep track of in this house? And now you’re expecting me to –what? What will satisfy you people?

“It will be good for your hips,” I told him. Then I went to the kitchen, and fifteen minutes later, I was surprised to hear a muffled swishing sound from the hallway as well as grunting sounds. He was dragging his bed to the kitchen.

That evening, he tried hard to drag it everywhere, making low gutteral talking noises to it, like he does when he’s giving instructions to his snowman. (Already, the snowman has had to be punished several times, and as a result is missing one of his rope arms.) You could see it was hard work, pulling and pushing this huge fluffy bed around the room. He’d have to stop every once in a while, just to glare at it for being so much trouble. Once he laid down across the room from it, and just eyed it suspiciously, refusing to close his eyes when it was in the room.

When it came time for bed, I took it back in our bedroom and put it in his spot. He stood there uncertainly, looking at me and then at the bed. Then finally he got in his spot, curling himself up in a tiny little ball so he wouldn’t have to touch the bed.

The next morning I found it in the middle of the room.

We went on like that for night after night. Finally he stopped trying to drag it around, or to reason with it through growling–but still every night he curled his huge self up so he wouldn’t impinge on its space.

And then one night–I was just about to put the thing up in the attic, figuring that this was just one more tactical mistake I’ve made in figuring out what people really, really need–and voila! He just figured it out. He was standing there looking at this bed, and you could almost see the light go on behind his rheumy old eyes.

My god, what if this isn’t another stuffed animal I have to carry in my mouth and teach life lessons to? What if they’re not expecting me to civilize this thing?

Without any more fuss, he plopped himself down right in the middle of the fattest, most cushiony part of the bed–and he’s slept there ever since.

You can teach an old dog new tricks, I guess. It just takes about six weeks.

The New Year isn’t even three weeks old, and already a lot of people are fed up with it.

Let’s face it. We are an anxious, exhausted people, made worse by the fact that there is a war lingering on and a winter that isn’t quite a winter, and so you can’t quite feel good about the fact that you may need to mow your lawn soon and you haven’t had to shovel even one flake of snow yet. Worse, it seems that just in my little beleaguered circle of friends, people are suffering from pneumonia, meningitis, cysts, sudden irreversible deafness in one ear, torn ACLs, car breakdowns on highways, computer screens shattering when books fall on them, family arguments, missed appointments, clinical depression, and writing rejections.

And, as if all that isn’t bad enough, now objects are starting to go missing.

Just this week I have spent hours looking for the following items: the receipt to the replacement phone I bought that will not work out and must be returned to the store; the password to Stephanie’s bursar account so I could find out why the hell they are still sending me a bill which they know and I know that I already paid in full, otherwise they wouldn’t have let her register for classes; the headphones to my iPod…and of course, my keys.

Then today I go see my friend Deb, and wouldn’t you know that she’s as anxious and exhausted as the rest of us–really maybe worse. She has lost all her estrogen patches. FIFTY DOLLARS WORTH OF ESTROGEN PATCHES, the only things, she says, that stand between her and even the possibility of sanity since her hysterectomy three years ago.

She has spent days and days looking for these things, dreading and postponing that moment when she has to try to get her doctor on the phone and in ten seconds explain that she needs a new prescription–no, she hasn’t used them all in a riot of estrogen frenzy; no, she’s not selling them to perimenopausal women on the street; yes, she’s looked everywhere; please, please, please, for God’s sake, just write me out a new prescription so I can go and spend fifty more hard-earned dollars for another box.

“And then,” she said calmly, “I realized what had happened to them. My dog Miles ate them.”

We looked at each other.

“He ate them?” I said.

“All of them.”

“And he lived?”

“Yes.”

“But how do you know he really ate them?”

“Well, how do you think I know? He’s wearing pearls and high heels and barking about how he wants to redecorate the place. How else would I know?”

This date on the calendar has said WRITE 20 PAGES OF NOVEL for some time now.

That’s how far behind I am on my five-pages-a-day regimen, due to such interruptions as Thanksgiving and the laptop taking to crashing four or five times a day just for fun, and–oh, why not just admit it?–a certain ignorance of just what is supposed to happen next in the book.

So, twenty pages. Very do-able.

Here’s what I did to prepare myself: I called and canceled my scheduled walk with my friend Karen. I turned off the email program, took the laptop to the part of the house where the wireless thingie doesn’t reach so that I couldn’t read the entire Internet, turned down the volume on the phone ringer, and made a whole pot of Darjeeling tea.

Jordie The Writing Dog settled down on the floor by the desk where he could maintain the required vigilance that writing deserves. I read the last few pages of what I wrote when I was still in my right mind, and found a flicker of an idea still rattling around in my head, and then–oh, blessed day!–I started writing.

But then I noticed a weird thing. Whenever I would stop typing even for an instant, Writing Dog would struggle to his feet and come to stare at me. Wagging. Breathing loudly. Resting his head on my thigh. Using his head to knock my fingers off the keyboard.

I was so touched. How like a loyal golden retriever to offer such unwavering support. To say, in doggie fashion, “I know you can do it! Just keep going! Keep going! I have no idea why you need to do this, but I’m sure whatever it is is just wonderful!”

“Thank you!” I told him. “Feel free to go back to your nap. I’ll take it from here.”

But he didn’t go away. This was not encouragement. He wanted carrots. He believes carrots to be the best treats in life, and although he used to only get them for returning back to the house without making us chase him through the neighborhood, now he believes he is to get them whenever he thinks of it.

By the end of the day, here was the scoreboard:

Pages written: 3.2

Times the words “NO carrots, go lie down!” were stated: 1,457

Number of times typing hands were bumped from keyboard: 2,589

Number of carrots ultimately given to Writing Dog: 2 gazillion