Sandi Kahn Shelton

…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.

Stephanie came home from college for 24 hours because she was sick. This is one of the advantages of living only a trainride from home–you can get a sore throat, a sinus headache, a stomach ache and a bump on your tongue, and you can come home for a good night’s sleep and a fried egg sandwich.

It was lovely. We sat out on the screened porch working side by side on our computers. I was doing–what else?–my novel, and she was working on a final paper for one of her classes.

We were enjoying the companionly silence of staring into space, trying to think of the next thing to type when I heard her say, “Hmm, I should check out how the bump on my tongue is doing.”

And then, to my astonishment, she stuck out her tongue at her computer, clicked a button–and voila! There was a close-up photograph of her tongue filling the entire screen.

“Oh,” she said. “It looks like it’s healing up nicely,” and went right back to work.

A lot of people have to get up and go look in the mirror to get that kind of information.

This morning started with a thunderstorm at 5:15 a.m., the kind that sits on top of the house for a while, lighting up the whole place and then crashing against the windows and scaring the dog right out of his wits. There was no further thought of sleep.

And then at 9:30 I had a dentist appointment.

You can hardly think of a worse start to a day. What’s next? A yard full of boa constrictors? Exploding cars? Flying monkeys? 

I made my way to the dentist office with trepidation. This was more out of habit than anything else. Last summer, you see, I had to get a crown put on a molar, and even now my tooth screams with displeasure when I eat anything, say, with more substance to it than a random clump of oats in oatmeal…and my brain cells still remember that going into that dental office caused that pain, and they do not want me to go back there again.

Ever. 

But today was just for a cleaning, and I reminded myself that I would see my favorite dental hygienist, who cleans teeth the way angels clean their harps in heaven: lovingly and kindly, as though she is on holy assignment and respects every molecule of teethhood.

Imagine my surprise when she was not there, when I had to be told that  LAST WEEK they let her resign, all because she is expecting a baby and needed a part-time job that had benefits. They let this woman LEAVE the practice rather than give her health insurance and vacation time. Can you imagine? I was ready to go back home right then and there…but no, they said they had another woman to clean my teeth, just as wonderful.

Immediately it became clear, though, that things were going very, very wrong. This new woman had never been around teeth that were actually in a human mouth and not on some kind of dental hygienist dummy before. I could tell this because she would pick up each sharp, pointy instrument and then frown at it and turn it over in her hand a few times, as though she was trying to remember what they had told her about this in the correspondence course she took. Once she got up and walked over to the window, so she could more easily read the fine print on the dental scraper. What, I want to know, can it possibly say on a dental scraper, which is about the width of a toothpick?

I wanted to get up and bolt out of the room, but I was scared to even move. I became Very, Very Nice. I asked about her children and her husband and how she’d known she wanted to be a dental hygienist. I complimented her hair.

Then she aimed the water sprayer directly into my right eyeball.

I laughed reassuringly–hahahaha–and said this was okay, fine really, I’d just use my dental bib to mop myself up. I could use the hand dryer in the bathroom later to finish drying my hair, I was sure. But I was becoming quite alarmed. You don’t want to piss off a person who is holding sharp, pointy things that she’s forgotten the use of.

I asked her if she had any fun vacation trips coming up this summer, and mentioned how great it was that spring was going to come. 

A few minutes later, the dentist came in and asked her to show him last year’s x-rays of my teeth, and she told him my chart was right there on the counter.

“OH MY GOD! This can’t be!” he said. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing!”

I don’t like to hear that kind of talk at the dentist office, so I glanced over to see what was so strange. 

“Um,” I said. “I think that’s my daughter’s chart, not mine.”

There was a long silence. Then he sighed and left the room, presumably to find my real chart.

I was relieved when the Gouging Portion of the Appointment was over, and we progresssed to the tooth polisher. I love the tooth polisher, because it tastes good, and also it means you’ve survived the worst and you’re going home soon. But suddenly, to both our surprises, the tooth polisher came flying out of her hands and landed with a clunk on the side of my cheek.

“Oh, NO!” she said. “Do you want some ice for that?”

“Oh, it’s fine!” I said, a little hysterically. “Fine! Just fine!”

She asked me if I’d like her to floss my teeth before I left, but it was clear by then that any further contact between the two of us without a third party present would be unwise.

“Oh, I’d love that,” I said. “Flossing! Wow! Thank you, really, but I should go.” I could picture my teeth being plunked out of my head one by one, and I got up out of the chair and took off the soaking wet paper bib.

“I don’t know why I’ve been so clumsy today!” she called after me. 

“Don’t worry,” I said, running down the hall. ”You were great. Let’s look on the bright side: at least if you were going to throw something in my eye, it was the water hose instead of that pointy scraper thing.”

“I’ll see you in six months,” she said.

“Fat chance,” I said under my breath. But I was already at the car by then.

My friend Mary Caruso is always out helping everybody else. One day when I was at the very tense deadline of my last book, so crazed with typing that my arms were barely functional, my doorbell rang, and when I went to answer it, there was a covered dish with a chicken cutlet, a huge salad, fresh bread, AND a homemade blueberry pie.

I just about died.

It was from Mary, who had just left it for me and hurried back home, figuring, she said later, that I must be feeling kind of overwhelmed and might need a little fortification even though I was too busy to stop for a real conversation.

She’s always doing things like this for people. You’d hardly know that Mary is in kind of a tough situation herself, from the way she’s always doing this stuff for others. But the fact is, Mary’s two daughters, Sam and Alex, were diagnosed 10 years ago with Friedreich’s ataxia, which is a degenerative neurological disease that interferes with the body’s ability to break down iron, from what I understand. It’s a complicated disease that scientists never knew what to do about because it’s so rare–and when Sam was diagnosed with it when she was eight years old, the doctor who named it for Mary said, “There will never be a cure, she will live in a wheelchair her whole life, and I’d advise you to just go and take all your vacations right now because you don’t have a lot of time.”

Mary wasn’t the type of woman to put up with that kind of news, so even though she was just a children’s clothing store owner and not a knowledgeable scientist, she bought a computer and started trolling the Internet for news. What happened then was truly amazing: she found other people whose children also suffered with this, and she got them all organized, and one day Mary and another mom got on a train and went to the National Institute of Health and asked very nicely if they could see somebody who could help them because their children were sick, you see, and somebody should be looking for a cure.

The woman who saw them was touched by their sincerity and their plight, and she helped them reach even more people, and then they raised a bunch of money doing charity walks and asking people to mail in five bucks when they could…and finally they raised enough money to bring a whole bunch of scientists from around the world to a conference, and Mary and her friends drove these scientists around and talked to them all night in the hotel bars, and put a human face on what was a very mysterious disease.

And, well, more and more, it’s looking like a cure might be just around the corner.

A cure that won’t come in time for Mary’s two sweet daughters, of course, who are already in wheelchairs. These are girls that when you meet them, you just forget right away that they have any kind of disability: they are funny and bright and generous, just like their mom. They actually help other people, these girls, volunteering and stuff. They’ve been taught that just because they have a disability, that doesn’t mean they can’t do kind acts for other people.

Which brings us to Extreme Home Makeover. The TV show.

You see, Mary and Sam and Alex live in a house that has a storefront, and a makeshift ramp for the wheelchairs to go up and down. Until recently, Mary operated her clothing store in the front, and she had an intercom system so she could run back to the house part and see the girls if they needed her in the bathroom, or to help them get from one place to another. But recently, Mary lost her store–it just wasn’t making enough money because times are hard–and well, the winter is tough because the heating system in this 1890-vintage house is kind of creaky, and the walls leak air, and the windows don’t fit tight, and the wheelchair ramp has a way of kind of tipping over the wheelchairs every now and then.

So Mary applied to the Extreme Home Makeover TV show for maybe just a little help. And now some friends of hers have started a petition that they’re asking folks to sign, just to encourage the TV producers to consider sending a team over to Mary’s, to see what they can do for this lovely family.

Here’s the link if you have a second or two and could just go and sign the petition.

http://www.PetitionOnline.com/samalex/petition.html

 It would mean a lot. Just sign your name, that’s all. You don’t have to do anything else.

Just sign your name. Mary and the gang will do the hoping.

Just when it seemed we didn’t have enough procrastination possibilities, now scientists have come up with a whole new area of tests we need to take time out to administer. We need to study our dogs’ tail wags.

I know. It’s too much.But today the New York Times New York Times reported that there is a new study that says how your dog wags his tail shows how he feels about you.

Apparently, if he loves you and appreciates that you’ve been feeding him all these years and letting him sleep in your bed while you’re at work (oh, you didn’t know he did that?)–his tail will primarily wag to the right when he sees you.

If he’s not all that into you, he’s going to give you the left-direction tail wag.

Who knew that tails are like Ouija boards? But that’s what the scientists have discovered, and they ought to know.

Golden retrievers, of course, have no choice but to love us. It’s built into their molecular structure, and they are powerless not to try to do everything they can to express that great love by slobbering on us, lying down where we are trying to walk, and putting as much of their fur on our clothing as they can.

Even so, I needed to test this out. It’s important when you’re home writing a book to take time out for the Important Things in Life.

Jordie is nearly 12–which is about 5,198 in dog years–so he probably would have been just as happy to forego this kind of testing, but it had to be done. He got up and came over when I called him, wagging a straight-down-the-middle wag. Very non-committal, I thought.

“Come on!” I said to him. “You and I are better friends than that!”

He collapsed so he could think it over better, which is when I took his picture. This it not the picture of Dog Love, in my opinion. It is a dog saying, “Why did you wake me up to get me to wag my tail?”

So I sat down next to him and reminded him of all the lovely, yummy tissues he’s taken out of my trash can, and of the times I’ve let all 75 pounds of him sit in my lap when he’s needed to watch television, and of the times the two of us have hung out in the hallway in the middle of the night, during scary, nerve-rattling thunderstorms.

I got two wags, one sort of right-leaning, the other middle-of-the-road.

So then I had to bring up the big guns, his favorite food: carrots. I explained again how I’m the provider of carrots right out of the refrigerator, and how the Other Adult in the Household doesn’t think a dog should be rewarded with a carrot for, say, every little thing he does, like breathing and allowing himself to be petted behind the ears. And how I disagree with that and think that dogs should get carrots whenever they want them.

“Carrots!” I said. “CARROTS!”

His ears perked up and he gave me about 200 big wags to the right. BINGO! It was love.

The phone rang just then. It was Stephanie, calling between classes from New York to say hi. “What are you doing?” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Actually, I’m running some tests on whether the dog loves me, based on his tail-wagging direction.”

There was a rather long silence. “Oh,” she said. “Well, as long as you’re keeping busy.”

Technorati tags: dogs, tail-wagging, New York Times

How long since you’ve seen somebody who is fifteen whole minutes old?

This is Miles, who is kicking back as he celebrates his first-quarter hour of life in the world–and Allie, his mother, who is just amazed by him. If you’ve ever had a baby, you know just what she is thinking: So this is who has been kicking my ribs for the past few months! It’s YOU!

You can see that they’ve already pretty much committed to each other and are in love…and I, who got to be present during the labor and birth, helping Mike, her husband, as we both held her elbows and said things like, “You can do it! You’re almost there!” have finally been able to stop sniffling every time I think of that moment when he came out into the world, looking around in surprise at everyone there to meet him: his mom, his father, the midwife, the nurse, and me.

He is the first person, besides my own children, that I got to see actually being born. Words are so inadequate to describe what it was like. Just so stunning and humbling and unbelievable…see? I should stop with the words. There aren’t words. 

Let’s just say that I cried. Later I got to sit in the rocking chair there in the birthing center and rock him for a while, and he stared up at me with those hazy big navy blue eyes, and he was calm and serene. He seemed to bring with him his own sense of peace and quiet. 

Already he’s showing signs of being a wise person. For one thing, he came one week early, just so he could avoid what in our family is the April Birthday Logjam taking place next week, when four of us have our birthdays all piled on top of each other. (People always have teased us for being very clever in managing to all be born right at the same time, but in fact who needs a whole week in which you have to make–and eat–at least four birthday cakes! I know, I know…some people will complain about anything, won’t they?) 

But little Miles picked April 14th, which was a sunny spring day in New York City. Tulips and magnolia trees and forsythia were blooming everywhere. Then, the next day, once he’d gotten safely home, a huge nor’easter raged outside. We hardly noticed.  

So life is good, and I am home again, back to work on my book–wasn’t I writing a book before all this happened? I think so!

I think I’m going to give all my characters new babies.

The sun is just going down, and I have to say it’s doing a bang-up job of it today. A bank of dark, ominous clouds has moved in, and the sun, which is sinking fast, is fighting them for dominance.

I AM THE SUN AND I WILL NOT PERMIT YOU CLOUDS TO MAKE CONNECTICUT DARK.

So these incredible golden rays are lighting up everything: the new red buds on all the maples are just glowing like they’ve been touched by fire, and there are big slabs of yellow light laid down across the rocks, trees, petrified dog poop, and hay-colored grass in my front yard.

So I have been writing my novel all day long, which means that I have been going on Yahoo every hour or so to read the news just in case something needs my attention. Like maybe global warming has been discovered to be coming even faster than predicted and soon it will actually be warm here. I have also had to check my horoscope for next week, where I discovered that I (and the other Tauruses) would “love to bring a certain process to a swift conclusion, but have no choice other than letting it proceed at its own pace.”

See? That’s the problem. We have no choice. And here’s the real kicker on this horoscope, the thing that almost made me turn off the computer and go to the movies: “Your efforts to speed things up only seem to be delaying matters.”

It is good to have confirmation on that.

But in the meantime, I have discovered that perhaps it’s my imagination, but the news is just filled with some of the weirdest stories ever. I feel as though most of the time I am reading The Onion, when really it’s Yahoo news.

Like Keith Richards apparently snorting his dad. Under what planetary alignment did that seem like a good idea? And what happens when children go around snorting up their parents? Slate has an informative guide for those of us who are contemplating such a thing, called, “Should I Snort My Dad? The Dangers of Inhaling a Cremated Parent”, which I think has to qualify for some kind of  headline-writing award. (In case you’re standing by for the verdict, doctors feel it’s okay every once in a while, but not if you make a habit of it.)

Then there is the fact that a U.S. billionaire has paid $25 million to be shot into space on a Russian space launch, which is already weird enough–but then it turns out that he just might possibly be engaged to marry Martha Stewart who spent the hours before his launch riding a camel, after which she made and packed a lunch for the crew consisting of quail roasted in Madiran wine, duck breast confit with capers, shredded chicken parmentier, apple fondant pieces, rice pudding with candied fruit, and semolina cake with dried apricots. (Did they have Tang with that?) Oh, and he peed on the tires of the bus that transported him to the launch site. Of course he did.

There is more, naturally, only much of it isn’t as fun as snorting up your dead parents or riding into space eating duck confit.

An airline pilot started screaming obscenities into his cell phone while customers were boarding the flight, first in the cockpit and then taking the phone into the bathroom where he could be heard shouting like a madman. When the customers started asking what was wrong, he then started screaming at them–all the way up until law enforcement officials came and walked him off the plane, and the airline put everybody up in a hotel until a new flight with a sane pilot could be found for them.

Perhaps his lineage should be looked into. He is possibly related to the McCoy clan, of the dreaded Hatfield and McCoys–who, it has now been discovered, wanted to fight all the time because many of the McCoys had a genetic disease which caused them to have hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts. They had headaches, high blood pressure, racing hearts and too much adrenaline–all caused by tumors on their adrenal glands. Some of the remaining McCoys don’t want this all blamed on genes–as one of them says, “It’s probably due to inter-marrying.”

Yeah, not related to genes at all.

Well, it is now nearly a whole week before American Idol comes back on, and all we have are our memories and blogs to read, detailing what everyone thought about Gina having to go–and the wacky Sanjaya not even being in the bottom three this time. My very favorite blog about American Idol is Television without Pity, which tells me every single thing that happened on the show, just as if it were being dictated by my hilarious friend Deb. It does a lot of other shows, too, not just American Idol, but since I don’t watch those kinds of shows where you need your full mind and attention (like “Lost”–I don’t have ANY IDEA what that’s all about and won’t let anybody tell me), I don’t need to read recaps of those shows.  I save a lot of time that way.

Which brings me to the dirty bathtub.

I have been meaning to write a post about this for some time, because I have been going around telling people this, and each one I tell says, “Why don’t you write this in your blog?” (I think there are now people who would rather read a paragraph by me than actually talk to me, which is a discussion for perhaps another day.) 

But–here is my news: THERE IS A WAY TO CLEAN YOUR BATHTUB WITHOUT, YOU KNOW, HAVING TO CLEAN YOUR BATHTUB.

This has been kept a secret from all of us, or many of us, at least. It’s called Method Daily Shower, and it is sold at Target in a large clear bottle. And the liquid inside it is clear, too. It just SCREAMS,  ”I am only a bottle of water, and if you pay $2.99 on your hard-earned dollars, you will be so mad at yourself.”

But then you take it home and spray it in your shower–and all the gunk that collects in there just melts away! All the brown mildew colonies that have become so familiar to you that you’ve practically given them names–Edna and Pete and Ralph. They all just ooze right out of there, along with the blue streaks that people with wells (and hard water) get in their tile grout.

The best part is: you spray it on right when you get out of the shower, when the wall and tub is still wet, and then you leave the house without looking back, and the next time you go in there, Edna and Pete and Ralph are gone, along with all of their offspring, and the place is just sparkling clean.

I have to tell you about the smell. It’s got a name. It’s called “ylang ylang” scent, which is code for something, but I don’t know what. It’s not a smell I ever smelled before. Not like horrible cleaning chemicals, not even like that terrible grape-smelling stuff they scour public restrooms with. It’s kind of light and almost-but-not-quite pleasant-in-a-no-nonsense-herbal kind of way, although once your shower is clean, you love it so much you think you might want to start dabbing a little ylang-ylang around your ears.