Sandi Kahn Shelton

My uncle Bob loved Elvis so much that when he attended an Elvis concert at the age of 11, he passed out from sheer overwhelmitude and had to be revived and carted home.

Uncle Bob then became something of a rock star himself, being the keyboard player and singer of Cat Mother and the All-Night Newsboys in the late 60s.

What? You’ve never heard of Cat Mother? Get out of town. They had a hit record called “Good Old Rock n’ Roll” which was a medley of several great songs from the fifties. And when I was a teenager, I rode the coattails of Uncle Bob’s fame and got to be backstage at many of his great concerts, the summer he opened for Jimi Hendrix.

But wait. This is about Elvis.

Because in 1977, on the day that Elvis died, Uncle Bob was helping me and my then-husband drive across country from Santa Barbara, to settle in New Haven (a place we intended to stay for four years and not one second more, the length of time it would take Then Husband to get his Ph.D. from Yale…and then we would scamper back to the safety of Santa Barbara to live happily ever after.) We didn’t know on Aug. 16, 1977, that we were going to get divorced three years after settling in New Haven, and that neither of us would ever go back to living in California.

We were just riding through Utah on Highway 70, listening to the radio and watching the U-Haul truck in front of us, with all our furniture inside, being driven by Uncle Bob with Aunt Alice in the passenger seat. And then on the radio came the news: “Elvis is dead, at 42.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t think Bob can take this.”

The U-Haul in front of us pulled over to the side of the road and stopped.

We got out on the highway and conferred about what we should do. Could people truly be expected to go on with their lives after hearing such news? What were ordinary citizens to do?

We decided to have an Elvis Presley Memorial Campfire that night. And so we did. We camped in a place that to this date reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of the surface of the moon: rocky and white and dusty and deserted. We pitched the tents and then built a fire and sat around it, singing Elvis songs late into the night.

Bob told the story of his fainting, which by then had attained epic proportions. It had already become one of those stories families tell at important get-togethers.

Now, thirty years later, Uncle Bob is dead, Then Husband and I are divorced, and both of us happily remarried. Aunt Alice is back living in California after trekking across the world.

And Elvis–well, he’s still dead, but I like to think that our voices, raised in song around that campfire that night–belting out “You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog” and “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock”–might have lit up the deserted patch of Utah where we camped out underneath the moon.

I had a fight with a health insurance company before it was even 8:30 this morning–and that is NOT a good way to start a day, let me tell you. If you’re thinking of taking that up for yourself–say to get your adrenaline pumping early in the day–I don’t advise it.

The thing is, you can’t win in a fight with an insurance company. They have all the cards.

It started with a prescription for birth control pills. I wanted three months’ worth and paid for that; they sent one month and claimed that the doctor had written the prescription to be refilled monthly instead of four times a year.

“Okay,” I said reasonably, “but I paid you $60, which is what I’ve always paid for three months. So…the next two months should be free.”

FREE is not a word that insurance companies can hear without laughing.

“No, no, no,” said the Customer Service representative who was no doubt taping this call, as threatened, so she and the other representatives could laugh about it on their lunch hour. “You have a flat rate of $60 for any prescription, whether it’s one month or three months.”

WHAT?!

So if my doctor writes a prescription for, say, some drug that actually costs about $10 and I send it away to the mail order prescription place, it’s gonna cost me SIXTY DOLLARS?

“Yes, ma’am, that is correct.”

I then went through all their appeal channels–which is lots of fun–and even though it was still way before breakfast and even before tea, I managed to get nicer and nicer with each subsequent level of employee. I figured they weren’t going to respond to me at all if I became the raving lunatic I could feel myself edging toward.

In the end, though, they got me. At one point, I blurted out, “But this is just ridiculous! This is a scam, charging the same price for one month as three months!”

“Ma’am, I don’t have to tolerate that kind of language,” the woman said. “That is just not helpful to the situation.”

So I am now writing a letter, the last refuge of people who are disgruntled. The thing with fighting with these companies is that you don’t have one single thing you can punish them with. You can’t even frighten them.

I’m going to cancel my policy with you?

I’m going to tell everyone I know that you are wicked and bad?

I’m going to never let you furnish drugs for us again?

I know! You can’t come to my birthday party!

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.

Just the word “summer” has such promise to it, doesn’t it?

When I was a kid, there was no better season. Summer meant buying popsicles from the ice cream truck, and swimming in Mary Anne Westervelt’s built-in pool, and staying up late playing Scrabble and Monopoly, and long, long days at Jacksonville Beach, where we played in the surf for hours on end. It meant trips to the lake to stay with my grandmother, who made boiled peanuts and potato salad and fried chicken, and taught us to catch minnows off the dock, using bread dough as bait, and then let us stay up late in the one-room lake house (a shack over the water, really), watching Johnny Carson in the dark from our beds.

Back then, the word summer conjured up a whole world of tastes and smells and sensations.

I don’t remember when summer started to sound like trouble, when it came to represent bugs, oppressive heat, snakes in the garden, MORE BUGS, unpredictable thunderstorms, overgrown weeds, and sweaty sheets and mosquitoes (yes, bugs). When instead of eating watermelon on the screened porch, summer meant trying to find child care arrangements for my three kids who were out of school while I was needing to go to work. It meant extra traffic, overheated kitchens, humidity-wrecked hair, half-dead houseplants always needing water.

But I am hereby taking a stand against giving in to that kind of thinking. I am going to wring every last summery thing I can out of this season, see it the way I used to. This year I am going to pay attention.

Right now, for instance, I am in summer mode, both good and ill. I am sitting on the couch, sunburned from a foolish day spent at the beach yesterday. (I went to Rhode Island and got so carried away talking that I forgot to put on the sunscreen until it was already too late.) It’s nearly midnight, but I’m on summer hours so it still feels much earlier. (Funny how midnight in the wintertime finds you long in bed, buried under layers of blankets, and probably fast asleep for hours.) The June bugs have taken over the house, and every now and then one dive-bombs itself into my hair and has to be liberated. (What DO June bugs want, really?) An ant is walking next to me on the couch. The ceiling fan is whirling around above me, waving the cobwebs around in the corners. (Summer means more cobwebs, too.) Moths are flinging themselves against the screens, and the air outside is filled with the sounds of fireworks and motorcycles dopplering their way out of town. The dog is lying on the wood floor, panting so loudly that he’s drowning out the sound of the ceiling fan.

Yet tonight for supper we had fresh native tomatoes and corn on the cob from our favorite farm stand, potato salad I’d made a few days ago, and fresh sugar snap peas, and we ate out on the screened porch and watched the cardinals and the black-capped chickadees getting ready for night as the sun went down. This morning I ate fresh blueberries that were so sweet each one seemed like a present. Right now my back is tired from weeding the garden earlier today, during which time I was getting buzzed by insects and was afraid a garter snake was going to startle me under the next weed. But none did. I didn’t even get any bites from insects. I sweated out there in the sunshine, and my sunburned skin felt tight. When I look in the mirror now, the face that looks back at me is tanned and brown, and my hair has gotten bleached out, even straw-like, and all that in just a few hours. I can’t stand to wear anything but my khaki shorts and a tank top. I can tell it’s going to be my uniform for the rest of the summer.

But so what?

Tonight I’ll fall asleep to the whirring of the fan and the loud chirping of crickets outside. I’ll sleep just under my cotton sheet, and no doubt in the night, I’ll wake up and turn over to find a cool place in the sheet to put my feet. And tomorrow morning the birds will wake me up at about five, cackling and cawing and calling to each other outside the window, exuberant to find themselves in a whole new day.

It’s summer, after all.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning to go and see my mother, and it’s beginning to feel as though this will be the last time.

She’s much weaker now. She’s had a few falls, and she is refusing to eat, the nurses tell me–and even though they bring her to the telephone when I call, I almost feel that I shouldn’t be taxing her strength by wanting to make her talk.

She’s that weak now.

But she does know that I’m coming. I had hoped when I booked this trip that we could take a ride out and see the beach once again. She always loved the ocean. But now it doesn’t seem as though that will be possible.

Although, as the hospice social worker told me, you never know. Sometimes patients can rally–and perhaps that will happen in this case, too.

Mostly, though, I expect that I’ll just sit next to her bed while she sleeps…

It’s so hard to believe it was just a little over four weeks ago that she got the news that her colonoscopy showed some cancer.

But just to show me that life does go on–tonight I’m scheduled to do a reading for a book that I was a contributor to. “Blindsided by a Diaper,” published by Three Rivers Press and edited by Dana Hilmer, is released this week. It’s about the amazing thing that happens to your marriage once you have a baby. I’ve written an essay called “Dating the Hubs,” about the first time my husband and I tried to go on a date. 

The reading is at 7 p.m. at Curtain Call in Stamford, if you’re anywhere near the place, and would like to come. Four authors are going to be reading: Beth Levine, Bill Squier, Pamela Kruger, and me. And best of all perhaps, the cast of “Baby” is going to sing songs from their show in between our readings.

I keep falling out of blogging.

I mean to blog, even just if it’s to record these times, to write something I can look back on and remember after this is over. But then…well, everything changes so quickly.

And honestly? I’m about five-eighths of a wreck most of the time.

My mother seems to be fading more quickly than anyone had ever predicted. She seems like a shadow of who she was even last week, when she called me up and demanded, “WHAT, I want to know, is going to happen. How is it that I am going to change from being the vibrant, spirited person you hear talking to you…into being a dead person?”

We actually laughed together about that, she and I. How indeed! It seemed almost ludicrous, in a sick, sad way. She couldn’t be dying. Nobody who is dying could think in such a way. I guess I thought we’d keep laughing and joking and being so funny and real about death for a while to come.

When my father was dying, back in 1989, we weren’t allowed to mention it. It would have been impolite to point it out or to ask how it felt. His body was riddled with kidney, bone, and brain cancer, and yet he was going to be fine, and so we behaved that way, even as the ambulance drivers were taking him off to the hospital for the last time.

But in our daily phone calls, my mother has been talking about dying nearly non-stop. It is typical of her–irreverent and refreshing.

And her opinion of it? “It sucks.”

Of course it sucks. “But,” she said one night, “I am definitely planning on contacting you after I’m dead.”

“Are you?” I said, pleased. “What method do you plan to use? Should I get a ouija board, or go to a psychic? Or are you going to use props of nature, like coming to visit me on the breeze? Perhaps sending a special bird to chirp at me?”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, irritably: “Don’t be silly. I am going to contact you by coming and sitting on the edge of your bed and talking to you! What do you think?”

But now these conversations have abruptly stopped. When I call her, after five minutes she says she’s too tired, the phone is too heavy, she wants to sleep. The nurses tell me she’s stopped eating, and she doesn’t walk to the bathroom anymore. She doesn’t want to do anything they suggest, like play bingo or take a shower.

“What happened?” I ask.

Nobody has any idea. The hospice social worker says to me gently, “Dear, they get to a point where they need to pull away. It’s a natural withdrawal from the world. She has to do this.” 

Last week I sent my mother a CD that I downloaded of her favorite music, songs by Andy Williams and Frankie Laine and Frank Sinatra, songs that she requested. But there was one song I didn’t want to record, because I told her it sounded too sad. I wanted her to have uplifting songs, happy songs that she’d always loved, songs we had danced to and sung along with on the car radio.

“But this runs through my head all the time,” she told me. And standing there at the nurse’s station, with all the hospital business going on around her, she started to sing it to me over the phone, softly and hoarsely:

“This time, Lord, you gave me a mountain…a mountain you know I may never climb…It isn’t a hill any longer, you gave me a mountain this time.” 

And then–well, we cried a little.

Here’s what I have noticed about being sad lately: there are moments of almost heart-wrenching sweetness that happen, even against the backdrop of uncertainty.

I am home again from visiting my mother in Florida, and I know that she is in a gray-colored room in a skilled nursing facility and that she is scared from her diagnosis of terminal cancer and wishing that I was back there with her, sitting on the bed, rubbing her back, telling her funny stories, bringing her cups of tea.

Instead of me, there are other people who are there with her, who are offering her kindness. Peggy, her neighbor in the senior housing complex, every day brings my mother’s little dog for a visit, and he curls up in my mother’s bed and goes to sleep on her arm, waking up only to offer a half-hearted “grr” when somebody comes over to the bed.

The nurses–most of them big, burly guys with tattoos and deep voices–take my mother outside with them to smoke, and once outside, they tell her their life stories. It’s only been three days, but when I call her, I can tell that she’s just been in the middle of a major chat with someone she never met before.

One day I called and she was in the middle of trading astrological stories with the night nurse–explaining that in our family, just about everybody is a Taurus, and how difficult this can be when all these bull-types have different opinions. The night nurse said his family members are all Scorpios, and, while I was on the phone, they had a moment of wondering who would win in a fight: bulls or scorpions.

“What do YOU think?” my mother finally asked me.

I think she has a renewed interest in life, is what I think. Each day when I talk to her, I hear in her voice something that is a little stronger and more sure of herself.

I feel stronger, too. We talk on the phone about all kinds of things. There’s a Frankie Laine song she wants me to download for her and send her. We’re talking about whether she’ll be strong enough to go back to her own apartment after she’s done with rehab…and some of the ladies in the apartment complex have said they’ll help her with meals and with driving her places she needs to be.

She could be back among her own things again. It’s possible she has more time than we think.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said to me today on the phone, “but knowing that I’m going to die soon has made me realize a lot of things I didn’t know before. I’m calmer than I thought I would be, and the food tastes good.”

Yesterday I sat outside a coffee house with Stephanie and Allie and little Miles, and drank pineapple-flavored iced tea and ate a cranberry-oatmeal cookie, and watched people walk by on a Brooklyn street for hours and hours. It was such a beautiful day, and my daughters’ voices were animated and happy. We shared a cookie and watched the people. The catalpa trees shed their white blossoms on us, which reminded me of a poem I couldn’t quite remember the words to.

We walked back to the house where Stephanie will be housesitting all summer, a beautiful brownstone in a quiet, shady neighborhood. Later, my husband and Allie’s husband met us, and we ate dinner–fried chicken, mashed potatoes, collard greens, biscuits, and key lime pie–in a little outdoor restaurant in a little back patio where the strings of white lights twinkled in the dusk. The baby looked around in wonder and did not cry once.

There are these beautiful moments that still go on, in which I feel such a mixture of happiness and gratitude, and I know they are sitting right next to the sadness, which is squatting quietly, biding its time, knowing it has its weapons but that it won’t win out after all.   

…and suddenly everything gets a little serious.

That’s what is happening right now, and it’s the reason I haven’t been posting in the blog lately.

The news is not good. My mother–who is 76 and lives alone in Florida–has just been diagnosed with colon cancer. And even worse, the cancer has already spread to her liver.

Right now she is in the hospital, having had the obstruction removed from her colon, and I have spent the last 24 hours making arrangements to get down there to see her.

I’ve written about her before, how she has done so many wacky, crazy things–finger-painted her refrigerator, taken out a whole grocery store display by riding her scooter directly into it, gold-leafed the toilet seat. But I haven’t been able to truly explain what she’s like, how she can be both funny and impossible in the same second. The bad things: she has a quick temper, and she quite simply doesn’t have even one tiny scruple about anything. Ever. For instance, she has never bought a pair of sunglasses in her life; she simply walks into a store and trades her old ones for new ones, and is amazed when you tell her that’s not such a good idea.

The good things: She’s hilarious and adventurous and will do absolutely anything. She has had about a billion best friends in her life because she’s extremely talented at drawing other people to her. One time her then-best friend told me that being out in public with her was like walking around with a movie star: “Men just come over and try to give her things, try to help her with anything she needs, try to get her to go out with them. Now me, I could fall in the gutter and lie there with two broken legs, and there isn’t a man in the world who would even notice!”

Like a lot of mothers and daughters, we have not always gotten along. I always wanted her to be a little less insane than she perhaps was capable of being. And she always wanted me to just understand her the way she was and to laugh with her at all her antics and also to wear more eye makeup so that people wouldn’t guess that she was old enough to have a daughter my age.

So I am going down to be with her. We will try to figure out what’s best for her, when there’s no way to really know. Should she have chemo? She doesn’t want to, but the doctors are pressuring her to do it. Should she leave Florida and come to Connecticut, where at least we could be close to each other for whatever is going to happen? Should she go to stay near my cousin in North Florida, where at least the weather is still warm and where she has some childhood friends left?

And the big unanswerable question: how long do we have? And what do we do with the time we have left?

On the phone she said to me, “I don’t WANT to talk about all that. Here’s what I need you to promise: that when I’m dead, you’ll have me cremated and then I want you to rent a plane. It’s GOT to be a small plane, and you’ve got to rent it, and then I want you to fly across Crosby Lake and scatter my ashes. Don’t just throw them from the shore. I want them tossed from the air. DO NOT LEAVE ME SITTING AROUND IN A JAR. Do you promise?”

“We’ll figure all that out later,” I said. “I’m coming to see you.”

Maybe there will be some gift we can give each other in this awful, scary time. That is all I am hoping for, that out of the fear and the unknown, we can just sit together in her hospital room, grateful for the chance to be there in that moment. Maybe the eye makeup will come off, and we’ll just be who we are, sitting there facing the darkness. Together for a time, before it’s time to go rent the airplane.

Okay, I’ll play. I got “tagged” by another blog, by Henri and since I’ve seen this done on other people’s blogs, I guess it’s a fun thing to do: tell eight things that most people don’t know about me. 

1. My mother thinks that I had a past life, because when I was four years old, I was watching her plant zinnias one by one, and then said very calmly to her, “That’s not the way we used to do it in the army.”

2. Despite being reasonably intelligent, I am the only person I know who never, ever knows what is going to happen in a movie. Little children can see the way something is going to end, and I’m still stunned. 

3. One of the craziest things I ever did was getting married when I was 18 years old–in a hippie wedding that took place on the beach in Santa Barbara in the middle of winter. I wore a long white dress that I made myself, and a veil from a friend who had gotten divorced. I came through the woods to Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, played on a tape recorder.

4. The marriage was a mistake, just like everyone told me it would be. But I got two wonderful kids from it, so it can’t be written off as a total mistake, can it?

5. I can always get a parking spot when I want one, right where I need it to be. I just say that it’s going to happen and it does. I am now trying that out with other things I need–like, say, houses in Italy.

6. I am the only one in my family who does not think it is wrong to cheat at solitaire.

7. I have never learned to whistle or to blow bubbles with chewing gum, despite repeated lessons from many, many experts, both children and adults.

8. I love to go on the spin-around rides in amusement parks, like the swings, and I adore Ferris wheels and things that put me way up high, but I hate the speedy ones, like roller coasters.

We are in the midst of a veritable population explosion in our family! It’s spring, and the little boys just keep popping out everywhere.

This newest member is Joshua, who was born on May 5, and who is in this picture just three hours old and has already discovered the magic deliciousness of his mother’s index finger. He’s being greeted by his parents, Ben and Amy, and his big brother, Charlie, who is three and a half, and who explained to anyone who would listen just exactly where this baby came from.

He kept saying to his mother, “So you’re not pregnant anymore?” and she would say, “That’s right.” And he kept shaking his head in wonder. It is a mysterious thing.

Also mysterious is all the technological equipment in Ben and Amy’s house, which luckily Charlie was adept at operating. I got to spend four days hanging out with him, and he helped me learn to work the GPS (”You turn right and you turn left and you turn right again, and then you reach your destination!”) and the TV remote, the car radio, the filtered water in the fridge, the night light, the living room lamp, and the key to the front door. In his spare time, he found time to educate me about big rigs, dump trucks, and how certain candies can resemble BMW hubcaps he’s seen go by on highways. 

I am getting so many new babies to rock and cuddle–it’s really a wonderful springtime. On Josh’s birthday, all the leaves burst forth on the trees, and the yellow tulip in the front yard suddenly opened…and we were finally able to take off our sweaters.

Charlie wore his BIG BROTHER t-shirt to the hospital.