Sandi Kahn Shelton

I’ve been home from paradise for three days now, and I’m still peaceful.

Amazing.

But allow me to explain. A friend of mine turned 50, and instead of just turning to drink and despair as so many of us do at such a milestone, she decided to invite friends of hers to a four-day celebration at a destination spa here in Connecticut.

It was snowing lightly when we set out at the beginning of last week. I was frantic with To Do lists, uncertainties, anxieties and all the rest of that stuff that I carry around most of the time. (I know that good writing demands that I should mention what some of the anxieties are, but to tell you the truth, I can’t much remember them anymore.) I do remember that I barely got out of the house on time to meet the car that pulled up in my driveway to take me there, and that papers and books were flying behind me as I settled in.

But then we drove for an hour and a half through the Connecticut countryside, and then something almost surreal happened. I got there and actually felt an incredible calm come over me.

At first the calm seemed to come from the beauty of the place: huge, welcoming rooms with deep, white chaise longues and soft, knitted afghans. There were floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over snowy fields and a pond lined with evergreen trees draped with snow, and an almost blue, calm sunset shining glowing. There were fresh flowers. Cups of tea, with little triangle silk tea bags and white china cups. Soft music. (I am a sucker for silk tea bags and fresh flowers. And those, combined with a sunset over a snowy field, knock me the hell out…and add to that a chaise with an afghan, and I’m gone, just GONE.)

Everything just felt soft suddenly. As though I’d come to the place where I was meant to be right then.

And then I met the other women, and I realized over the four days that the best part was NOT the perfection of the rooms, the amazing food, or even the wonderful massage treatments and classes in stress relief and hypnotherapy. The best part was the fact that there were 30 women there, all of whom were kind and fascinating and funny and REAL.

Over the four days, we all wore warmup clothing supplied by the spa, and no makeup. And we talked, in both large and small groups, over meals and tucked into corners of the spa and while we swam in the pool or steamed in the warm aromatherapy room. Talked about husbands and kids and jobs and childhood and aging and…well, everything. Real estate. Politics and sex and anxieties. The past. The future. What we’d like to do. We laughed and drank wine and tea and ate amazing food (healthy and delicious, both), and nobody said mean things like, “What did you mean by THAT?” or “Let me tell you why I’m the most important person in the universe.”

Nobody said, “You could really stand to lose a few pounds” or “Why would you ever wear your hair that way?” like sometimes they slip up and say back in real life. 

Everywhere was peace and quiet, an indescribable feeling of having come to the perfect place. It wasn’t like not knowing there weren’t worries; it was the feeling of standing aside from them and knowing they couldn’t swamp you.

The days loped along. I did things I hadn’t done before, drifted in a kind of shelter of myself. And then one day it was time to come home.

I thought coming home would be a shock, but it wasn’t. Maybe I’m just unwilling to give up this feeling. Nothing seems worth giving over this happiness.

Maybe I’m still hypnotized into believing that life can be sweet. Just in case, though, I picked up a little rock I found on the ground outside the place, tucked under the snow. When this blissful feeling starts to wear off, I’m thinking I can hold this little rock and remember some of the feeling.

Or maybe I’ll just go buy some tea in little triangle silk tea bags. That could work, too.   

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.

Well, it’s almost Oscar Night, and I am so not ready.

This year I’m not even sure which movies have been nominated for which awards, much less who should win–and I still have to get the ballots printed up, cook the chili, and vacuum the dog hair out of the family room so there’s enough room for people to sit down without having to push a golden retriever tumbleweed out of the way.

We have to be ready for the Oscar Party, after all.

This is a party that started up, without our permission, mind you, about twelve years ago, when we were beset with friends simply arriving on Oscar Night, waving ballots at us and insisting on sitting on our couches. No, no, turn the TV in this direction. I can’t see well enough. No! I want the arm chair–you sit on the floor.

We were flattered, make no mistake. When people claim that your family room is the Only Good Place for Watching the Oscars, what are you supposed to do? Say you’re too busy?

Deb was the main perpetrator: one year I discovered that she’d actually sent out invitations and had bought little prizes for the winners in each category (okay, so they were Christmas presents she’d been given that she didn’t like, but they were still prizes). My cousin Jennifer also showed up from Boston, armed with movie trade magazines and piles of reviews of movies she’d been studying. Diane, who was having a long-distance relationship with a sitcom writer in L.A., would show up filled with insider information–and the three of them, along with my kids and husband and me, would puzzle over our Oscar ballots as if the fate of the free world depended on the outcome.

Over the years there have been different casts of characters who attended. We auditioned participants, depending on if they could meet our stringent requirements, which were:

• You have to watch the Joan Rivers portion of the show and have passionate opinions about hairstyles and gowns.
• It helps if you have cultivated a few tidbits of insider information you can dispense throughout the evening. (This is like that portion of Hardball, when Chris Matthews turns to his guests for the segment called “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know,” and it is highly competitive.)
• You must not actually want to watch the actual Oscars as much as be in the mood to scream and yell and jump up and down, throwing balled up Kleenexes at the television set and falling to your knees when something weird happens, like the night that guy climbed over the seats to go up and accept his award. (We have lost a lot of people over the years who thought they were being invited to actually watch the Oscars with us, and then were horrified when we wouldn’t shut up.) (We can’t. We have no control over ourselves.)
• The person scoring the ballots has complete jurisdiction, and just like in Florida and Ohio, ambiguously marked ballots will be disqualified (although whining can sometimes have a good effect).
• There is no requirement for actually seeing any of the movies. We learned that lesson when 6-year-old Stephanie voted the straight Babe ticket back in 1995, and ended up winning far more categories than any of the rest of us, despite the fact that we’d seen all the movies, read endless Vanity Fair pieces, subscribed to Entertainment Weekly, and actually studied the probabilities for months ahead of time.

This year, Diane and Jennifer are both living in California, Stephanie has gone to college, and two others aren’t sure they’re going to make it. It might be just Deb and me watching and screaming and throwing Kleenexes at the television.

If I’d hoped that meant it was going to be less competitive, I was sadly mistaken. Today she called from her cell phone, demanding to know who I was voting for in the Best Sound category. I told her I had no idea.

Really? she said. There is one movie that she felt was head and shoulders ahead in sound, and surely that was going to win, only she can’t remember the title. Then she went on about Martin Scorcese and Queen Elizabeth and on and on…

I finally had to break it to her. “I saw one movie, and I’m going for ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ all the way.”

There was a long silence and then she said: “Are you crazy? That doesn’t have a chance in the world.”

Yeah, but that’s what she said about “Babe,” too.

Is there anything better than waking up one morning and getting to read about a friend in the New York Time Style section–and then also getting to see photos of her house?

I don’t think so.

My friend Mary used to live three miles away from me, but now she lives in Eastport, Maine, where, under the pseudonym Sarah Graves, she writes the most wonderful, funny, suspenseful and fascinating mysteries. (They’re called the “Home Repair is Homicide” mysteries, and here is her website so you can see them for yourself.) The heroine is Jake Tiptree, a transplanted Wall Street business type, who coincidentally also relocated to Eastport, Maine, and who, like Mary and her husband John, is constantly doing home repair.

As the New York Times put it, a lot of the details Sarah Graves’s novels tell the truth about Eastport–it’s just that the murder rate isn’t really so high.

These books will keep you on the edge of your seat, I promise you…and, in the process, you’ll also learn a lot about getting the squeaks out of your wooden floors, and even how to hang a window.

And, oh yeah, what to do when you find a corpse in your basement.

But first–if you want to read a fun story, check out “In Writing, As in Murder, A Hammer is So Handy.”

I’ve always felt there’s a reason they don’t let February have as many days as other months. It  misbehaves so badly that we just have to get through it as quickly as possible, and get on with March, when at least there are daffodils.

We have had a February of crises, both minor and major, involving all the deep inevitabilities of life: death, taxes, water, wind, ice, blood and fire. It has been a little like being in an epic movie. There was a point when my husband looked over at me and said, “We’ve had so many bad things lately that we think we’re having a good day when there are only one or two horrible things that happen.”

February, I said to him. It’s like this every year.

But–dare I say this?–life has momentarily stopped throwing hardballs at us. The heater is fixed, the toilet works again, the taxes are done, the driveway ice has been chipped away, and the dog’s bloody paw has healed.

We even have water again in our well, which is lovely–it only occasionally now throws a whole handful of sediment into our bathtub, and, frankly, we’re learning to appreciate the exfoliating properties of gravel, which are often overlooked. Our skin is going to be so soft come springtime.

I do have to say, though, as nice as it is to take a bath at home, it was sort of companionly and fun going to friends’ houses to shower. How often, after all, do you get to go visit people before they leave for work in the morning? You really get to appreciate how organized your friends are when you see them first thing in the morning. I find morning mostly to be the time of day when I am at my most harried and forgetful, but I have vowed to turn over a new leaf. I have learned this week that there are people who do not every day run out of the door sloshing their tea all over themselves, then running back because they can’t find their keys, or they just remembered they need to get a phone number off the caller ID, or they realized their shoes don’t match.

I’ve actually seen people leave for work who have not only eaten breakfast, but they’ve done the breakfast dishes, swept the floor, done a load of laundry–and I can’t be sure of this, but I do believe they’d even put out food to thaw for dinner.  

Anyway, February is on the run. Yesterday ice stopped falling from the sky, and the sun came out. My editor called to say that the paperback of A Piece of Normal has been selected by Target as one of their Bookmarked books and will appear in a special rack in the store. A website for working moms, called Work It, linked to my blog, which made me so happy because their stuff is so funny and so necessary out there in the world. And my blogosphere friend, BlogLily, is well again and has even learned how to do a podcast, in which she reads a wonderful Billy Collins poem and her child sings a song about elephants in French. And oh yes–she recommended my book! I was over the moon.

And–I’ve gone back to work on my novel, in earnest now–my characters understand that there is to be no more fooling around and no more procrastination…and well, spring is going to be great.

The British have named January 24 the most depressing day of the year, but I say they may have gotten it off by just a week. This year, from my point of view, nothing can beat out January 31 for a sad day.

That’s the day we lost both Molly Ivins and Bill Meade.

Molly you probably know about. Tributes to her writing and her scathing liberal wit have been everywhere in the press lately. She deliciously made fun of the rich, the powerful, and the Texas legislature. My favorite is a description she once gave of one of the legislators of whom she said, ”If you put his brains in a bumblebee, it would fly backwards.” And of another one that “if that man’s IQ slips any further, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” 

Bill Meade, however, you might not have known. He was a family man, a father of three, and a husband. An ordinary guy, except somehow not so ordinary. He loved music and poetry. He read Thich Nhat Hanh and Reader’s Digest, both. He believed in helping people. He worked hard for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised. After retirement, he worked as a volunteer for literacy and in the hospital. He had four young grandsons and a chihuahua named Joey who adored him. Bill was the kind of dad who talked to his grown children every day and never let an opportunity to say “I love you” go unsaid.

By the time I met him, when my daughter started dating his son, he was already involved in a serious fight with depression. You could see in his eyes that the battle was taking its toll on him, and yet what was also there in his face was so much love and tenderness that you sometimes felt you should look away. He was someone who seemed to understand everybody. It was as though he saw to the core of you and recognized all the goodness you were striving for, even if you missed half the time, or even three-quarters. Bill was devoid of pretense, as if he knew he didn’t have time to bother with all that. I think he was in a race with a huge and unmanageable sadness, and the effect of that was a kindness that shone from him, even as it was mixed with melancholy.

He reminded me of a saying I’ve always found comfort in, written by the Buddhist thinker Jack Kornfield: “Life is so hard, how can we be anything but kind?”

This sounds corny, I know, but tonight it’s just a little bit tempting to think of the afterlife being a little bit of a better place, with Bill and Molly both there at once, shining their special light. In the meantime, she left us with a charge a few years ago, and I think Bill would echo it:

“Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce.”

And be kind.

I am proud to say that we have one-thirty-secondths of an inch of snow in our driveway—finally! So it was not a total waste of time to put snow tires on our car this year.

It’s even a little bit cold outside. Not like winter cold, you understand. Not like our usual January bone-chilling cold that makes your eyes water and your nose fall off. It’s just…brisk.

But still, it’s something. Frankly, I am tired of apologizing for this lethargic winter to my friends who live in the West and the South, those who seem to feel that we’ve wimped out here and are now endangering the planet with our manifestation of global warming.

My friend Diane called me today from L.A. to congratulate me on our surrendering to winter and to ask for the actual total snowfall amount.

I had to tell her the truth. She’d only hear it on the Weather Channel.

“Not really very much,” I said.

“Is your driveway white?”

“Well. Yes. With some bare spots.”

She thought this over. I felt guilty, as though I hadn’t really tried harder for more snow. 

“It’s only January,” I said weakly. “We still have February to go. There could be blizzards still to come.”

“It’s been colder in L.A. this year than it’s been where you are!” she said.

“I am so, so sorry about that,” I told her. But actually when I hung up I realized that I’m not sorry at all. I think it’s time we spread out some of the cold weather around the country instead of concentrating it all right here in the Northeast. It’s only fair that they take their turn and not hassle the rest of us.

I refuse to take all this snow just so they can imagine that the world is running properly. Let them shovel the driveways for a season.

I’ll even send my snow tires.

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?”

The winter–such as it is–is taking its toll.

Today my friend Beth told me she became flat-out hysterical yesterday when she tried to put her jeans on, and they no longer fit. Now this is bad for many reasons, not the least of which the winter hasn’t really kicked in yet, and that means that the Days of Wanting to Sit in Front of the Television and Drink Gravy Right Out of the Bowl haven’t even begun, and yet even so, the clothes are starting not to fit. It’s way too early for this!

But Beth is a sensible woman, and she told herself not to panic, that surely the jeans had just spent a little too much time in the dryer, and that she should just tug at them encouragingly and keep hoisting them up, think positive, keep pulling, and that all would be well.

But these jeans would not even come close, no matter how much she struggled. And so at last she came to the only possible conclusion, the conclusion any woman holding her pair of too-tight jeans would quickly get to, which was, (to quote):  “I am a fat fat fatty fat fat fatso who can’t even fit in her comfortable pants because she is so fat, and now I will have to start shopping in the tent section at L.L. Bean.”

She threw them on the floor and threw herself on her bed and started to sob.

And that’s when she noticed that the pants were actually her skinny little son’s.

Okay, so I have a couple of eating issues:

A pound of toffee arrived in this morning’s mail, and there was no one home but me.

I am going out to a party tonight at the best pizza place in East Haven, which may be the town that makes the best pizza in the whole world. This pizza is so great they have to call it “apizza” because–well, they just do. Doesn’t it sound more authentic that way?

Tonight’s party will be the third night in a row I have eaten out, and despite all my good intentions, I have never once ordered just a salad. (Salad seems to be one of the most dangerous foods you can order these days anyway; you might as well order just a plate of arsenic, I think, as a Caesar salad.)

Luckily I am friends with Beth Levine, the queen of funniness, who has advised me the proper way of weighing oneself over the holidays so that life doesn’t get too depressing right when you need to be the most cheerful. Be sure and go to her website, where you can look at all the funny essays and stories she’s been writing for years for various magazines.

Here, meanwhile, are her foolproof rules:

The Only Correct Way to Weigh Yourself:
1. First thing in the morning. (Better yet, while you’re still asleep. Maybe you’re dreaming!)
2. After you’ve gone to the bathroom and before you’ve eaten.
3. Stark naked.
4. After you’ve brushed your teeth (plaque can add pounds).
5. Lean this way or that to make the scale needle move. Who is to say which is the correct point?
6. Weight usually varies by a half-pound each time you step up. Accept the number that appears two out of three times–unless that’s the higher number, in which case, go for three out of five.
7. Subtract a pound if your hair is wet.
8. Subtract 2 pounds if you are wearing underwear.
9. Subtract 4 pounds if you’ve had Chinese food the day before, or anytime it’s humid outside and your rings are tight.
10. Subtract 20 pounds if you have your period.
11. Never use anyone’s scale but your own. Everyone else’s is way off, unless it reads thinner. Then never use your own again.