Shatner Chatter: Or, Post-Human Travel Plans

Last night:

Hi Susan,
Thanks for your email. Unfortunately, it does seem like your mom is getting weaker. I'm so sorry. Please keep us posted with regard to your travel plans. Also, if you need us for anything, please don't hesitate to give us a call. We'll be around all weekend (in and out).
Take care.
Love,
Ellen


This a.m.: Secure and on the Arden Courts waiting message sounds at first like "cure."


--She ate 25% of her breakfast. We couldn't get her in a wheelchair to go to the community room. She's very weak. [I ask.] Yes, come earlier.


Nurse says the same thing.


Got tickets for Thursday arrival through priceline.com. Plane and rental car for less than a round-trip ticket. I booked the hotel on the wrong night. Can't ever remember the red-eyes take up the night. I call priceline, get William Shatner, a phone tree, no persons. I look at united.com, but there are no phone numbers. There is no phone number for United Airlines in either of my Honolulu telephone books. They merged, so I call Continental, get Daphne. Daphne looks up my reservation, says United owns it, gives me their number. Phone tree. I speak loudly--too loudly--to the automated voice. I get a person. I tell him how grateful I am to have a human being, and he thanks me. It's then I realize that he sounds automated. He is sorry to hear about my mother, but he can't do anything, because I made the plans with an agent. I call priceline again, more Shatner, no human being.

hi susan,  thanks for letting me know.  very tough and poignant times for you i guess and beautiful too.  i send love.  if you want to send me your mom's name we can chant for her and hold her and you in mind.    Yrs, Norman 

I can get a one way ticket to DC, which is not Baltimore, where I will have a rental car on Thursday, the day after my hotel reservation begins in Fairfax, and where I'll return from. I can get a one way ticket to Baltimore, but it's crazy. I will get the ticket to National. I will beg them to change my rental car reservation and they will tell me they cannot. It's not them, it's priceline, and I refuse to talk to William Shatner any more. He can beam me nowhere.


I call the cousin down the street. I will leave Radhika with them tomorrow. They can pick up Bryant and Sangha in the evening from Kauai. Or I can leave the car and let them know where it is at the airport and they can tell Bryant when he arrives. Bryant cannot be reached. He is on High Adventure with the Boy Scouts.


I am on High Adventure with priceline.com. I hit the purchase button. The screen tells me they are negotiating deals. Little dots flash at me. Birds on a wire. William Shatner is there, one fist jabbing the air toward me, the other held back. He is shadow-boxing, as am I. They have made me a good deal. Too bad it's the second deal I've made this week. Two good deals do not one make.


My mother broke her pelvis a couple of months before our wedding. She canceled her flight reservations. "I got my money back!" she told me on the phone. She was well by the time we married. She would not want me spending her money this way.


I call Arden Courts back, say I'm coming Monday, please keep her going until then. "We're trying," says the caregiver.

> I'm visualizing you sitting with your mom. > > Much love, > Sina >