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.   

Well, okay, so it’s not exactly “starting off the New Year” if it’s going to January 5 in 30 minutes, but still…

This will make all you writers out there nod in recognition, and can be shown to your non-writing friends and relatives who don’t understand why we have to do this crazy thing.

And it will make you laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4_twvj5HJg

(See? I know other bloggers know how to embed youtube videos right into their posts, complete with little screens that people can click on. And truthfully, I was going to put this post on back on January 1st, except that I’ve spent the last three days arguing with WordPress about how to do this on my own blog. It has refused to post it…not only refusing to post it, but changing the whole configuration of my banner and everything. If you see a car in a green tunnel at the top of this blog, you know that things are not going well. But I will win! I will figure this out.)

At last there’s a game on the internet that actually helps somebody.

It’s a vocabulary game called FreeRice, and if you click here, you will find yourself in a flurry of doing good.

You get a vocabulary word and four choices for its definition–and if you get it right, voila! Not only have you just donated 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program, but, you smart thing you, you get a harder word next time.

A little tally keeps track of all the rice you’ve donated–and meanwhile, if you’re like me, you get quickly hooked on moving up (and yes, sometimes down) the vocabulary ladder. There are 50 levels, but most people don’t get beyond 48, so the site says.

It’s amazing how quickly the rice piles up.

I used to have to play Spider Solitaire before I could truly settle down to a day of writing–but now I’m all about the rice.

I don’t think I’m the only one. My friend Karen says her friend had to delete FreeRice from her computer because she was unable to get her novel written. And Karen herself, a true person of self-control,  has to limit herself to donating 800 grains of rice so that she can get on with her life.

The game started on Oct. 7, 2007…and just yesterday alone 383,730,260 grains of rice were donated.

The number of grains that have been donated since it started?

FOUR BILLION, NINE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE MILLION, SEVEN HUNDRED SIXTY-THREE THOUSAND, FOUR HUNDRED NINETY.

Whoever thought procrastination could really help out?

So many of us have transplanted ourselves across the country so many times that we don’t know anymore whether we’re Southerners or Northerners.

I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, to parents who were both from old-time Southern families. When I was growing up we had to say “yes ma’am” and “yes sir” and eat grits for breakfast. When I was 12, I moved to Southern California, where I discovered that saying “yes ma’am” was considered a sarcastic act that could get you in trouble with teachers. And grits? Nobody out there had heard of them. (I was just as glad.)

Just about the time I’d adjusted to California culture, it was time to move to the Northeast, where I learned to talk about tag sales and bubblers and eat grinders. The cheese that people put on pizza? That’s called moots here (rhymes with foots.) Oh, yeah–and the other weird thing: you have to ASK for it on your pizza. Pizza doesn’t automatically come with moots. Just don’t call it mozz-a-rella when you say it. People laugh and point.

Anyhow, when I came here, people laughed when I talked, saying I talked Southern. And my Southern relatives were horrified whenever I would talk to them: “You sound just like a Yankee, honey. You need to come back HOME.”

So which was I? Dixie or Yankee?

If you’ve got the same problem, you don’t have to sit up nights trying to figure out which one you are. Go click on this link and take The Yankee or Dixie quiz and you can find out once and for all just who you are, based on nothing more than the words you use. (Don’t worry–there’s no quiz about the Civil War or red states vs. blue states.)

It’s all about if you say aunt or ant. Do you call athletic shoes sneakers or tennis shoes? Is a drive-thru liquor store a party barn or a brew-through? (They have DRIVE-THRU LIQUOR STORES?!?)

I’ve lost a lot of my Southern dialect these days, but I still scored 55% Dixie, just from my leftovers.

I’m not sure my Southern relatives would be all that pleased.

This comes, thanks to Dorothy Thompson, who posted it on the Yahoo writers page. She’s a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, too–the times I’ve talked to her on the telephone, I LOVE hearing her accent. That’s the thing I miss, living up here in the cold north: those soft Southern sounds. And, of course, the utilitarianism of the word “y’all.” It really is a word that can’t be replaced with “youse guys.” I’m sorry. It just can’t.

It was a lovely time, really.

We all went to the Cape, rented the same little house we always rent, went to the beach nearly every day where we plopped down in the sand with our sand chairs and our new cooler (the kind that has wheels) and our umbrellas. We ate steamers and drank beer with limes in it, slept late, read books, played killer double solitaire, had long talks and walks, went to a county fair with Charlie, who is 3 and who loves the rides so much that he is in a constant state of grinning the whole time he’s there. Some people in my family ate FRIED TWINKIES. (I did not, not from any moral superiority but simply because I think that Twinkies are already an abomination…and frying them could only make them worse. However, I was hooted at when I mentioned this. So I had to console myself with eating a strawberry sundae that claimed to be the best strawberry sundae in the known world, according to an international panel of experts. This is true.)

It was lovely for the whole week, which alternately seemed short and then longer than forever. The children came and went. There were babies to cuddle and smile at. We ate more steamers, went to Moby Dick’s twice, took a long hike while flies pursued us and we had to run from them, flapping our arms around our heads, laughing and looking ridiculous, which only encouraged the flies to bite us more. There was sunburn. There was the required day of rain, requiring a movie. There was the night we cooked lobsters, and one lobster got out of the bag and terrorized us, a la “Annie Hall.”  

I thought about my novel and made tons of notes on it, and came home and spent today writing it with renewed passion.  New ideas have kept piling in. The main male character pointed out that he had said he was going to California three separate times, and that I really should have allowed him to go, since now he looked foolish for not going. Unmanly. The other boys in the novel were laughing at him and calling him a wimp, I suppose.  So now I am sending him to California–at least temporarily. He has to come back when he realizes he’s in love. He has promised to do that. The female main character, who is mad at him, thinks it would be fine if he stayed there, although she would like to sleep with him. These two are a mess, but now at least I know who I’m dealing with!

I may have gained 250 pounds on this trip, mostly from the butter from the lobsters and the steamers. They don’t call that restaurant Moby Dick’s for nothing. I have become the whale.

They are having a great time over at google…when they’re not chasing down their pet snakes, that is.

If you’re planning a trip to Paris, you might try running Google maps, at

http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=google.com&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=N&tab=wl, and then typing in your destinations:

New York, NY to Paris, France.

This is what you get for step 23:

Of course, some people are arguing that Google has given the very worst possible route for such a trip, since it would have you leave New York and drive on the Mass Pike to Boston before jumping into the ocean at Long Wharf and then you would still have to swim through the treacherous Bay of Biscay once you got close to Paris, but those commenters, like Shane Curcuru have been assured that Google worked out an algorithm to optimize swim travel time. As a guy named Ryan assures us, “You would actually arrive 30 minutes sooner this way, and unusually refreshed.”

Still, there was a person who actually DID swim this trip. Ben LeCompte, a French long-distance swimmer, went from Hyannis, Massachusetts to Brittany, France in 1998, to raise money for cancer research.

Too bad he wasn’t able to consult google on the best route. He had to swim a whopping 3,716 miles instead of the 3,462 google recommends. Although, I suppose once you’ve confronted jellyfish, sharks, turtles and three thousand miles of salt water, what’s another 354 miles?