Sandi Kahn Shelton

On Friday, I came home to find my cell phone bill in the mailbox…and it was double the amount it usually is.

And just when we had decided to stop our wild, spendthrifty ways, too. We have had three months now of trying to be soooo careful–radical things like eating at home ALL THE TIME, canceling subscriptions we can read on-line, cooking all the food we buy instead of throwing half of it out, not driving places unless we absolutely have to, and clipping coupons. I’m even learning to turn off lights when I leave the room.

And then, wouldn’t you know, the cell phone bill goes completely haywire.

It’s not like a regular human can actually READ a cell phone bill to try and figure out what happened, so I called up customer service and said, “Would somebody there please walk me through this 14-page document and explain how it is that my cell phone is always $114 but now is $229? Did I somehow walk in my sleep and sign myself up for a new deluxe, charge-me-for-everything plan or something when I had to replace my old phone last month?”

The woman who had answered my call said, “Oh, didn’t you just want to faint when you looked at that bill? I know just how this is!”

I was silent for a moment. ”As a matter of fact, I did consider fainting,” I told her, “except that I knew I would probably just bonk my head on something on my way down to the floor and then I’d have an additional medical bill to pay.”

“Well, let’s just see what’s going on here,” she said. “Sit down and take a few deep breaths, and I’ll see what I can do.”

She kept typing things–I could hear the clicking of the keys–and after a moment she said, “Oh! I see exactly what this is! One of the people on your family plan made lots and lots of calls last month!”

“Yes. That’s my daughter,” I said. “She’s at college and she doesn’t have a land line. She uses her cell phone for everything.”

“Ohhh. She must have had a tough month. Usually we see this when kids are stressed out at school. That’s when they need to talk to their friends.”

“Yes,” I said. “They do.”

(March had been a tough month: lots of sickness, a couple of friend crises, some heavy decisions about next year’s courses and housing situations.)

“Well,” said the woman. “Let’s just make all that go away. You’re back to where you usually are. Just tell your daughter to use the phone nights and weekends unless her friends are on the same network, and then they can talk anytime. This was just a one-time deal, though, I bet. She’ll be more careful from now on.”

I sat there stunned. “You took the extra calls away?”

“Yes. You’re back to where you usually are. Your bill is $114.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No! Have a good day.”

“YOU TOOK THE CALLS AWAY?”

“Yes. It wasn’t your usual bill.”

“Um, can I send you some chocolate chip cookies?” I said.

“Oh, no,” she said. “You know how much trouble I’d get into for that?”

Has anybody else ever had anything like this happen? Are there LOTS of companies just waiting for us to call them and say we need our bills explained?

Maybe I should call up the heating oil compan. Would they say, ”Ohhh, I see what happened! George Bush really messed up the economy with that war in the Middle East. You shouldn’t have to pay $3.80 a gallon for heating oil. Let me just put that back where it used to be….”

For those who don’t know what the FAFSA is, I say to you: bow down right where you are at this minute and kiss the ground. Pat yourself on the back, shake your own hand–and then take yourself out for a nice dinner and drink.

The rest of us will just sit here, gnashing our teeth.

The FAFSA stands for Free Application for Federal Student Aid, and it consists of, oh, about 103,000 questions designed to make you examine your entire financial situation. After all, you are asking the government to kick in a few bucks so you can send your child to college–and that help doesn’t come cheap.

They want worksheets from you if they’re going to think about doing something like that. And not only worksheets–they’d like to see your tax return, hear about your checking and savings accounts, and ponder with you how they might make use of your retirement funds before you get to them. They throw around inexplicable terms like “credit for federal tax on special fuels” and “foreign income exclusions.” Occasionally they mention the word “perjury” if you should fill out the forms wrong.

And they have STRICT DEADLINES. The kind of deadlines that mean you have to get your taxes done way before you would normally think of such a thing.

But all those are not even the worst things about the FAFSA.

The worst thing is that they want to operate the world on a system of PIN numbers.

Which you have to apply for in advance.

And everybody in your family has to have a different one.

And you are supposed to guard it with your very life and know where it is at all times.

Because if you forget yours, then you have to wait a long time while FAFSA thinks whether they will help you find it in their voluminous vaults where they store such things. Don’t even think about trying to get them to give you a new one. They won’t hear of it.

I don’t know about you, but I have had it with PIN numbers–especially PIN numbers that other people pick for me.

And so every year, despite the fact that I store the PIN numbers in folders which I mostly know the location of but not completely because too many things live in this house, I get heart palpitations just at the very thought of locating these PIN numbers and remembering whose is whose, and then entering them in just the right spaces, and worrying what if they’re wrong because I’ve waited until the very last minute ONCE AGAIN, and what if the government says these are the wrong numbers and they have to take a couple of weeks to go into their vault and look for my numbers, (which has happened in the past) and then we won’t get financial aid and it will all be my fault and March 1st is coming, which is the DEADLINE. The absolute DEADLINE for “priority consideration,” whatever that is.

I tell you, it could make a person delirious.

But last night, FEBRUARY 28, I sat down with all my trepidation and the online FAFSA, filled it all in, and typed in the PIN numbers.

Wrong, said FAFSA.

So I had the requisite minor heart attack, possibly a small stroke, began developing an ulcer and possibly some kind of tumor.

Retyped them, this time very carefully, so as not to transpose any numbers.

WRONG!

Then, through blurred vision, I realized that, ha ha, I had switched our numbers by accident. I had used MINE when I needed to use Stephanie’s. Ha ha ha.

I re-entered all the data. Filled out all the rest of the thousands of pages. Pressed the button to file my E-SIGNATURE, which is a hocus pocus thing so you don’t have to wait two weeks for them to process a piece of paper with your actual signature on it.

The FAFSA said NO.

Had another minor heart attack, several small strokes, noted that my ulcer was in full bloom now.

So I called them up! Yes, it turns out they have a phone number. And human beings. A HUMAN actually talked to me, and at first the human was as mystified as I was. I thought this was going to be another one of those times when machines have defeated us, like when you try to get your bank balance online and your bank pretends not to know you and says you didn’t type in your name, but YOU DID, it’s RIGHT THERE, but the machine says it isn’t, so you just have to leave the internet and go drink something alcoholic.

But then, when all seemed lost and there wasn’t going to be any financial aid this year after all, the human said, “Aha!” and explained that there was one teeny tiny question, one way way down at the bottom of the screen, which due to my hysterical blindness caused by the major illnesses I was contracting, I hadn’t noticed.

So I answered it, and palms sweaty and heart palpitating, pressed the SEND button–and the FAFSA left my computer screen and MAY HAVE GONE TO WHERE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO, that part remains to be seen, but it left at least.

I printed out all relevant documents, slumped over the keyboard, and promised that never again would I wait until the Last Possible Minute to do this, even though really there wasn’t any other way.

It was then I noticed that–hey, we have a Leap Day! March 1st is still technically waaaay off. We were awarded another whole day for the FAFSA this year.

I’m actually ahead of the game for once. AND, best of all, because Stephanie will be a junior next year, I only have to do ONE MORE FAFSA in my whole life.

One more to go. I might even be able to remember where I put the PIN numbers.

I haven’t been writing much lately because, like the rest of the country apparently, I have gotten just a tiny bit addicted to politics. I am reading politics online and in the newspapers and watching politics on television and following every last “he said, she said” waaaay too much. If Obama ever gets tired and doesn’t want to deliver his well-worn speech, I am ready to jump in and deliver it for him. I think I could do it verbatim, even without the teleprompter. (”McCain can’t say I supported the war…because I didn’t. And he can’t say I gave George Bush a blank check, because I wouldn’t.  … I was born to a teenage mother. My father left when I was two, and I was raised by a single mom and my grandparents…”, etc., etc.)

Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE this speech! It plays in my head day and night. I could listen to it for ten more primaries if necessary.

Luckily I had some major distractions come to visit me this weekend. And Mike (he’s the one on the left) put my camera on a chair in the dining room and then had us all face forward (how we got babies to face forward was a minor miracle, and then he ran and jumped in the picture–and this is what we got. Amazing!

Here is just one of our runner-up pictures…before we got the main one to work.

And what is a day without a little puppy love? Jordie, who normally runs when he sees anyone under five feet tall coming toward him, was patient and submissive for this kiss. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that Miles had his nose in a vise grip.

You  might not think those two topics have anything to do with each other: haircuts and writing fiction.

I wouldn’t have either, until yesterday.

Yesterday was the day I suddenly couldn’t stand my hair another second. You know what this is like. It was either go to the hair salon or get the pinking shears out of the sewing box and have at it myself. The night before, my hair had been subpar but acceptable, and then Tuesday morning, it was unbearable. Go figure.

Luckily I see a haircut person who is not only wonderful, but she works a million hours and seems always to be able to get a person in if she hears that pinking shears might become involved. So I called up, got an appointment for 2 o’clock, and then spent the morning writing my novel.

By the time the appointment came around, I was lost in the book, totally immersed in the story–but, hello, this is a haircut we’re talking about. You have to go to a haircut! So I went.

“What are you working on lately?” asked the hairdresser, whom I will refer to as R, for her own protection. She took me over to the sink to be shampooed.

So I told her about my book. (I have to stop here and say that I knew this was very, very bad to do. Writers are not supposed to discuss the plots of their books with anyone, not even kindly, interested hairdressers. I have never understood this rule, but all the other writers will tell you this. It has something to do with spending the energy of your book in your excited retelling of the plot, when actually all that energy belongs on the page. Or something like that. You  just have to trust me on this: all your better writers won’t discuss their books.)

But there I go, blabbing away about my plot, which involves (here I go again, telling) a massive, almost unforgivable infidelity between a couple who has been married for a long time. The infidelity took place at the beginning of their marriage, and has been…well, smoothed over. So I’m telling her this story as she’s taking out the scissors and the combs, and she’s nodding and looking very, very interested, and so I’m telling more and more.

And then she says, “My father left my mother after 30 years of marriage, when I had just gotten married and was pregnant with my first baby. It turned out he had been having an affair, and he just left.”

Now is that fascinating or what? We got into such a wonderful conversation then–all the gory details of love affairs and how people find out, and how my characters find out and what happens next, and what happened to her mother, and how she wouldn’t speak to her father for years, and yes, he’s still with the other woman, but it’s very awkward, and how her mother tries hard to forgive him but can’t really, she’s broken now and has no self confidence…and we talk all the way through my haircut. By the end of it, we are so overcome with emotion that we have to HUG before we can go our separate ways.

And I go home and sit down and work on my book for the rest of the afternoon.

But then last night, as I was combing my hair before I went to bed, I noticed that…well, there’s a big chunk of hair that’s simply missing. On the right side. Like, ridiculously so. I can’t pull  my hair back anymore because on one side I seem to have  a pixie haircut and all the other sides are kind of regular…longish, even.

I have no idea what to do. The obvious lesson is: I should stay home and write my book, quietly, until my hair grows back in again. And when I go back to her later (as I will), and she asks me what I’m working on lately, I’ll say, “Ohhhh, nothing really,” and open a magazine. With a yawn.  

Today I woke up late, drove 30 miles to pick up a friend to go to a goal-setting workshop that took three hours, (my goals were not to be in such a hurry all the time), then stood in a thirty-minute line for lunch, took her back to her house, drove home, went to the grocery store to buy ingredients to make Thai soup for dinner, rented two movies, drove back home, and then drove 30 more  miles to pick up my daughter from her babysitting job, drove to a second grocery store to get the rest of the Thai ingredients that I couldn’t find at the first store, and then drove home, decided the Thai soup was going to take too long to cook when we were all so hungry so I made chicken curry in a hurry instead, and then washed the dishes, and then came downstairs to work for a little while, sending out a bio for a talk I’m giving in April and tracking down sources for a story I’m working on for the newspaper.

And I came across this quote, which seems to sum why I still feel in such a good mood:

Leonard Bernstein said, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”

I rarely take on issues in this blog. Mostly it’s just me, talking about my own life, showing pictures, going through the throes of writing and parenting, and talking to my friends about both of those things.

But today I got a comment on a post from Mother Pie, and since it’s always so much fun to meet new bloggers, I went over to her blog and read a few of her posts, which were wonderful…and then I came across this one, a post from a soldier in Iraq, who has been writing a blog for the past five years for the Rocky Mountain News.

Andrew Olmsted lived constantly in the presence of great danger, and so he wrote a very thoughtful, heartbreaking post to be published in the event of his death. Aside from the political ramifications of the war in Iraq (which he asks us not to use his death to talk about), there is something so poignant in being able to read a man’s honest and forthright look at his life. Without even a trace of self-pity, he talks about what he would have done differently and what he will miss and the people he wished he could have met, and then he tells us about his wife and what he hopes for her future. He tells about his feelings for the job he was doing and his country–and says that if he had to die there, he hopes we will all spread the story that he must have died liberating a village and saving innocent women and children, though he admits that probably isn’t the way he died.

It is a beautiful look back at life. And I’ve been sitting inside today, typing away while it is nearly 60 degrees outside…and, well, I just think I’m going out for a walk.

It is the last day of the year, which is as good a time as any to look at the present moment.

So here it is: a moment.

It’s 1:45 on a Monday afternoon, and I am sitting at my desk in the family room, with my laptop in front of me, and I am listening to a Nellie McKay song called “Gladd.” I just heard an interview with her on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross while I was in the car, and so I came home and downloaded some of her songs on iTunes. (When my New Year’s resolutions kick in tomorrow, I will not be downloading quite so many songs on iTunes.) I’ve just realized that this song is from someone who died–it’s kind of a hymn of comfort, the type of thing a dead person might want to say to those left behind…and since this has been a year in which a lot of people close to me died, it seems particularly fitting to listen to right now. You can listen to it for free on the npr website…here’s the link, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6719830, and then you click on Listen. (I promise you: it’s not a sad song. It’s really beautiful and comforting.)

Anyway, back to the moment. (This is why I can never be a Buddhist; I can’t stay in any one moment.)

It’s now 2:26, and I’m just back from making a pot of white needle tea, which is wonderful–warm, light and delicious. The dog is stretched out asleep next to me, but you can see by his flickering eyelids that he’s not deeply asleep. His feeding time is officially 4 o’clock, but he gets ready by 2, and so any time I shift in my chair, he comes to hopeful attention.

Outside it is sunny although we were supposed to have a snowstorm today, so the sky–which is a delicate egg-shell blue with little white wispy clouds–seems like a particular blessing today. One of my children is snowed in in Boston; another had snow yesterday in Pennsylvania, and the third has gone off to meet New Year’s Eve in New York City. The house still looks like a post-Christmas apocalyptic catastrophe. I managed to get the wrapping paper out of here for the garbage pickup today, but there are still stockings lying around, looking indolent and self-satisfied, and a few stray boxes that should either go up to the attic or politely out with next week’s trash.

If I were to make a list of all the things I should be doing, it would be long indeed.

• I should be interviewing the subject of my next newspaper story, a 16-year old boy who will tell me why he believes exercise saves him. (I did try to call him; he’s not home. No doubt he’s out being saved by exercise right now.)

• I should call Jennifer and Stacy and Alice and Butch and wish them all Happy New Year, because it’s been too long since I’ve checked in with the extended family, and I would actually LOVE hearing what they’re all doing.

• I need to make an appetizer for the New Year’s Eve party we’re going to tonight with friends. While I was upstairs waiting for the tea to brew, I read the Cook’s Illustrated cookbook and thought for a long, hard moment about launching into a huge cooking project, and then decided, “Nah. I’ll go buy some shrimp and make shrimp cocktail. Everybody likes that, and why wreck the moment of being alone in the house listening to music by myself?”

• I could do laundry. I think it’s been weeks.

• Empty the dishwasher–those dishes in there have been clean for a few days, I think.

•  Go the gym and see if exercise saves ME.

• Send out Christmas cards, which now would be called New Year’s cards and may yet have to turn into valentines.

• Make some more New Year’s resolutions, along the same lines as STOP DOWNLOADING ITUNES.

But you know something? This day is just too marvelous the way it is. Just a perfect moment in time–the heater roaring softly, the music, the taste of the tea, the knowledge that soon I’ll have to go out and buy shrimp and cocktail sauce. I will go back to reading my novel and making the last little tweaks, the last Ridding of the Adverbs as I think of it.

Nellie McKay is singing her last line: “It’s been a long time coming, but all the pain has passed and there is peace.”

To all of you who stop by for a visit, Happy New Year…and may 2008 bring you much joy and peace.

It was a lovely Christmas, really. Besides the usual presents under the tree and stockings hung by the chimney with care, and carols playing on the stereo, we had babies taking baths, crowing at each other, sucking on washcloths, and splashing. As my friend Nancy said, “Now we know why God invented double sinks.”

We had my husband and me, sitting on the kitchen floor with the three grandchildren, laughing. That is Charlie and Josh, measuring each other, while their cousin Miles looks on with envy. He is clearly wondering who you have to know to get your own big brother around here.

And we had the dog posing as William Tell’s son, although I’m happy to report that no one shot an arrow at him.

For a while life was so chaotic here that we all seemed to be doing triage, rushing from one tumultuous situation to another. But there was plenty of food, and laughter, and music–and lots of time to cuddle children and read stories. By the time Christmas was over and we had packed everyone off to their respective homes, we were so tired we had to pretty much take to our beds. The next day I got up and mailed off all the things they had forgotten to take home with them.

Then today, Hospice called.

“Sandi? How are you doing?” the social worker said.

“Well…I’m fine,” I said. The caller ID hadn’t said anything about Hospice.

“Really?” she said. She sounded surprised, like it might not be okay to say you were fine. Not after you lost your mom to cancer just six months ago.

“It was a good Christmas,” I told her. “Of course, I miss my mother terribly, but there were babies here, and my whole family came, and there was a lot going on.”

She was silent, respectful.

I didn’t tell her about the dog with the apple on his head or the double sink, or how I played one of my mother’s favorite songs on the stereo but didn’t mention to anyone that it had been her favorite song. Or how sometimes lately I wake up at night thinking about those Christmases I had a long time ago…when my mother decorated the house with little styrofoam ornaments with toothpicks and sequins, and how she would whip up Ivory Snow detergent into what looked like snow, and have my father coat the boughs of our Christmas tree with it. Bowls and bowls of it. One year she used 24 boxes of Ivory Snow. For years the smell of Christmas was for me the lovely fragrance of laundry soap.

But when I hung up, I sat there for a long time thinking about all of that.

The best Christmases are mixed, I think. The fun of being with little children and seeing family members try to reach out toward each other…all that new bright happiness can’t help but be more lovely when it’s mixed in with the awareness of loss. And the fact that when you look around, you realize that everyone else is struggling with some form of loss as well. No one gets by untouched.

I miss my mother now almost more than I did when she first passed away. As time has gone by, I’ve replaced the memory of those last hospital days with the larger memories of when I was a child and she was the person I depended on most in the world.

It’s a wistful feeling, of course. And fleeting–just like the smell of pine needles drenched in 99 44/100% pure Ivory soap.

It was midnight last night when my husband delivered the news. “The piles,” he said in a low, ominous voice, “are uneven.”

I blanched.

I knew what this meant. I have to go back into…the stores. No matter how you look at it, the presents for the children are unbalanced. And since we’re having a “light” Christmas anyway (read: cheap and stingy), it isn’t going to be good enough to even up the piles by taking some people’s presents away.

Oh, no. This is clearly a day when I have to go shopping once again. On the weekend before Christmas! When people who are crazed will be there, pulling things off the racks, forming long lines to the cash register, snarling with holiday cheer gone bad.

There is nothing worse than holiday cheer gone bad. Trust me, I know.

This year, for the first time in many years, I got in the mood for Christmas right on time. I didn’t kvetch about the decorations going up just before Halloween. I made peace with the fact that a Major American Holiday was coming–and even before I served the turkey for Thanksgiving, I had bought some presents, which is unheard of for me. I’m usually smacking my head on Dec. 15th and saying, “WHAT?!?!? Nobody told me it was Christmas!!”

But there I was, decked out in my holiday spirit and clutching my little overused credit card, clicking away ordering things online. By the time Cyber Monday rolled around, I was nearly done with my shopping.

But then a curious thing happened: the rest of the planet caught up with me, gift-buying-wise, and, I don’t know, I just kept picking out little things here and there. Things I obviously can’t tell you about, but you know what I mean. That for her and oh this is on sale and he would like that, and oh yes, the baby needs this, and yes, the other baby should get one, too. And somehow even though I’ve been proudly done with my shopping for weeks now, I still have to go shopping on Dec. 22 (and maybe again on Dec. 23 and 24, because who knows if the piles will even up and stay even?)

First, though, I’m having a cup of tea and admiring the tree for just a little longer, maybe reading three more stories from the fiction issue of The New Yorker that came this week, playing another round of Christmas carols. (I’m loving the Bare Naked Ladies’ version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” with Sarah McLachlan.) 

And then I’ll go. Yes, and take my place in the long, long lines that by now are surely twisting around the stores, going down the blocks, and heading toward the New Year.

Hope your holiday is a happy one, whatever you celebrate…and that your piles stay even.

There’s a lot of things to accomplish, especially at this time of year–but I’m happy to say there’s a new thing we can cross off our list.

We’ve worked out a plan to prove our identity to each other should one of us be taken by kidnappers or terrorists.

It was Stephanie’s idea. She’s a sophomore in college and has a lot on her mind, what with final exams coming up and all. But she called me the other night and after we finished with our usual topics which involved travel schedules, untenable homework load, food situations, possible health insurance claims, requirements for new pieces of clothing now that the weather has changed, and computer glitches causing unheard-of troubles, we got down to the Real Business: our emergency management plans.

She’d watched a movie recently which got her thinking how she would ever prove to me that she was REALLY Stephanie, should that ever come up.

“Here’s what I’m going to say, Mom,” she told me. “Remember how when I was little and you were putting me to bed, we would always say to each other, ‘I love you a million dinosaurs on a million mountaintops’? If I ever have to prove I’m really me, that’s what I think I’ll use. You’d definitely know that was me.”

You know, a lot of people don’t think of this kind of thing in advance. And I’m relieved I’m not the only person waking up in the middle of the night worrying about such contingencies.