Sandi Kahn Shelton

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.

I got to see my friend Diane this past week–and even though I am right this minute simultaneously writting this blog entry, cooking dinner, eating leftover candy corn, angsting over the upcoming election results tonight, IMing with my kids, and doing a load of laundry–I still am possessed of this hazy, golden memory of walking around New York City last Friday with Diane, conducting about six simultaneous conversations, at least five of which could have taken place twenty years ago just as easily as today.

You see, for reasons that I can’t quite figure out, Diane and I can’t seem to get our lives sync-ed up right. Since the 1980s, when we first became friends while working for the same weekly newspaper (while running that newspaper, actually), we’ve lived parallel lives, but in a consecutive universe.

When we first met, I had kids, and she didn’t. And now she has a kid just at the time when mine have vacated the premises. Sort of rotten timing, I think. How much fun we would have had taking our babies to the park together. Instead, when my youngest was a baby (okay, a hard baby), Diane and I had to conduct all our conversations while doing errands, usually while Stephanie kicked the back of the car seat and screamed.

One time, getting ready for one of these drives, while Stephanie hollered, I was counting on my fingers the list of all the things I needed to bring along: my purse, the diaper bag, the bottle of apple juice, the bag of goldfish crackers, the three pacifiers, the required four changes of clothing, the Barney book, the Grover sippy cup, the Sesame Street CD, .. when I stopped and said, “Wait, I’m forgetting something. What am I forgetting?”

And Diane said, “The stun gun?”

Over the past 24 years, we’ve gone together through disastrous love affairs, my divorce and remarriage, her marriage, her cancer diagnosis and treatment, my sister’s death, the birth of our children, lots of dinner parties, numerous health crises and hypochondriac moments, thousands of do-I-have-a-right-to-be-mad-about-this conversations, a million newspaper deadlines, probably fourteen house-moves between us, and zillions of hours of conversations, many of them in restaurants, and many of them taking place while one or both of us was crying.

Anyway, so now Diane lives in L.A., where she is the mother of three-year-old Maisie and she is married to a television writer, which means that until the television industry throws in the towel, she can never, ever leave. (She pretends that she wants to, that she misses snow and ice–which she refers to as “the changes of the seasons”–but I am from Southern California myself, and I know that not having seasons is also very good.)

It is technically possible to carry on a relationship with people who live in different time zones–but not, I think, when they have a small child. You can’t just call them up any old time you feel like it, like when you first wake up in the morning and you might like some friendly encouragement to start the day. And then, by the time they’ve finished their dinner, cleaned their kitchen and gotten their kid to bed–well, you are turning off The Daily Show and heading for sleep yourself. (If you have any sense.)

But then this past weekend her sainted husband actually gave her a weekend pass out of L.A., sans child, and we got to see each other face to face.

I think it was the first time in our twenty-four year friendship that neither of us had to be somewhere on account of a child needing us.

So what did we do? We did all the things we used to do: tried to figure out what lipstick color would look the best on us. (We both bought the same color; it turned out to look great on her and horrible on me, so now I will mail it to her.) We tried on jeans and sweaters at Loehman’s. We looked at toys we might buy and then couldn’t decide which ones to buy so we walked away without buying any of them.

We talked about our work and our husbands and our kids. We even held our favorite conversation, which is Were We Happy In The Old Days, Even Though We Were Broke and Heartbroken A Lot of the Time? (One of us always argues that we were actually quite happy because we were excited about every little improvement we could make, and we were young and we had a lot of energy and hope.)

We ate lunch at Monster Sushi, our favorite sushi place in Manhattan and stayed for hours and hours–almost until it was time to order dinner. And we did not cry.

Later we walked miles through New York, and maybe just because it didn’t feel right to be with none of our kids for a whole visit, we met up with my two daughters and had dinner.

There wasn’t any crying at dinner either. Well, except for me. Sometime between the fried tofu course and the time they brought us the green tea, I got a little teary-eyed looking around the table, feeling startled to see these two grown girls I have, and seeing them with Diane, who has been my friend forever and has been there with me to watch them turn from babies to women.

Today, back at home cooking dinner, waiting for the Democrats to win some seats in the House, I feel both grateful and greedy for more of those days in New York, those dinners and long talks and walks. And I’m aware that the day is going to come when we will have another dinner in New York–possibly after a day of trying on lipsticks and jeans–only this time it will be Diane’s current three-year-old who is the young woman across the table from us.

And when it happens–well, I just know we’ll still be having the same wonderful, comforting conversations. We’ll get to the bottom of it once and for all: Were we happy in the old days? And why were we crying in all those restaurants?