culture | Bertram's Blog

Upgrading to a Smartphone

January 31, 2014 — Pat Bertram

My poor old dumb phone finally decided it had enough of being at my peck and call, and it quit working. Although I have never wanted a smartphone, that’s what I ended up with, and oh, my. I thought the internet consumed time, but that phone could pretty much eat up my days if I wanted it to.

For starters, it took a long time to find my way around and get it the way I wanted. It’s not that the actions were complicated, but in many cases, it was hard to find the instructions.

One of the things I didn’t like was that all texts ended up in the inbox of one of my online email accounts. Yikes. It wasn’t bad yesterday when I had only a couple of texts, but some family members correspond with me strictly via text, and I had visions of spending hours deleting such items from my inbox. Also, all contacts from certain email accounts ended up as contacts on my phone, and most of those people I’m not close to. I certainly don’t want to be carrying them with me wherever I go.

And then there was Facebook. I downloaded the app, got it all set up, even downloaded the app for Facebook pages, then went to add something on the calendar on my phone and found it flooded with events and birthdays from people on FB I don’t even know. I found a way to empty the calendar, but it immediately filled up again. It wouldn’t be a problem since I have never used ecalendars (I’m not always on the computer when I need to check my schedule), but I thought I’d try the one on the phone. I found no way to unsync all the FB info, so when it turned out to be a choice between FB or the calendar, I chose the calendar. So I uninstalled the FB app. If you’re one of my FB contacts, you won’t be inundated with silly status updates. Aren’t you glad?

I found a cool calculator that works like its unvirtual counterpart, and a colorful game — Blendoku. I have always loved the way colors shade and fade into each other, so the game is a natural for me.

I’m sure there are hundreds of other apps that I would find fascinating — for example, I saw an app that supposedly identifies stars and such in the night sky — but for now, I’m limiting myself. The whole thrust of my current life is to live the real world, not the electronic one (though apparently, the so-called real world is also just a series of electrons connecting us one to another).

Still, I will be using the phone for more than making calls. I just wanted to let you know in advance that any errors in my posts and emails are due to the phone. I, of course, don’t make errors. 🙂

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Follow Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in culture, internet. Tags: Blendoku, FB mobile app, smartphone. 8 Comments »

A Retrospective of Grief

January 27, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Another 27th. This is the 46th twenty-seventh of the month I have survived since the death of my life mate/soul mate death on March 27, 2010. At the beginning of my grief, each minute, hour, day seemed unfathomably long. I felt as if I lived years during that first month. I still don’t understand how I made it through that eon. The pain started out unbearable and got progressively worse. Each breath took such effort that it seemed as if it would be easier to stop breathing altogether. And yet I continued to breathe, one agonizing gulp of air at a time.

For the first three years, I could feel the grief surging as each twenty-seventh crept up on me, but today I only knew the date by the calendar. Even so, I might not have noticed if I hadn’t advanced his perpetual calendar.

About a month before he died, he told me he wanted me to keep the calendar. It was special to him — a family heirloom and a relic of his childhood — and he didn’t want me to throw it away with the rest of his effects. Which I probably would have done. I thought such calendars silly because if you don’t remember to advance the calendar each day, the calendar loses its effectiveness. He, of course, had the discipline to advance the calendar. No matter where we lived, no matter the state of his health or the stresses of our life, he always advanced the calendar first thing every morning.

And now so do I. It has become a way of honoring his life, of remembering him, of being connected to him in a small way. For a long time, I felt connected to him through grief. (Odd, that. It was the feeling of being disconnected from him that grieved me in the first place.) Now that my grief has waned, there is nothing to connect me to him. Unlike many who have lost someone important to them, I have never had a visitation, a sign, any indication that he still exists somewhere. He is simply gone — gone from my life, anyway.

The tears are gone, too.

It seems strange now that I grieved so deeply. I can barely remember loving someone so profoundly that his death tore me apart. Can barely remember that shattered woman who screamed her pain to the uncaring winds. Was that really me or simply a character in the book of my life? (I meant this as a metaphor, but I did write a book about my life, or rather my life of grief. That seems strange, too.)

We live each day as it comes, deal with each pain and sorrow, and somehow, through the years, we become something other than we were. I am no longer a schoolgirl dealing with the small dramas of grades, cliques, unacceptance. No longer a young woman desperately and radiantly in love with a man. No longer an adult struggling to live while her soul mate was dying. No longer a grieving woman.

At the moment, I am thrust in the role of caregiver for my 97-year-old father and homeless brother, but someday, I won’t be this woman, either. I don’t know what will become of me, don’t know what I will become (other than older), but chances are, I still will be advancing that ancient calendar in honor of the life that meant so much to me.

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: death of a soul mate, grief at four years, honoring life, honoring the dead, perpetual calendar. 6 Comments »

Is It Cheating to Look at the Solution of a Puzzle Before You’ve Finished?

January 26, 2014 — Pat Bertram

When you are working a puzzle, such as a crossword puzzle, and you come to the end of what you can do on your own, do you consider it cheating to look at the solution for hints so you can finish the puzzle? Do you see checking the answer as part of the fun of doing puzzles? Or do you abandon the puzzle half-finished to keep from cheating? If you do consider it cheating to check the solution for an answer you have no way of figuring, do you also consider it cheating to ask someone, to use a crossword puzzle dictionary, or to look online for the answer to the clue? Do you find yourself shying away from more difficult puzzles because you can’t do them without cheating?

This has nothing to do with anything, of course, I’m just curious what you think. I did a hard Sudoku this morning and had to check the solution to keep going. I used to consider it cheating to check the solution when I got stuck, but after realizing how many puzzles I wasted by not jump starting the puzzle, I understood it was simply a way of working the puzzle and had wasn’t dishonest.

Just for fun, here are a couple of A Spark of Heavenly Fire Sudoku. You work these exactly as you do number Sudoku, but you use the letters from A Spark of Fire. (A, S, P, R, K, O, F, I, E). If you don’t know how to do Sudoku, you can find the directions here: http://www.sudoku.ws/rules.htm You should be able to print out the puzzles to make them easier to work.

Click here for solutions:

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Posted in books, culture. Tags: A Spark of Heavenly Fire, cheating at crosswords puzzles, cheating on word puzzles, puzzles, Sudoku. 7 Comments »

Secret Stairs (Part III)

January 23, 2014 — Pat Bertram

[Continuation of Secret Stairs (Part I) and Secret Stairs (Part II)]

The third and final leg of the journey to search for secret stairs in Hollywood took us to the Temple Hill neighborhood. There weren’t a lot of steps to climb (only 108 compared to the more that 300 in Whitley Heights), but there were many steep hills that could have used a few stairs to make the hike easier.

This is an area was once the home of various spiritual centers, including Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophists and the Vedanta Temple:

On Vine Way, we found this graceful and winding set of 47 easy steps:

snd these private steps:

We continued to Holly Mont Drive where we saw Hollymont Castle, once Barbara Stanwyck’s estate and now owned by pianist Derek Grey. We met a man who claimed to be Derek Grey’s twin brother, and he could have been, for all I know. He confirmed that the castle was haunted.

Across from the castle was a set of 61 steps that divided into two narrow stairways.

I was disappointed when the search for secret stairs ended for the day. I’ve never known that stairs could be so romantic. I’ve seen very few staircases in the past twenty years — there was no real need for them in the high flat areas I’ve lived, and whatever steps I encountered were banal, simply a way to get from one place to another. Now I will keep an eye out for stairways, and wonder about all who have set foot on those steps.

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Posted in culture, history/myth, photography. Tags: Barbara Stanwyck, Derek Grey, secret stairs, secret stairs Los Angeles, Temple Hill, whitley heights. 4 Comments »

Secret Stairs (Part II)

January 22, 2014 — Pat Bertram

[A continuation of Secret Stairs (Part I)]

Secret. There is something about the very word that rouses our curiosity, making us wonder what dire (or delightful) truths are being kept from us. Secret societies. Secret meetings. Secret codes. Secret stairs.

Secret stairs? I’d never even heard of such a thing until a friend invited me on a trip to search out some of the secret stairs in Los Angeles. Apparently, there are many secret stairways in steep hilly neighborhoods. In the days before cars took over the city, these stairs allowed people to get down the hill to schools, markets, and trolley cars. In fact, many of the houses in these neighborhoods had no other access to the outside world than these public staircases.

We saw once public stairways, such as these steps that now go up to someone’s back yard in Whitley Heights:

We saw remnants of stairs:

We climbed stairs that meandered through a park,

old wooden stairs,

faux wood stairs,

painted stairs.

And we took these concrete stairs up to my favorite part of the hike,

this lovely secluded walkway.

There are so many wonders in the world, secret and otherwise, that it’s amazing we go about our ordinary lives without stopping more frequently to gasp at the awe of it all.

To be continued . . . Secret Stairs (Part III)

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Posted in culture, history/myth, photography. Tags: secret stairs, secret stairs Los Angeles, secrets, whitley heights. 3 Comments »

Secret Stairs (Part I)

January 21, 2014 — Pat Bertram

A friend invited me to go on a trip with her for a “secret stairs” hike in Hollywood. Even though I didn’t know what the hike was about, of course I said “yes.” I have developed the habit of saying yes to anything anyone invites me to do, even if my first inclination were to hesitate or even say no, a practice that has led me to many wonderful places and activities that I would never even thought of experiencing. Even if I weren’t already primed to accept, I’d have gone — I’ve never been able to resist anything “secret.” There are a vast number of secrets in the world, including life itself, and being gifted with an insatiable curiosity, I try to ferret out those secrets, but considering that so many secrets are . . . well, secret . . . by definition, I wouldn’t know that they even exist. And there, in a few simple words, I was being offered a chance to discover a hitherto unknown secret.

Secret stairs. Even the phrase evokes feelings of adventure, wonder, mystique.

Apparently, there are many secret stairways in Los Angeles in the steep hilly neighborhoods that were built back before cars took over the city. These stairs allowed people to get down the hill to schools, markets, and trolley cars. In fact, many of the houses in these neighborhoods had no other access to the outside world than these public staircases. The stairs were largely forgotten until Charles Fleming published his book Secret Stairs: A Walking Guide to the Historic Staircases of Los Angeles.

A friend has been doing all of the walks — 42 of them — and has finished all but the last few. The walk she invited me on was a combination of #36 and #35 in Fleming’s book. (It was such a lovely day, she decided to do two of them.)

We started out with an unplanned stop by a bit of sidewalk graffiti that seemed oddly appropriate:

Our first scheduled stop was the historic Highland Towers apartments, where William Faulkner is supposed to have lived when he worked on such films as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not:

We passed the Hollywood Heritage Museum, and walked up Milner to the first secret staircase — the Whitley Terrace steps, an L-shaped staircase with 160 steps.

At about the ninetieth step, there was a landing with fabulous views of the High Tower residential area — not that I know what the area is, but it was an interesting sight:

I paused at the top to take a photo of the steps we had just climbed before searching out the next set of secret stairs in Hollywood. (Hint — the key to walking up huge flights of outside stairs is to stop periodically to marvel at flowers or take photos of . . . anything. That way you can catch your breath without having to admit that you have reached your limit.)

To be continued . . . (But of course, you already knew I’d be continuing this saga since the title says “Part I” and you can’t have a “Part I” without a “Part II”.)

Secret Stairs (Part II)

Secret Stairs (Part III)

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Posted in culture, history/myth, photography. Tags: Charles Fleming, High Tower residential area Hollywood, Highland Towers apartments, Hollywood stairs, secret stairs, Whitley Terrace steps, William Faulkner and Highland Towers apartments. 10 Comments »

Falls and Follies

January 18, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Ever since the death of my life mate/soul mate, I’ve made an effort to do new things, especially things I would not have had an opportunity to experience if he were alive. (It helps me make sense of his being gone. If I continued to do only what we would have done together, I’d feel as if I were wasting his death.) Now I am continuing that effort, not just to honor his death, but to help me survive a stressful family situation. Oh, who am I trying to kid? I just want to have fun!

My two most recent experiences were a trip to Palm Springs

to see the Palm Springs Follies, a Las Vegas-style production

where all the gorgeous showgirls were over 55, some even over 75! We weren’t allowed to take photos during the show, of course, so I hope they don’t mind my using their photo:

And then today I went on a hike with the Sierra Club to a lovely riparian area in the middle of the desert. (Riparian means relating to the banks of a natural course of water.) At the base of this looming rock formation

is a lovely grotto, like a natural shower stall, with water cascading down the walls (I’ve been told that when the area isn’t on drought alert, there is so much water, it is very much like a shower, and perhaps the local tribes once used it for such a purpose.)

I have other trips planned — I’ve been invited on a walking tour of secret stairways, and I have tickets to Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, an all male dance troupe that is supposedly as funny as they are accomplished. I am also planning to plan even more trips, maybe take myself on a date since I’m not having any luck finding anyone on the online dating sites, perhaps even go away for a weekend by myself. I’ll keep you posted.

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Posted in culture, life, photography. Tags: Arastre Falls, grotto, Marilyn Monroe Palm Springs, Palm Springs Follies, riparian area, waterfall. 6 Comments »

Excerpt From “Grief: The Great Yearning” — Day 288

January 16, 2014 — Pat Bertram

GTGYthmb I’ve come a long way in the three years since I wrote the following journal entry. Saturdays have ceased to be difficult, though I still don’t understand the nature of life or death. Still don’t understand the point of it all, but the questions don’t haunt me quite as much as they did during the first years after the death of my life mate/soul mate. I’m learning to live without him, learning even to want to live without him. Sometimes I see his death as freeing us — me — from the horrors of his dying, and I don’t want to waste the sacrifice he made.

I still yearn to talk to him, though. I miss talking to him, miss his insights, miss the neverending conversation. (“Neverending” is a misnomer — the conversation that began the day we met and continued for decades until he got too sick to hold up his end of the dialogue, did eventually end.) He was easy to talk to. He never misunderstood what I said. I could make a simple comment to him, and he understood it was a simple comment. He didn’t make a big issue out of it, just answered back appropriately. It seems now every remark I make to anyone becomes a major deal as I try to explain over and over again what I meant by the first remark. It’s exhausting.

I’m grateful we met and had so many years together. Grateful for all the words we spoke to each other. Grateful I once had someone to love. Grateful that when my time comes to die, he won’t be here to see me suffer. Grateful he won’t have to grieve for me or be tormented by unaswerable questions.

Excerpt from Grief: The Great Yearning

Day 288, Grief Journal

Saturday, again. I stayed in bed all morning reading because I did not want to get up and face another Saturday. Friday nights and Saturdays continue to be difficult. I watched movies last night until my private witching hour of 1:40am.

The longer Jeff is gone, the more I see what I’ve lost. When we were together, everything was normal, so I couldn’t see how extraordinary our lives were. We created all our own recipes and fixed all our own meals, built our own business, spent years researching the mysteries of the world. And we had such wonderful marathon talks that lasted for days. We didn’t try to convince the other of our position—we each brought truth and thought to the conversation, and together we created a greater reality. There was no reason to argue—it was never about his opinion versus mine. It was about the truth—the truth as far as we could reconstruct it together.

A woman who lost her mate four months after I lost Jeff asked me the other day if I loved Jeff more now than when he was alive, and in a way I do. The problems of his growing ill health got in the way the last few years, clouding my vision of him. Now that those problems and my reaction to them are no longer a factor, I can see the truth of him again (or at least more of the truth than I did) and the love shines through.

Grief comes and goes, but love stays. And grows.

Click here to find out more about Grief: The Great Yearning

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: grief and gratitude, grief and healing, grief and searching for meaning, Grief: The Great Yearning, neverending conversation. 1 Comment »

Waiting for Late-Blooming Genius to Flower

January 12, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I’m not a creative genius by any means, and that’s probably a good thing. A large percentage of such geniuses (77% for novelists and 87% for poets) suffer from some sort of mental disturbance — schizophrenia, cognitive disorders, depression, bipolarism, neuroses, alcoholism. I don’t even have the sort of mental dissociation that many creative non-geniuses have, such as sitting back and letting my characters tell the story, like some form of spirit writing. My characters never do anything that I didn’t intend them to do, they never take on a life of their own, they never appear to me in my dreams. They are a deliberate construct, created by carefully chosen words.

On the other hand, there is still a chance that I will end up as a one of those poor tormented souls. There are two kinds of genius — the wunderkind kind where a person is born with their genius, and the late bloomer kind where a person develops their genius through experience and trial and error. (To the extent that I have a talent for writing, mine is the late blooming kind. I tried to write a novel when I was young, but when I sat down to write, hoping the words would flow, my mind was a complete blank. Throughout the years, though, I did learn how to write.)

There is another possibility for such late-blooming genius to flower in me. Dan Chiasson, writing about poet Marianne Moore who became a star in her seventies, said “Poets often make a sudden advance with the death of their parents, as though a curfew has suddenly been lifted; for some, it happens just at the moment the imagination has stalled.”

If this “curfew” is lifted from other creative types, too, then when I am free from the responsibilities of looking after my father, my creativity could erupt. (And anyway, I used to be a poet once upon a time, so either way, the curfew lifting could be a boon.) I have the stalled imagination, that’s for sure — for several years, I haven’t been able to write much of anything except blog posts with sporadic forays into fiction writing — so who knows what will happen in the coming years. I just hope that if genius decides to descend on me, I get to keep my normalcy. I have no desire to suffer from any sort of mental disturbance. I’ll be satisfied with being just a garden-variety, everyday, creative non-genius who writes magnifient books.

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Posted in books, culture, writing. Tags: creative genius, creative genius and mental disorders, Dan Chiasson, late-blooming genius, Marianne Moore. 1 Comment »

Where Do the Misfits Fit?

January 10, 2014 — Pat Bertram

This is a strange world we live in where a person can get arrested for having a beard. I don’t have a beard, and I wasn’t arrested, but a relative was. Or maybe it wasn’t his beard that got him arrested. It could be that because of his sciatica, he was walking with a lurch, and that’s what attracted attention.

He was walking down a non-residential street about a block from where I am staying, and the cops stopped him. He told them he was on his way here and to call me and I would vouch for him. Instead, they took him to jail way out in a part of town I would never want to visit in the day, let alone at 10:00 at night. (I had to go back again at 12:30am because they wouldn’t release him.) The arrest report lists his crime as being intoxicated in a public place, and he might have had something to drink, I don’t know — but he wasn’t unruly or doing anything but lurching down the street, his white beard like a beacon.

He’d also been arrested a couple of weeks before that for jaywalking.

Cripes. I jaywalk all the time — the crosswalks around here are about a mile apart, and so if I am on foot, generally I have to go way out of my way to get anywhere. And there is one intersection with a crosswalk that doesn’t have a walk signal. There are four different roads that converge on that spot, and considering turning cars and such, I take my life in my hands every time I step off a curb. Since that crosswalk is way out of my way, I generally jaywalk in the middle of the block where there is no traffic. I’ve been lucky so far about not getting a jaywalking ticket, but since I can’t afford a sheaf of $186 tickets, I’ve been doing the dangerous thing and using the crosswalk.

These and other episodes have made me wonder about people who don’t fit in our homogenized world. If you have a few drinks in a bar, and then go outside, you are breaking the law because you are intoxicated in a public place. But of course, the cops don’t hang around outside bars waiting for customers to emerge and arrest these lawbreakers. Instead, they arrest those who don’t fit in with the bar crowd, such as the intoxicated homeless. So basically, it’s being homeless that is the real crime.

What are people supposed to do who don’t fit? Our world is getting narrower and narrower, where we don’t want to deal with anything or anyone who is a nuisance or who doesn’t add glamour to our plastic world. In fact, there is a law currently being considered in the UK that could criminalize behavior deemed capable of causing a “nuisance or annoyance.” We don’t need such laws in the US — we have plenty of annoying laws on the books that can be used to criminalize the nuisances.

But it’s not just the armies of derelicts twho don’t fit in our world. A woman with two masters degrees was crying to me the other day because she doesn’t fit. She can’t find a job to fit her, doesn’t have the energy to work forty hours a week even if she did, has maxed out her credit cards, and has no place to stay but couches in friends’ houses.

In the larger sense, no matter who or what we are, we fit in with the world because we are all part of the whole. But in a more localized cultural context, not everyone fits. (Everyone thinks they are misfits because they might not be comfortable with their fit or they wish to do something else, but still, they are a cog in machinery of society. But there are some people who lack the ability to make the necessary compromises or to hold their tongue when it is politic to be silent, and so the machinery grinds them to dust.)

I don’t fit in the cultural world at large, either, and neither did my now deceased life mate/soul mate, but we did fit with each other. Currently, I have a place looking after my father. And then . . . I’ll have to figure out how to fit into the world (or figure out a way to make the world fit me), because a misfit in the twenty-first century is a precarious thing to be.

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