Sandi Kahn Shelton

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.

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?

We have suffered an outrage, my little circle of friends and I. An ethical outrage.

We’ve had our hearts broken by our favorite consignment shop…and while I know lots worse is happening to people every minute and this wouldn’t even make the Top Ten of Bad Things that happened, probably even on my street, still…when your heart is broken, your heart is broken.

OK, about this consignment shop. Shopping here is actually lots more fun than shopping at regular stores–mostly because you never know what you’ll find, and most of the time you come home with something that you probably wouldn’t have ever even looked at in a “real” store. Last winter I bought a faux-shearling coat there FOR TWENTY DOLLARS that I loved so much I couldn’t wait for winter to come again, just so I could wear it and think again about how it had only cost twenty dollars.

And I got a red cashmere sweater that I never would have bought–not in RED, at least. But it’s fine…it’s more than fine. It’s soft and bright, and in the store, I probably would have gone for the boring blue one or the white one, but hey this one is RED. It announces itself. And it was FIFTEEN DOLLARS, but it’s real cashmere and doesn’t even have any of those little pills yet on it.

I could go on. I’ve been shopping there for years, and most of the really good things in my closet came from there–and then every now and then, when I’m organized, I pile things in a box and take them down there and trade them in and get new stuff.

It’s like the best thing there is, retail shopping-wise. 

Until my heart got broken, that is.

So here’s how it happened. First of all, the rule at this shop is that when an item has been there for 30 days, it then goes on sale for half price. This, of course, even makes consignment shopping MORE fun. You go in there, fall in love with something–but then sometimes you just have to take the chance that it will be reduced. It’s like a little gambling game you’re playing, the thrill of the deal.

And you might lose. I have lost very many times, and kicked myself HARD over not having the good sense to buy something immediately and pay the full price for it.  

So–oh yes, back to how it happened: my friend Leslie fell three-quarters in love with a coat there a few weeks ago. I say three-quarters in love because there wasn’t really a question of paying full price for it. She loved it, but she wasn’t going all lovesick about it. It was a perfectly wonderful, kind of Mary Poppins-ish coat–long and black with kind of an indent at the waist, which looked divine on Leslie. But $68! We agreed it looked great on her, but it was too much. 

AND it was going to go on sale in only two weeks from the date we discovered it, so it seemed, all in all, worth it to wait this one out. Only then, as often happens, we both became a little obsessed with the coat. Leslie couldn’t stop thinking about it. She went in to visit it a few times, just to make sure it was still there. And I stopped in once or twice, too, just to see it once again and say hello to it and “I hope I see you soon, in Leslie’s closet.”

Then, on the day before it was to drop to $34, we both drove by the consignment shop with the intention of going in just one more time, just to make sure. The store had a CLOSED sign in the window–no customers, but you could see the workers doing renovations inside.

Had the coat survived right up until the last possible moment, with no one plunking down $68? Maybe it had!

Leslie called me that night. She had an important meeting the next morning–but she wondered if I had the time to go by when the store opened and buy the coat for her. “If it’s not there, don’t worry about it,” she said. “But I really hope it is.”

Well, I couldn’t wait. I went to the gym early in the morning and left in time to get to the consignment shop before it opened. It seemed imperative to be the first customer through the door! I tell you, I was psyched for this. I sat in the car until they turned the sign to OPEN, and then hurried in. And–yay!–there was the coat, hanging near the cash register.

“Oh!” I said. “Wonderful!! It’s here! That coat–Leslie’s coat…”

The owner, Kristin, said, ”Oh, that coat is reserved. You can’t have it.”

“Reserved?” I said. “Really? Oh, no, I didn’t realize people can call in and reserve items that are going on sale.”

Kristin said, “Well, as it happens, the person who wants it didn’t call in. She actually came into the store and reserved it.”

“But when?” I said. “It just went on sale three minutes ago.”

So, okay, I didn’t say that. Instead I said something like, “Oh, my friend Leslie is going to be so disappointed. She really wanted that coat so much.”

She said, “Well, it’s reserved. Too bad. The other woman was first.” And she walked away. End of conversation.

NOW HOW COULD SHE BE FIRST IF THE COAT WAS SUPPOSEDLY FULL PRICE UNTIL JUST THAT MOMENT?

After I left, I coudn’t decide if I should just tell Leslie the coat was already sold and leave it at that. But of course, I was so mad by the time I talked to her later in the afternoon that I spilled out the whole unjust story.

And then Leslie was so upset that she actually drove to the store, where, to make matters feel even worse, the coat was still hanging behind the cash register. She tried in her very nice way to find out for herself what had happened. (Leslie is sort of friendly with Kristin in a way that I’ve never been able to be. Kristin doesn’t seem to remember me from time to time; we always have to start over at the beginning of our acquaintanceship. You know how that is sometimes; I’m sort of invisible to her.)

So Leslie explained how badly she wanted the coat, and Kristin, without ever saying she was sorry OR that the other woman was her friend, just kept saying, “Well, this woman really, really wanted it!” as though that made the difference.

Now here’s the thing. Obviously the consignment business belongs to the shop owner, and she can sell the pieces to whoever she pleases. And if, as likely happened, her BFF came in and said, “Oh, I adore that coat–when it comes on sale, if it’s not already taken, please hold it for me,” and she did–well, I might have done the same thing for a friend. I could see that happening.

BUT…it’s also true that the consignment business is a system of trust. When we bring in our clothing for her to sell, we trust her to set the price fairly and then to be honest about when it sold, and then to divide the money as we’ve agreed. Nobody checks up on her. Nobody says, “Saaaay, why did you mark my Aunt Lucy’s trousers at $5 when you could have gotten $20 for them?” And nobody EVER says, “Gee, I really thought that silk blouse I brought in sold for full price, and you’re telling me it hung around here until it went so far down you just had to donate it?

I’m just saying.  

Until now, I’ve trusted her to do the right thing: to set the prices fairly and to split the money the way she’s supposed to.

And now…well, now, I wonder if she doesn’t cut corners, and play favorites with the customers.

Because it IS a system of trust, I think she has to be extra careful not to have it look as though she’d not playing by the rules she set. She has to be scrupulously honest so that we all feel taken care of. The used clothing business, after all, can turn pretty tawdry if you’re not careful. There’s a certain psychology to it. 

Maybe, as someone said, her only real mistake was not putting the coat in the back room where Leslie and I couldn’t see it still there when we came in to buy it. Or maybe it would have been better if she’d said to us, “Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry! But my friend wanted that coat so badly, and I didn’t realize anybody else was looking for it, too!” Maybe that would have helped. I don’t know.

But now…well, cashmere sweaters and faux shearling coats or not, I can’t help but feel she’s breached our trust. And Leslie is now saying she doesn’t ever want to shop there ever again. 

What do you think? Should we: (1)  write her a letter explaining how disgruntled we are, (2) just stop going there…or (3) take this as a sign that the world runs in crooked little ways sometimes, and just put things on reserve if we want them next time?

I really, really want to know what you think.

It’s fall, and I don’t know anybody who’s feeling really GREAT right now, between the nose-sucking virus that is going around (I still have not recovered sufficiently from that), and the fact that oil prices have skyrocketed to the point where we all are going to have to start burning our junk mail to heat our homes this winter, AND it’s sinking in that the television is just going to be filled up with even MORE reality television shows while deserving writers have to go out on strike.

The war in Iraq costs $1.6 trillion, the sub-prime mortgage thing has gotten worse, and…for how long am I going to have to hear the news from people other than Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert?

So then comes into my spam-infested inbox a letter from my friend Mary Rose–and, well, despite the fact that it made me spit tea on my keyboard not once, twice, or three times but FOUR TIMES (enough to possibly short out my spam filter for good)…well, I needed the laugh.

And in case you do, too, I’m printing it pretty much in its entirety:

Thus said the Lord, Mary Rose’s family is not cutting the mustard in some way and I need to get their attention so there will be drought and they will have to take showers at the parish house and do laundry all over the town and fill up their water storage tank with 5 gallon jugs several times a day to flush toilets.  (Our well failed to produce water  and we have thus been without it for over three weeks now…we are contracted to have a new well drilled to the tune of eight thousand dollars….which we have to borrow from the bank.)

But apparently, Mary Rose, with her chin-up, optimistic pioneer spirit needed to pay even more attention, so came to her family a pirate who proposed an easement on 10 percent of the front of their property which is only 33 feet to begin with and the family had to spend much time with lawyers and planners and there was much sleep lost and much wailing and gnashing of teeth until they just told the pirate from Century 21 that they were sorry their lack of agreement put into jeopardy a project that took two years to plan, but that was just the way it was.

And Lo, when the pirates had gone, the Lord thus wanted more attention and as Mary Rose made her way with water to the basement tank, she noticed a plague of milkweed bugs on the cellar door.  There were so many and they swarmed as she entered the basement and she just at this point nodded her head and said to herself, ‘Well, now we have plague….that is just very fitting. (As I am typing this I was eating a little Milky Way bar and I thought a piece had dropped on my lap so I picked it up without looking and put it in my mouth and it did not taste like Milky Way….I took it out and it was one of the aforementioned bugs, still alive, that I pulled out of my mouth – NO LIE!)

It was on this same day that the lady bugs who were known to frequent the quiet corners inside the house during the winter grew in number so vast that they swarmed and took over the entire cellar. And alas the day which followed, the Internet for the family went out due to some problem with the router which has been a problem from the get go and there was a drought of cyber communication for several days.”  (Which is to be followed by the drought of money due to the well needing to be drilled as well as a field trip Danny’s class is taking for three days for which the cost is $280!!!   Are they kidding me?????)

Will it ever end????

So when the vultures arrived, you can see that I was not surprised.  Turns out they were going after something that had washed in on the stream water after a night of heavy rain which has done nothing for our well, nor have subsequent rain storms….despite the ending of the drought by flooding, we are still without flow of water!

I am now thinking we are into serious plagues here. And I keep asking “How many plagues are there? ” Because I am hoping we are done. Let’s see, I think there are 10 as we count them at Passover…we have drought of water, pirates, milkweed bugs, ladybugs, drought of Internet, drought of cash, and vultures…so that means we must have three more to go.

Then I was moving the computer and the phones in the rest of the house went out so I only have one phone that works.  I think that may be the eighth plague….drought of communication.

So then the next day a friend came to visit, and during dinner, he happened to mention that he had lice last month (thus explaining his hair cut).  But he thinks he got it from the youth hostel he had been at a few months ago which is…you guessed it , where he spent the night the night before he arrived at our house for dinner. OH MY!!!!

A plague of LICE. With my four little boys! 

So we are up to nine plagues, and I am sitting here trying to wait quietly. I know what comes next: I’m going to look out the window and see the raining down of frogs.

If you are a reader of the fabulous blog Boing Boing, you know that every now and then things get so gross that they have to run a unicorn chaser, which means they run pictures of happy unicorns, hearts and flowers just to clear everybody’s mind of the horrifying images they’ve put there.

My friend Nancy says I’ve reached that point. Since I wrote about my colonoscopy, she says I absolutely must not tell any more gross stories without offering a unicorn chaser of my own. 

Okay, here you go–beautiful purple water lilies. Feel better?

No? Okay, then. How about a dramatic sunset?

Okay, and here’s a sweet baby to look at–little Miles, six months old.

Tra la la.

And now–unicorn chaser over!–I have a gross story to tell you.

Last Friday I hung out for most of the day with little Miles, who, as you can see by the picture, is running for president in 2052. He’s quite serious about his campaign, too, intent on smiling and cooing and kissing everyone he sees, just to ensure that he has their vote.

At one point, we were in a restaurant together, he and I and his mother Allie, and he worked the room like any good politician would, making faces and grinning at everyone–at one point even banging his cup HARD on the table when some people at another table seemed interested in going back to their own conversations rather than continuing to admire him.

Don’t worry: a little table-banging brought them right back to attention. I tell you, we were all riveted by his platform.

And, as a way of thanking me for my support and my promise to vote for him, he grabbed onto my face at one point and sucked on my nose as hard as he possibly could. I was sure I was going to pull back to find my own face unrecognizable, possibly minus its nose altogether.

But, hey, who needs a nose when you have the love of a baby? I was so flattered–and yes, laughing so hysterically–at the intensity of his attention that I was willing to ignore the fact that Miles had had quite a runny nose himself–and now, of course, I am struck down with all manner of upper respiratory symptoms.

I am sad to report that I have a cough, a sore throat, chills, a killer sinus headache, laryngitis, and a runny nose, all at once.

Go back and look at the water lilies and the sunset again if you need to, Nancy. I’m going to take some more Sudafed and drink more Earl Grey tea. It’s freezing in here.  

Okay, everything you’ve heard about having a colonoscopy is right.

It’s not bad.

And it can save your life.

I was a big baby about it, the way I am about a lot of medical stuff I don’t want to think about.

Even the prep, which everyone says is the Very Worst Thing in the Whole World, was not that bad. I was given pills instead of the yucky liquid stuff, thirty-two pills, to be exact, with specific instructions as to how to take them.

The worst part by far was the dreading…and oh, yeah, fasting all day yesterday wasn’t so great. I kept forgetting that I wasn’t supposed to be eating, and would find myself thinking, “Ah, I know what I need! Some crackers!” And starting for the kitchen before I remembered…ah, yes, there’s a reason I’m so hungry.

All day, I felt like I was in some kind of countdown–four hours until I have to start the prep…three and a half hours ’til prep time…oh, NO! IN TWENTY SHORT MINUTES I HAVE TO TAKE FOUR PILLS THAT ARE GOING TO MAKE ME FEEL JUST AWFUL ALL NIGHT LONG, AND AFTER THAT I HAVE TO TAKE 16 MORE OF THEM AND THEN 12 MORE OF THEM TOMORROW MORNING! AND THEN WHAT IF I GO TO THIS APPOINTMENT AND IT TURNS OUT THAT I HAVE COLON CANCER THAT IS SO FAR ADVANCED THAT THEY CAN’T CURE IT AND I SHOULD HAVE COME IN YEARS AGO BUT I DIDN’T?

(One of the little known perks of being a writer is that you can always get to the worst case scenario in 0.2 seconds.)

But then the time came and I just did it. Told my crazy monkey mind to take the night off and go off somewhere, and I took the pills and spent the evening reading a very good book and admiring the decor of our bathroom.

I woke up in the morning before the alarm went off at 6 and took the rest of the pills, admired the decor some more, re-told the monkey mind that we would be NOT thinking about colon cancer anymore this morning…and by 9:20, we were on our way to the Endoscopy Center.

Once there, I was fine. The nurses were all chatty and nice. We discussed books we were all reading; one of them had read one of my novels, and we talked about that. We talked about where we get our hair colored and how awkward it is to break up with a hairdresser. I put on a hospital gown, and they started a saline IV and filled out a questionnaire about my health.

I was a little taken aback when one of the nurses asked me, as part of routine questions, if I had a Living Will. I must have looked startled–I mean, this is just a colonoscopy, right?–because she leaned over and touched me on the arm and said, “Don’t worry. Your Living Will wouldn’t count for anything here anyway. If anything goes wrong, we are going to revive you!”

Oh. Good then.

We moved along to the room itself, and I was told to lie down on my left side on the bed, underneath the sheet. We talked about all the good food I was planning to eat later on, and then the doctor came in and asked me how I felt.

The nurse said, “Okay, we’re ready to get started.” She smiled at me and said, “Good night! You’ll be back in thirty minutes!”

And everything suddenly went black. No fading out, no count to ten. Just–GONE.

The very next moment the doctor was standing at the foot of my bed, speaking loudly: “I HAVE NOTHING BUT GOOD NEWS FOR YOU!” And my husband was sitting next to me, and it was 35 minutes later.

I got up and got dressed. Everything had gone well, he said. He did remove two tiny little polyps that looked absolutely benign, nothing to worry about, he said.

“No evidence of any cancer,” he said and smiled. When I had had my consultation in July, my mother had only been dead a month, and I was shaking the whole time we talked.

I have to go back again and have another in three years, due to the family history. But next time I won’t be scared. 

This is what happens to you when your mom dies of colon cancer: doctors start insisting that you get your own colon looked at.

I’ve tried to explain that I’m not the type for procedures like colonoscopies. I’m sure that I don’t LIKE them, I said. And besides that, I feel just fine, colon-wise.

I didn’t get very far with that line of reasoning. Doctors have heard it all before. One of them–my mother’s surgeon, actually–said to me, “You know, your mom would be alive today if she’d had a colonoscopy a few decades ago. Colon cancer is very slow-growing, and we could have nipped that polyp right out of there before it even turned into cancer…you don’t want this to happen to you!”

It’s true. I don’t.

So I signed up and went to a nice gastroenterologist for a consultation appointment. He seemed very calm and he assured me of many things: It won’t hurt. I won’t know anything about it because I’ll go to sleep. The drugs are very, very good–so good that some people actually WANT to come for colonoscopies. AND, best of all, he said they now have a pill you can take rather than drink gallons of horrible liquid…for the, you know, colon-scouring you have to do beforehand.

“It’s nothing, it’s a piece of cake,” he said. “I do ten of these a day, and everyone does great.”

So I made my appointment and then two days later, I suddenly had a great idea about how to get around this colonoscopy business. I called up and canceled my appointment, cleverly rescheduling it for a date so far in advance that surely the world would have ended by then.

But–quelle surprise!–the world did NOT end, and now, unless those California wildfires suddenly engulf the whole nation in the next 24 hours, it looks like I’m really going to have to go through with this.

Today is my last day eating real food. Tomorrow I am to eat ONLY jello, chicken broth, and drink tea all day long. That’s it. And at 5 o’clock, I have to take 20 pills, four at a time, 15 minutes apart, drinking lots and lots of liquid with them.

According to all reports, that’s when the real fun begins.

Then I have to wake up at 6 in the morning on Friday (like I would have been sleeping, who are they kidding?)  and then I’m to take the last 12 pills.

And then…the colonoscopy itself. 
Sheeeesh.

I’ve always gotten myself to do hard stuff by giving myself rewards. A trip to the dentist means that I get to order a black turtleneck shirt from Lands’ End. If I have to get a filling or a crown, I get a skirt, too. Regular doctor visits with blood work mean new earrings and possibly a milk shake.

But I frankly don’t know what will be good enough to get me through a colonoscopy. I think it’s going to take a trip to Europe or something, possibly a stint in the Greek Isles.

Of course, being told I’m not going to get colon cancer anytime soon–that would be good, too. Along with a nice lunch.