Dreams I Never Dreamed

Daily writing prompt
What’s your biggest dream?

I don’t have any dreams, biggest or otherwise. Well, I do have the night kind, but I don’t have many of those either, at least not that I remember. Should we have dreams? I don’t know. I tried looking up dreams on Google, but no matter what my search terms, I always ended up with a list of sites pertaining to nighttime dreams. I even asked if we needed a dream, and what I got was a lecture on the importance of REM sleep.

So, I guess I’m on my own for a definition of this topic.

Do we need to have a dream? It seems to be the consensus (except for Google) that yes, we do. As Harper’s Bizarre once sang, “You gotta have a dream. If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?

As far as I can recall, though, I never really had a dream, something I was passionate about that I wished would happen or that I could work toward happening. When I was young, I wanted to be an author, even quit a job to pursue the craft, and it came as a shock when I discovered I had no talent. Years later, long after any vestige of that ambition had disappeared, I learned how to write, even had some books published but never became a “real” author, one who makes a living by writing. Perhaps the closest I came to having a dream was after Jeff died when I considered walking the Pacific Crest Trail, or walking cross country, or doing some other epic walk. I called it an impossible dream in my many blog posts about pursuing that dream, and as it turned out, it was impossible, but still, it was something that consumed my attention for many years. I researched, tried to get in shape enough to carry a heavy pack, did so many things to try to achieve that “dream,” though was it a dream? I don’t know. Looking back, it seems less a dream and more of a mental escape or a way of coping with a life of uncertainty.

And my life was uncertain. After Jeff died, I moved a thousand miles from our home to go take care of my aged father, and then after he died . . . well, let’s just say I was untethered.

Still, back then, I did think a lot about trying to find a “dream,” a way of getting through the rest of my life as fully engaged as possible. I did a lot of things in pursuit of a dream, though in fact, I’d never even dreamed any of those dreams. Dancing on stage, for example. I’m not the lightest of folks, not much of one for music or rhythm or bendability or any of a dozen other things one thinks about when you think of a dancer. And yet I did learn to dance, even did several performances on stage before a live audience. Apparently, despite the Harper’s Bizarre song, you can have a dream come true even if you never had the dream.

It’s the same with my house. Until I decided to spend my last bit of savings on a house, I’d certainly never even entertained the idea of owning a piece of property. Once I had the idea, I dreamed the house into existence, and now I seem to be living a dream, one that I never really dreamed.

And my garden. It’s a dream of a garden, that’s for sure, but for sure one that I’d never dreamed. In fact, I distinctly remember thinking (and telling people) that I didn’t want a garden or any landscaping. I wanted a yard that would take care of itself, and yet here I am, with an aftermath of a dream I never had.

Although I still don’t have dreams, I continue to open to whatever comes my way. And who knows, one day I might find myself in another situation where a dream I never dreamed actually came true.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Promises

Daily writing prompt
What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept?

I don’t really make promises to myself, at least not using those words. I do wake each day with the idea of trying to do better than I did the day before at taking care of myself, such as eating real food or doing stretching exercises if nothing else. I sometimes played around with New Year’s resolutions, though those resemble my daily betterment intentions rather than any resolution or promise to myself. Oddly, my unintentional resolution of daily blogging (I never decided to do it, never promised myself I would, just started doing it) is still in effect. 208 days and counting!

The closest I ever came to promising myself anything was after Jeff died and I became determined to be spontaneous. The only time in my life I was spontaneous was right after I met him. His very presence in the world made the world feel friendly, and I felt comfortable taking chances. Over the years, I settled back into my worrisome self. Our lives became constrained by his health, our finances, and various other matters beyond our control. He told me once it bothered him that our shared life had destroyed my spontaneity — but he never understood that he was the one responsible for whatever spontaneity I had developed to begin with.

I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life mourning, didn’t want to spend my life regretting that my shared life was ended, didn’t want to . . . well, I didn’t want to do a lot of things that I had to do, such as deal with the pain and go from there. Through it all, though, I kept that determination to be spontaneous as a way to honor him. And to honor myself.

I did many new things and took many chances — visiting museums, taking dance classes, hunting for wild poppy preserves, exploring the desert, hiking — though oddly, a lot of my spontaneity came with preparation and planning. For example, I couldn’t just start driving cross-country trip on a whim — I had to get both myself and my car into shape, stock up on the necessary emergency and camping equipment, notify people of my intentions in case they wanted me to stop by, and so many other niggling details. And yet, despite the planning, most of the trip was an exercise in spontaneity — driving how far I wanted each day, taking side trips when the signs beckoned me off the main road, accepting invitations from people I barely knew.

Even buying my house was as spontaneous as such a purchase can be. I got an unsolicited email from a real estate website saying that they had a house I might like. I did like it. And I bought it sight unseen. (Though I did have a realtor and two inspectors look at it for me.) Although my life has settled into a comfortable stay-at-homeness, and although I still have to live more or less according to a gardening schedule, my life is mostly unplanned. I do what I wish when I wish it, which most often means not doing much of anything, which I’m okay with, although oddly, yesterday I suddenly felt like cleaning house, so that was my big spontaneity of the day.

I suppose, in the end, I did make a promise to myself — that plan to be spontaneous — and I did keep it.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Cooling Down

Today is the hottest day of the year so far. Not of all years, just this year. I’ve survived hotter days than this — days when today’s high of 108 degrees was a cool-down — but still, it’s hot. Hot enough to have fried whatever energy I have. Hot enough to boil any ideas right out of my head.

So instead of writing anything of significance — assuming, of course, that I ever do — I thought I’d post photos of previous winters in the hopes that images of all that ice and snow will cool me down.

And if not that, then they will be a good reminder that although winter is officially five months away, winter weather could come as early as next month. Not that I think it will, just that it has. I remember snow in August. I also remember snow in June.

Just a reminder for people who aren’t paying attention: these are photos from previous winters. Not last year, because we had only a couple of real snowstorms, but previous years.

So are these images this cooling me off? Not particularly, but I must admit, seeing the photos is nice, especially since I don’t actually have to deal with the cold or the snow . . . yet.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Rushing the Seasons

I don’t like rushing the seasons. Instead, I try my best to get through the most trying days, even if only to remind myself that in just a few months, I’ll be complaining about the cold. But we’re in a sizzling hot spell, several days over 100 in a row, with the apex tomorrow at 109. Eek. It’s not that much of a problem, actually, since I do have a roof over my head and a way to keep the house — and me — cool, but still, those temperatures make even early morning chores a challenge. And, too, I can’t use open windows as a way to cool down the house in the evening because around here, at this time of year, it doesn’t cool down much until close to midnight.

I have to admit, that while I was hoping to bypass such temperatures this year since we had an early onslaught of summer (sometimes that’s an indication of an early cool down), stretches of more than 100 degrees are not at all uncommon. And anyway, although we’ve been in the 90s for weeks, we’ve only blipped into the 100s a couple of times. I do think this spate of sizzling weather is coming later this year than normal, but it’s hard to remember. Hot is hot.

For the next few days especially, I’ll do what I can to make my outside chores easier. It helps that so many of the summer flowers are through (or almost through) blooming. There are still a few lilies, a few echinacea, a few marigolds starting (which I don’t like particularly, but they love it here), and the petunias, of course, but for the most part, there’s not a lot to see out there except one heck of a lot of work I’m not doing.

One thing that is going strong enough to celebrate is my pumpkin vine. I just wanted the vine (ten feet long right now!) since I had a huge area to cover quickly, but still, a couple of the blossoms are turning into fruits. (Pumpkin is considered a fruit because it develops from the flowering part of the plant; it’s treated like a vegetable, but technically it’s a type of berry. Odd, that.)

Despite my claim of not liking to rush the seasons, I’d just as soon skip over the next week. Still, since there’s no choice, I’ll sweat it out (literally and figuratively), and hope that my grass, my flowers and I all survive the blast of heat.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Outdated Technology

Daily writing prompt
Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why?

I’ve been thinking about this blog prompt for a couple of days now, and I can’t really think of anything. The one thing would be the simple internal combustion engine as well as a simple dashboard with no electronic beeps or flashing lights or voices telling me what to do, but I don’t have to miss all that. It’s what I have.

About ten years ago, I had the opportunity to buy a new car, but even the older models had way more gadgets than I wanted. A car with an instrument panel as complicated as an airplane? So many electronic components most older people don’t bother to even figure out how to use? It was just too much, but still I dithered.

My mechanic, of course, wanted me to sell my old car because he wanted it, but he was honest enough to tell me the truth. He also told me that if I bought a new car, in ten years I’d have a piece of junk, but if I kept my VW Bug, in ten years I’d have a gem. I still dithered, but another car guy about had a fit when he found out I was considering getting a new vehicle, and he used the exact words the mechanic did.

By that time, I’d test driven enough cars and paid enough attention to my friends’ cars to realize I didn’t want all that computer stuff. I also didn’t know what lifestyle I would end up with. If I were going to be nomad, I needed a vehicle with a back area I could go car camping in. If I had to move to a big city, I’d need a small car. All that indecision! In the end, I had my bug restored. (Now that I’m remembering, the insurance and license plates tags on a new car would have been out of my budget range, so that pretty much decided the issue.)

I’m glad I kept the car. It’s simple, it works, and it’s a conversation piece. The only problem is I can never get a new car. I’ve told that story so many times — that I bought the car new and never bought another one — that it seems ingrained in my psyche.

So I don’t need to miss having a car with older technology, since that’s my vehicle.

It still seems astonishing to me that a car I bought when I was young, one moreover that I thought was a lemon, is still running. Well, for that matter, it amazes me that I am still running. I mean that my body is still working. I don’t run, can’t run, actually. But luckily, my car does run, even if it is outdated technology.

Oh, wait!! I just thought of another outdated technology that I liked — VCRs. But like my car, I don’t have to miss the technology because I have one or two never-used VCRs so I can play the movie collection Jeff left behind, though to be honest, I haven’t played any of those tapes in years.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Technology in 2046

Daily writing prompt
What’s a piece of technology you’re convinced will exist in 20 years?

I’m not convinced anything will exist in twenty years. In fact, I truly doubt I will exist in twenty years, so it won’t matter to me what, if any, technology will exist at that time. Chances are, technology will progress as it always has, with artificial intelligence becoming more and more prevalent and changing human lives in ways we can’t even imagine. Of course we can’t imagine — the changes will be coming from non-human intelligence, something so alien that it certainly doesn’t care about anything human. Any pretense at human emotion emanating from those ones and zeros will be just that — pretense.

Besides, we have no idea, really, when and if a cosmic catastrophe will happen. Over the billions of years the earth has existed, there have been many such events, events that seem to have changed the earth’s environment almost overnight. We all know of such events — the dinosaur extinction and the wooly mammoth extinction, to name two. The prevalence of flood myths, of the world standing still, of night becoming day all seem to reference other extinction events.

The truth is, despite all our vaunted science expertise, we really don’t have that much knowledge about how the sun — or any other cosmic body — affected the earth over those billions of years. Our human history is such a tiny fraction of the earth’s history. We live in a rather temperate and stable time, when we think the way the world is today is the way it always was and always will be. What else explains the prevalence of mobile home parks being set up in tornado alleys, towns being constructed on flood plains, and people building cabins in fire zones? When terrible things happen to people in these areas, it’s always a shock, though it shouldn’t be. What is, wasn’t always. A dry flood plain today wasn’t always dry, and it’s still subject to rare and not-so-rare floods.

And if the cosmos weren’t enough of an inimical neighborhood, we have the political situation, too. Here in this country, it used to be the goals were the same, the differences in political parties were due to differences in the means of achieving those goals. Now the goals are so widely divergent they hardly seem to be describing the same country. Most people want us to remain a constitutional republic, but a growing vocal and volatile group wants to tear the whole thing down, get rid of the constitution, the government, the entire criminal justice system, and let chaos and poverty take over. (Which I don’t understand. What do these people think is going to happen to them when they have destroyed this country? They will be living here, too. Or are they so stupid as to they think they will be the ones running things? Or so brainwashed as to believe the country will suddenly become a utopia with no crime and Kumbaya everywhere?)

Some people believe we’re headed toward a civil war. Others think we’re heading toward a world war, complete with nuclear weapons going off everywhere.

I don’t want to believe either of those scenarios, just as I don’t want to believe in a major cosmic event, but what I’ve learned during my many years is that the world does not run on my beliefs. If it did run on my beliefs, we would be living in a utopia because everyone would be spending a lot of time at home, working in a garden, reading, or writing rather tame blogs without a lot of emotion, and certainly no rage or outrage. Just kindness and smiles for everyone — well, almost everyone.

Still, let’s assume there are no major upheavals, civil or cosmic, and in twenty years, the world is more or less continuing on the same road to total technology as it is today. I still wouldn’t have an answer to the question because I’m not convinced of much of anything, though I’m pretty sure technology will have outpaced my need for it. To be honest, it already has.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Lifelong Learner

Daily writing prompt
Are you a lifelong learner?

For sure! I have always been a dedicated learner. From complicated subjects such as quantum physics to simple subjects such as the etymology of words, anything new to me has always been grist for my mental mill.

A lot of this desire to know is innate. I tend to think most of us are born with such a desire — all you have to do is watch a baby explore his new world or try to answer a toddler’s non-stop questions, to realize how true that must be. I’m not sure why so many people lose that interest, nor am I sure why I retained mine. Well, I do know two reasons — one is that I have always spent so much time alone, that there was no one to quench that desire to learn. Another is that when I was very young, everyone seemed to know so much more than I did, things like names of streets and the different shapes of leaves, which left me always trying to catch up.

It turns out that the reason they knew more was that they could see. I still remember after I got my first pair of glasses, I was looking out the car window in total amazement, and then I saw . . . street signs!!! And I realized that’s how everyone knew so much more than I did — they could see.

That realization didn’t make a difference, though. I still learned as much as I could as quickly as I could so I’d catch up, but I only ended up tormenting myself. I was one of those weird girls who read her school books the first day of school and then sat there bored out of her skull the rest of the year. So my learning came outside the classroom from any books I could get my hands on. (I wasn’t as fanatic as my brother who read the encyclopedia from cover to cover, though I did leaf through them — and the dictionary — and read what interested me.)

Somewhere along the line, perhaps because of the Taylor Caldwell books, I discovered there was a whole world of history we were never taught, and that gave me another area of study. And then, of course, there was health, writing, traveling, and so many other subjects that encompass the whole of the world.

Today, I keep my learning to gardening. It’s more of a hands-on kind of learning — trial and error — rather than book learning, but still, it’s learning. Come to think of it, though, I do spend a lot of time learning about the current state of the world, though I tend to think that subject is going to end soon since there’s nothing much I can do about any of it. But isn’t that the way of learning? Much of what we — or rather I — learn is simply learning for learning’s sake.

I suppose eventually, I’ll mostly be beyond this learning stage, not just for current events, but all subjects — though since my desire to learn has lasted decades, perhaps not, but still, there comes a point in almost every subject where I reach the end of what can be known (or what I can know, anyway) and then there’s no real point in going on. For example, I no longer am as fascinated by particle theories as I once was. It seems that particles can be broken down further and further until they reach a point where they no longer act as particles but as waves. So perhaps everything comes down to thought waves, brain waves, all sorts of waves. And if, in fact, everything exists as a possibility until it is “seen,” then that sort of makes learning less about finding out what exists and more about creating what might exist, which, to me, is pretty much a dead end.

Anyway, that’s more about my desire to learn than you ever wanted to know, but there it is.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Being Noticed

It rained the night before last, enough rain that not only did I not have to water yesterday, it was too muddy to work in the yard.

So I went for a walk. It felt good being out and about despite the heat and humidity, though I actually did more visiting during that hour than walking. First, I chatted with a neighbor who was thrilled with the almost two inches of rain, and then we moved onto other topics, such as theft. Solar garden lights are disappearing around town. Both of mine outside the fence went first, then someone came into my fenced yard and took one of my expensive solar lights, so I put the remaining light in the garage, where it will be safe. Useless, but safe.

Apparently, kids are stealing them to use as nightlights on their bicycles. Even if they were caught, no one would do anything about it. The sheriff, of course, couldn’t care, and the new local police force . . . actually, I don’t know anything about them other than that this town decided not to rely on the county anymore. And that they have brand new vehicles. I guess I should count myself lucky I have no information about them — it means I have no need of their services.

I continued my walk, and on the way back, as I paused to look at a tiny rosebush, a woman came rushing out of her house and said, “I’m so glad to see you’re okay.” I’d been introduced to the woman once, and had never spoken another word with her, but apparently, she’d noticed I hadn’t been out walking for a while. She mentioned that another woman, one I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen, had also been asking about me. It’s nice to know people notice and care, but the truth is, by the time they realized I was missing, my corpse could have been moldering in my house for months. But still, it is nice. And weird, too, in a way.

It’s funny — every time I go walking, I realize how much I miss it, but then something happens, like the ground drying out and my needing to do yardwork as it did today, and I never get a chance to get back in the swing of daily walking. But maybe. Someday. When it’s not hot. Or windy. Or cold. Or snowy.

Oh, who and I trying to kid. There’s always an excuse. But yesterday, I did take a walk, and it was nice.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

Keeping the Past in the Past

Daily writing prompt
What’s one habit that has improved your life the most?

The one habit that has improved my life the most is training myself not to look back. What is done is done, and cannot be redone, so it’s best to look to today — what exists today — no matter how I got here, and then go on from here.

This philosophy was described to me using a golf metaphor. If your golf ball lands in the sand, you need to concentrate on the shot as it exists, not how you got there. At the time of making the shot, how you got there is immaterial. Only the conditions existing now are what counts.

Sometimes, of course, I do look back, or else I used to, but only to figure out what — if anything — I did wrong so that I wouldn’t make that mistake again. (In the case of the golf metaphor, the golfer can critique the fatal shot after the game is ended if the golfer so wishes.) Otherwise, the sand trap I am standing in (or the green I am delighting in) are the only things that need concern me.

A problem I’ve always had is what I call roundaboutation. It’s when my thoughts continually replay the past, a mental loop, always trying to come up with a different outcome. Unfortunately, that outcome is always the same because that outcome is . . . today. Getting rid of that mental loop and accepting that today is what counts in going forward (as the old cliché goes, today is the first day of the rest of your life) makes for a much more serene life.

Also, any problems can be looked at as simply themselves, not as what created them, not as what I wish had happened, but simply the problem itself without any backstory or history. It makes focusing on a possible solution less complicated because there’s not a lot of murky shoulda/woulda/couldas clouding the issue.

I wish I could teach people this lesson, especially those who so often refer to ancient wrongs committed by forebears, who think that because this country — like all countries — had a bloody and immoral past, it negates whatever good exists in the present. Concentrating on the past makes it easy to teach people to hate this country. If people could ignore the past, take today as it exists right now, where most of those situations no longer exist, figure out the direst problems today, and go from there, people would be much more accepting of the good. But no . . . grievance is about the past even more than the present or future, and a grievance culture needs the past.

Thinking of that is part of the sand trap for me. I need to concentrate on my own sand trap, not anyone else’s, even though their position on the sand trap might affect me.

Still, for serenity’s sake, today is the starting point — what is actually present in my life and what I can do, not what other people do that might (or might not affect me).

This serenity was hard won. I wasn’t able to slough off grief as so many people do. For me, for many years, my present was my grief (or do I mean my grief was my present?) Either way, I had to deal with all the burdens that came from losing that one special person (as well as my parents and brothers) until I could let go of the past. In fact, it’s those years of grief, way more than any golf metaphor that helped me. No matter how many times I replayed those last days, weeks, years, of our shared life, it always came out the same — him gone from this world. Me alone.

And that’s what I deal with. My life today. And it’s a good life.

As long as I leave the past in the past, anyway, and don’t create — or recreate problems that don’t exist today.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One

All the World’s a Stage

It’s only recently that I’ve become aware of politics as identity and identity as ideology. Somehow, I thought people were bright enough to stand apart from what they believed, to see themselves as a person believing a thing, not believing that they were the thing believed. But apparently not. When some people buy into a political ideology, they identify with that ideology, and when the ideology is attacked, they think that they themselves are being attacked, not just their idea.

I can’t imagine holding any idea so strongly that a destruction of that belief would destroy me, but that is not the case with a lot of people. Decades ago in a theology class, the teacher broke down everything we believed. His intent, if I remember correctly, was to make us rethink what we thought we knew. To get us to start building up a new way of thinking. Before he got to that point though, a student in the class got really upset, and told him he was destroying everything we believed without giving us anything to replace it. It was as if he had destroyed us, since those beliefs were the foundation of our lives until then, and most of the class were as upset as that one student, but it didn’t bother me. It was just something else to learn, is all. (As far as I was concerned, nothing I learned in school was ever about me. It was just the curriculum.)

To be honest, that’s the only thing about that class I remember. Well, there was one other odd thing that has stuck in my mind all these years. He taught that “Love is the movement of an appetite toward a recognized good.” (His exact words.) I think the discussion that day centered on the supposition that if this were true, then what we think of love is really like and vice versa. But the upshot of that class is lost in the shadows of time. Or rather, in the shadows of my mind. Odd that I remembered those two bits.

A more recent example comes from The Wheel of Time. In the books, there is a people, a warrior society, that takes their entire identity from their belief that they were always warriors, that what sets them apart from others and makes them morally superior is that they use spears rather than swords, their thinking being that spears can also be used for hunting while swords can only be used to kill other humans. When this ideology was proven false, a huge percentage of those people couldn’t handle it and ran away, not just from their culture but from themselves. (It often seems to me that these books are a brand-new allegory instead of a decades-old fantasy series.)

The odd thing is that the story of this warrior society helps me understand many politically motivated people today, while at the same time, these people today help me understand the people in this warrior society.

Another odd thing is that in the book, the chiefs of this society knew that the destruction of their beliefs and their people had been prophesied, but as a chief said, “It’s one thing to know prophesy will be fulfilled eventually, another to see that fulfillment before your very eyes.”

This statement certainly rings true to me. It’s one thing to spend a lifetime studying “prophesy,” aka history, both overt and hidden, and to know that one day we will be balanced on the knife edge of keeping our country a constitutional republic or turning into another sociologic cesspool, but seeing it happen before my eyes is . . . disheartening. It’s also weird to see all the political, global, and economic machinations that had been going on behind the scenes my whole life, suddenly appearing on stage as if it’s no big deal. I’d always presumed I’d be gone by the time this new world order would be put into effect, but it’s happening faster than I expected. I try to look at it as seeing history in the making — both the push toward socialism and the pushback of the republic — but it’s hard to continue to see it all as “out there.” It comes too close, at times.

Still, whatever happens, I will still be me. My identity is only as a truth seeker, not as a victim or oppressor. (And even “truth seeker” is only a surface identity. I am . . . me. Period. I am not my ideas. Not my writing. I’m just me. No further definition needed.) And, if I am being truthful, there is a chance I will never see the fruition of this current push since part of the “ideology” has always been to get rid of the old folks who are perceived by the young as using up too many resources without contributing anything.

But who knows. The curtain is up. The play is still going on, and we have yet to discover the plot.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One