Elusive Knowledge

June 13, 2020 — Pat Bertram

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a term for our inability to step back and objectively look at our aptitudes and behaviors. This is especially obvious when it comes to bombastic folk who act as if they know it all. These windbags talk incessantly about their own world view, but refuse to acknowledge the validity of any other. It makes sense, of course, because they’ve boxed themselves in with their pomposity, so that whatever is in the box is all that is real, and they know everything in their box.

Many people are touched by this effect in a small way, so that even if they are open-minded about some things, other ideas are boxed off, and they simply will not entertain different possibilities, especially in areas such as politics, current issues, religion. Which is why I try to stay away from such topics. I don’t mind people disagreeing with my own views if they extend to me the same courtesy I extend to them of listening to what they have to say, but too often, they have to have the last word. Or rather, the only word. And so I’ve learned to let them have that word early on to save a whole lot of aggravation later.

I hope I’m not one of those who are closed off without being aware of it. I do have pet ideas, of course — we all do — but I tend to think the way this Dunning-Kruger effect rules my life lies in a different direction, either by my underestimating my intellectual capability (some people think I’m smarter and more knowledgeable than I feel I am) or, as I so often fear, by my overestimating my capability and thinking I’m smarter than I really am. I have no way of knowing which is the truth because of the above stated inability for us to observe ourselves objectively.

I don’t think I have locked myself into a narrow box, though. I’ve always been aware that there is so much more out there than what I know. (Which is perhaps why I sometimes think I’m not all that smart or knowledgeable — I can sense how little I know, how little I can know.)

From what my mother told me, as a baby and as a toddler, and even into my early schoolgirl days, I idolized my older brother. It seemed to me he could do anything, and that year of life experience he had over me made him seem . . . omniscient. Each year, I could hardly wait until my birthday so I could catch up to him, and it always came as a shock that he was still a year older, still a year wiser.

Having bad eyesight at an early age added to the awareness of all that I didn’t know. It also created a sort of cognitive dissonance where I knew I was smart enough to get good grades but was too ignorant to know what everyone else seemed to know intuitively, such as what the names of streets were and how to tell the different trees apart. Even when I got my glasses and realized how everyone knew such things — they could see street signs! They could see individual leaves! — the dissonance remained.

My father didn’t believe in television for children. He wanted to raise his kids to be independent thinkers (as long as we thought the way he did), and that lack of cultural conditioning added to the feeling of not knowing. I remember a group of girls giggling about double-barreled slingshots, and they laughed at me when I asked what those were. It wasn’t until many years later when I happened to see a Beverly Hillbillies show that I got the joke. Way too little, way too late!

This idea of elusive knowledge, of knowledge waiting for me made me excited about school every year. For a week or two. Then I realized that whatever knowledge I wanted was still out of reach (I was one of those kids who read the school books during the first days of school, so I knew exactly what I would and wouldn’t be taught). I especially remember senior year in high school. “This is the year I will get to learn,” I thought. I was going to finally have a great teacher. (At least that’s what her previous students said.) On the first day of class, the teacher gave us an assignment: “Write an essay about what you expect to get from your senior year, and don’t give me any sycophantic nonsense about wanting to learn.” I just stared at her. This was the teacher who would finally teach me? As it turned out, no. Too many seniors wanted to take her class, and even though I had been one of the first to sign up, I was kicked out. (The only time my name was ever drawn out of a hat.)

Luckily, there were books. A lifetime of books. And just when I got to thinking I had a grip on some of what life had to teach, Jeff died, and the realization of how little I knew started all over again. If something as immense as grief had been hiding from me all my life, what else has been hidden? That question haunted me for many years, and in fact helped drive me through the worst of my pain. I thought perhaps something wonderful was waiting for me on the other side, but the only thing wonderful that happened was that I survived. And I gained a lot of knowledge about grief that has been of benefit to many people.

The sense of impending . . . something . . . has pretty much dissipated over the years since Jeff died, and I now let life offer me what it will.

Well, except for bombastic folks. Those I walk away from whenever I can.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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A Lovely Day

June 12, 2020 — Pat Bertram

Today was a lovely day — immensely hot, but the still air and clear blue skies made up for any discomfort from the heat. It seemed such a harbinger of summer that I considered going in search of hanging plants, but tomorrow the wind will pick up again, and I don’t relish the idea of worrying about the poor things flailing around. Nor do I want to fill the planters I have until a more benign time. With any luck, once the windy season is gone, there will be some cooler days when I could do the work. And if not, the potting soil should last a while. If worst comes to worst, and the expiration date passes, I can always spread the soil on the ground. It won’t hurt, and it might help revitalize the dirt. (Odd to think of soil having an expiration date — dirt been around since the beginning of time. But then, salt has an expiration date, as does bottled water, so it shouldn’t come as any surprise.)

I built a bookcase from a kit today. It seemed a heavy mental burden, so the kit has been sitting unopened for a week or so, but when I got down to actually building the thing, it went together nicely. I also cleared the storage boxes out of the second bedroom to make room for the bookcase. Once the garage is done, those boxes will finally find a home, but for now they are in the dining room. I’m sorting out all the storage stuff into various piles — craft and fabrics, household goods, camping equipment, office supplies, — to make it easier when it’s time to move everything onto the shelves that will be set up in the garage. I’d planned to do the moving myself, but I don’t want to take a chance on reinjuring my knee, so the contractor and his workers said they’d do it for me, and I don’t want to waste their time dithering about where things go.

Meantime, I’m enjoying the extra space in the room where I spend so much of my time. No more cave-like dwelling!

I’m not sure what to put in the bookcase. My collection of tarot cards, perhaps, which was a legacy from my deceased brother.

I started learning about those cards before I moved here, but ever since then, they’ve been packed away. If they were where I could see them, maybe I’d take up my studies again. Or not. As interesting as I find the idea, it doesn’t seem valuable from a personal standpoint since any question I would want to ask the cards will be answered on its own given enough time. Still, the history of tarot is fascinating. And oh, there’s always the I Ching and the rune stones that came with the collection if I really wanted to delve into such esoteric matters.

Meantime, I’m enjoying the empty shelves. I seem to see any sort of emptiness as a place of possibility, and once the emptiness is filled, the hint of possibility disappears.

Also, once an emptiness is filled, there seems no chance of ever unfilling it, so it’s best to keep the shelves empty as long as I can. Things (in my life, anyway) tend to stay wherever they’re put.

As if that wasn’t enough excitement for one day, I also got to see two different friends at different times, as well as chat a few moments with the worker who was here painting the garage.

Yep. A lovely day.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

 

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Dream Come True or Nightmare

June 11, 2020 — Pat Bertram

Before I bought this house, before I even considered the possibility of buying a house, I’d planned one last epic adventure with what was left of my savings. I was going to go on a year-long road trip, camping out at the various national parks, staying as long as I could at each (two weeks, generally) before moving on to the next one. I’d planned to go south for the winter, north for the summer, and I thought I could stay in motels or with friends when I got tired of being out in the weather.

After my homeless brother died, the idea of having a home of my own grew on me, and when I discovered how inexpensive old houses were in some rural areas, I decided to buy a house instead of taking that trip.

As it turns out, it was an immensely fortunate decision. Not only do I love my house and love owning the house (which surprised me because I never wanted such a responsibility), buying the place saved me from a ghastly experience.

I would have been on the trip this year, dealing not only with some of the worst winter weather in a while, but also park and motel closures, friends in quarantine, and riots. Oh, my! That would have been an epic adventure for sure, though more of a nightmare than a dream come true. I can’t even imagine the horror of such a trip.

Even though the events of this year do impinge on my life somewhat, it’s not really a problem. Oh, I’ve garnered insults and such with some of my writings that attempted to make sense of both The Bob and the riots, and I feel the restlessness of the world (or maybe just my own), but basically, since I’m alone in my snug little house, life has been good.

I’ll probably never be able see those national parks now, especially the iconic ones that everyone should see like the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone (the garage ate up any remaining travel funds), but I have the opportunity to make a park of sorts in my own back yard. It might not be as majestic or panoramic or awesome as some of the national parks, but it will be mine. Even if I don’t do anything special with the yard, owning the property and creating a home for myself is an epic adventure of a different kind, more of a dream come true than the nightmare I always thought it would be.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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A Garden of Sorts

June 10, 2020 — Pat Bertram

A friend is planning on stopping by later this month to visit for a few hours on her way east, and she mentioned that she is especially looking forward to seeing my garden. I had to laugh at that — she’s already seen my garden. And so have you. At least what there is of it, which isn’t anything, really, but a few isolated flowers that bloom then disappear. What I mostly have is dirt, dead weeds (you know how bad the drought is when even the weeds are dead), a few baby lilac bushes and some transplants that are struggling.

What I also have is an appreciation for any bit of color, even a single flower, and a good photographic eye, which makes it seem as if I have a garden.

Someday, there might actually be a garden of sorts. I still have to wait until the garage is finished (high winds and rain the past couple of days and now mud today have delayed the work again), dirt is brought to fill in around the garage and the big depression where the old garage was, the sidewalks and pathways laid down, and the ornamental gravel arrayed around the house and garage. Then, maybe, if it’s not too late, I’ll try planting some things.

I did get a large planter and some potting soil, but I haven’t yet decided what to do with it or what to plant in the pot. It was supposed to go on a tree stump to add a pit of color to a dead spot in the side yard, but the top of the stump isn’t level, and I worried that with the high winds around here, the planter would be too unstable.

I’d also planned to get a couple of hanging plants to go on either end of the house, but I’m glad I haven’t yet done it. The wind the past couple of days was scary enough without having to worry about damage from flying planters.

Today’s bit of color: trumpet vines that found their way into my yard. Such welcome visitors! I’m glad they decided to settle in.

I might not have a garden to show off to others, but I must admit, I do love the flowers that show off to me.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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Isolation in an Isolating Time

June 9, 2020 — Pat Bertram

Isolation is never so isolating as when one is isolating oneself from online social activities during a time of quarantine, while trying to recover from a bum knee as well as enduring fierce winds and driving drizzle. (Like a driving rain, only with drizzle.)

Yep. Complete isolation. Alone with only my thoughts (and the characters in The Wheel of Time) to keep me company. Some of these thoughts are being dredged from deeply buried memories — buried not from trauma but by time since they happened so very long ago.

Because of the current state of unrest (my own as well as the world’s), many of those thoughts are of my dealings with people of various colors and are both divisive and unifying.

I remember standing on the sidewalk in front of the house cater corner from where my family lived, talking with the girl my age who lived there as we watched our baby brothers play together. We were friends of a sort, but all we really had in common were proximity, our ages, and those two little boys. I have a hunch I was more enamored with having a black friend than I was with the girl herself, but at least I tried. At least we both tried. This was in the early sixties, I think, when blacks were “colorizing” previously all white neighborhoods. The main street we lived on was the border between the black neighborhood and the white, and looking back, it seems a rather nice image, those two young girls and those two toddlers straddling the dividing line.

What really made me remember some of this stuff was that one of the people who left a scathing remark on that video I shared on Facebook was a woman I had gone to high school with. I’d never been friends with her, but somehow I got connected via Facebook because of a high school reunion some years ago (that I did not attend). Ironically, it seems to me she was one of the faction of girls who hated me all those years ago because I took a black kid as my date to a high school dance. I am amazed, in retrospect, how much he seemed to enjoy the dance, but then, I think as many girls were enamored of him and his dancing style as were disdainful of his being there. And now years later, I am considered the racist, and she the “tolerant” one. Life is strange, that’s for sure.

Except for a few such instances, though, when skin color was a factor, I really was skin-color blind. I remember once telling my mother about a girl I really liked who clerked at the local Safeway, and my mother said she’d look for her. Weeks later, my mother said she’d finally met the girl, and then said wryly, “It would have helped if you’d told me she’s black.” I stared blankly at my mother and said, “She is?”

To be honest, even though I was proud of that colorblindness (which nowadays is considered proof of racism), I tend to think it had more to do with my being unobservant of physical traits, remembering people instead by my “feel” of them. I remember once working in an office with mostly men and for some reason I had reason to mention a certain fellow who had the same name as a couple of other workers. “You mean the guy with beard?” the man talking to me asked. I said, no he didn’t have a beard. The man laughed at me. “You wanna bet?” I turned around to look at the guy in question, and sure enough he had a beard. An immense one.

Yep. That’s me. Oh, so observant!

(To this day, I don’t remember what Jeff looked like when I met him; all I remember is a radiant being, shining with kindness, as if he had just recently come down from some spirit realm into my life.)

I remember a woman I once was friends with. We had things in common because we’d both lost our life mates. Although she was a lovely woman (inside, I mean, but outside, too), she had darkness in her past she only hinted at, horrors that rose because of her skin color. And somehow, I felt guilty because of what she had suffered. (And then I felt guilty for the guilt because I worried my guilt was negating her reality.)

It’s funny how for so much of my life I’ve shouldered guilt for things that weren’t my fault. A sort of cultural guilt, I guess. Guilt over concentration and relocation camps, over the Sand Creek Massacre, over slavery, over so many things. Now that I am having this guilt foisted on me, as if I really were personally responsible for all the world’s ills, current and historic, the guilt is sliding off my back, receding from my spirit.

I am responsible only for what I personally did, can only change that which I can control (and it’s amazing how little control we have over even the things we think we control).

My “crimes” have always been small ones — a bit of smugness, perhaps. A touch of pettiness. An occasional lapse into thoughtlessness. And worst of all, a tendency to look behind the curtain for the real truth, not the “truth” that’s paraded on the world stage.

Not much guilt in any of that to expiate.

Which is good. I don’t need one more thing to close me in and add to the isolation of this isolating time. Luckily, the winds and rain will pass (late tonight, supposedly). My thoughts will drift back from whence they came. My knee will heal. The Bob will retreat. My re-re-reading of The Wheel of Time will be finished. I will get used to curtailed online activity.

And then?

I don’t know, but the possibilities of life after isolation will give me something new to think about rather than rehashing all these old thoughts.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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Ceding

June 8, 2020 — Pat Bertram

I don’t like living in a world of almost total regimentation of thought, a world of double think and thought crimes. I wish this horror would go back to live in the pages of the book these terms came from. Alas, it’s not going to happen, so I will concede or recede, or some sort of cede anyway, and hide myself in the pages of a book. And in the rooms of my house and in my yard, too, of course.

The world out there, whether online or offline is just too volatile for a truthseeker, especially when the seeking itself goes against the narrative we are all supposed to accept.

I don’t know the truth, obviously, or I wouldn’t have to look for it. I’m not sure anyone knows all the truth about the virus, the protests, or the riots. As Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman) says to his son at the end of the movie Hero: “You remember when I said how I was gonna explain about life, buddy? Well the thing about life is, it gets weird. People are always talking ya about truth. Everybody always knows what the truth is, like it was toilet paper or somethin’, and they got a supply in the closet. But what you learn, as you get older, is there ain’t no truth. All there is is bullshit, pardon my vulgarity here. Layers of it. One layer of bullshit on top of another. And what you do in life like when you get older is, you pick the layer of bullshit that you prefer and that’s your bullshit, so to speak.”

The difference is, today we’re not allowed to choose our own layer — it’s chosen for us. Which might be okay if the layer made sense. I’d rather be thinking about other things, anyway. But believing two contradictory ideas — double think — drives me nuts. For an example, we’re supposed to believe that The Bob came accidentally from a wet market in China, and yet we’re not allowed to call it the Chinese flu or the Wuflu or anything like that because it’s racist. And we’re supposed to believe that only whites can be racist, though why that is, I don’t know. I just know that it is because that’s what we’re told over and over again. And yet, the thing I posted on Facebook that caused such a ruckus was a video I shared about a black woman attempting to tell the truth (or at least her truth) about the not-so-angelic victim of the inciting incident of the protests and riots as well as the truth of police brutality when it comes to different skin colors. Because it didn’t follow what everyone believes or are supposed to believe, this “racist propaganda” garnered anger and hatred from my “friends”.

I’m sorry, folks, you can’t have it both ways. Either only whites are racist or the black woman was racist. The two ideas are mutually exclusive. And, of course, I am racist for sharing the video.

Thomas Sowell, a black economist, pretty much sums up my confusion: “If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today.”

It feels so very odd to go from being a radical thinker or a liberal to a . . . well, not radical thinker, and definitely not a liberal by today’s standards. And I definitely am not buying into the current story we are all supposed to believe. I can’t. It’s too contradictory.

Besides, even though it seems to be required to pay obeisance to the black community, to take a knee, to apologize for “white privilege,” I can’t do that, either. To do so means that every bad thing a person of color did to me, I have to accept as being deserved. As being my due. Believe me, I did nothing to invite sexual assault. Nothing to invite intimidation and harassment. (Sure, I cross the street to avoid gangs high on drugs, but there is no way in hell I would ever elbow my way through such a crowd.) There was nothing my brothers ever did to invite all the beatings they got in our interracial neighborhood, nor did we request to have our bikes stolen. And for sure there was nothing I ever did worth having my car wrecked, being pulled out of the vehicle at gunpoint, and having my bag stolen.

Oops. I didn’t mean to let all that out. Still, those things happened, though at none of those times did it really register that the perpetrators were people of a different color. They simply were.

But see? Shades of gray when we are supposed to only see one stark shade of maybe-truth.

Since there is no room for a truthseeker nowadays, I am retreating. I haven’t deleted my social network accounts since I might need them when my new book is published next year, but I have removed all bookmarks so that I am not tempted to go back and accede to their narrative. (Don’t worry — I’ll be keeping up with this blog. I need some way to keep in contact with my inner self and the outer world.)

Once I get past all the insults and unpleasantness (and at my age, it’s a bit foolish of me to let those sorts of things still sting), I’ll be happier.

I must admit, all this makes me miss Jeff so very much. He, too, was a truthseeker, and it would be comforting right now to have the company of someone who didn’t vilify me for trying to see what others want to keep hidden.

Since he’s not around, I’ll be mostly hermitting. Luckily, this is the time of year for a different sort of seeding, so I’ll have things to do to keep me occupied in my secession.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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An Exciting Life

June 6, 2020 — Pat Bertram

I spent my allotted writing time today responding to the very interesting and thought-provoking comments people left on my latest blogs that I forgot I hadn’t yet posted a new blog. I’m glad I finally remembered, not just because I’d hate to break my 256-day streak of daily blogging, but because this has been a rather momentous couple of days for me.

It started Thursday afternoon when I went to a friend’s birthday party in the park. Since there were more than ten of us, I said that if anyone asked, to tell them it wasn’t a party — it was a protest, a protest against getting older and against isolation. I doubt that would have held sway with any arresting officers, but luckily, no one showed up but us. And oh, it was so wonderful seeing people! I even hugged a couple of dear friends, holding on as if we were saving each other’s lives instead of perhaps endangering them. (One friend is recuperating from a severe illness, and even though she isn’t contagious any longer, I couldn’t take a chance on hugging her, and I feel bad about that, but I was  very glad to see her up and around.)

Despite this one lapse, I will be more diligent about isolation for a while longer. Many rural communities that managed to avoid The Bob when larger communities were suffering, ended up having problems when they opened up again, and I have a real issue with being a statistic. But that’s for the future. Now back to yesterday.

Yesterday, the contractor came to get the carport that has been cluttering up my backyard. (And brought me some fresh farm eggs!) They worked so hard taking the metal carport apart (the entire day in 100+ degree weather) that I felt as if I should be paying them, when in fact, the carport was payment for some work they had already done.

It is such a joy to have it gone! It opens up my yard and makes this place feel like an estate. (Not bad for someone who thought she’d end up living in some sort of subsidized housing.)

Even better, the garage door, opener, and the rest of the OSB board for the inside walls of the garage were delivered while they were here!!! Oh, my such excitement.

And that isn’t all. The library called. Well, the building didn’t call; a librarian did. My email from the end of March asking for books via their curb-side service apparently got lost at the bottom of their email list. The poor librarian was embarrassed and apologetic, though there was no need. Still, since I couldn’t get to the library to pick up the books, she delivered them to my house. Wow! My own private bookmobile! Luckily, they aren’t going to be charging overdue rates because I won’t be getting to the books until after I finish re-re-rereading The Wheel of Time series. I have a lot of the story in my head right now, so I’m able to find answers to various plot points and to see foreshadowings that have previously eluded me, and I don’t want to halt the momentum.

The library is aiming for a July 1 reopening, which will be nice. More than nice, actually. The only change they will really have to make is to curtail computer usage (the banks of computers are all real close to one another), which doesn’t affect me at all. I seldom see anyone in the stacks anyway, so I’m not worried, even if I’ll still be in my self-imposed isolation.

I should have babied my knee today after all that activity, but I took the time to pull some boxes of stuff out of a closet that I want to store in the garage when it is finished. And those boxes were heavy!!! They weren’t heavy the last time I lifted them, so what I have been suspecting is true: I am getting elderly.

Which reminds me of another “elderly” example. I haven’t been using the back door because the step is much steeper than normal steps and it really strains my knee, so I’ve been going in and out of the front door. Yesterday, I went out to check on the work the guys were doing, and when I tried to get back in the front door, it was locked. It confused the heck out of me because the only way to lock the door when leaving is with a key, and I didn’t have the key. I hobbled around the house to the backyard, and mentioned my dilemma. “I don’t understand how I got out here,” I said.

“You came out the back door,” one fellow said. “It didn’t look like you had any problem, either. You just came out.” Then he kindly went in the house and unlocked the front door for me so I didn’t have to navigate that step. (Apparently, going out is a lot easier on my knee than climbing back in.)

Yep. Old. I don’t remember going outside. Not at all. I know it’s easy not to remember things you do by rote (which is why if you want to remember locking a door or some such, you need to do something different, like patting the key when you are finished. You still won’t remember locking the door, but you will remember patting the key.) But it’s been so long since I went out that door that I would have thought I’d remember not to go out that way, if nothing else.

Oh, well. Such is life.

And what an exciting life it has been the past couple of days! That, at least, I remember.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

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Feeling Incredibly Old

June 5, 2020 — Pat Bertram

I haven’t admitted to being old, only to growing older. The way I figure, the “elderly” moniker comes next birthday when I reach that age when I can no longer fudge the demographics to convince myself I’m not old, that I’m just in late, late, late middle age.

But now I’m feeling incredibly old. And disheartened. And vulnerable. Admittedly, the vulnerability comes from a slowly-heeling bum knee that has nothing to do with anything that is going on in the world, but all the rhetoric about protecting the elderly (of whom, apparently, I am one, at least according to The Bob statistics) has put me firmly in the old age category, and not being able to easily get around offers additional proof.

Even worse than all that is the truth — I’ve lived through pandemics, large outbreaks of terrifying and highly infectious diseases, horrendous flu seasons, wide-scale disseminations of dubious vaccinations that came close to being mandated. Comparatively speaking, The Bob is just another over-exploited, would-be end of the world scenario that was conveniently forgotten when a more immediate (and more obvious) threat came into being.

I’ve lived through violent times, too. Protests, both political and racial; civil unrest; fathers fighting sons; riots; burning; looting; terrorist tactics perpetrated by US citizens on US citizens. I’ve also seen men with criminal records upheld as heroes because of cop brutality, as if being beaten up or killed suddenly erases their unsavory past. (Oddly, both men at the heart of two of the worst race riots were substance abusers who perpetrated crimes on women — one was a wife beater and abuser, the other a man who once held a knife to a pregnant woman’s belly while his friends ransacked and looted her house.)

Too much, too much, too much.

It’s hard to remember that for many people, all of this — The Bob and the riots (and yes, a riot by any other name is still a riot) — is new.

A young man waited on me the other day when I went to the store, a new employee, who I hadn’t yet met. I didn’t know the etiquette of the situation —I wasn’t sure if I should reach out because of what was going on or simply ignore our skin color differences and pretend all was well in the world — so I did what I always do: err on the side of connection.

I asked if he was okay, and made a gesture indicating the world at large. He gave me a closed-off look and turned away from me. Then, apparently deciding to answer in kind, he looked at me and smiled and said, “Thank you for asking. I’m okay here in this bubble.” (And it does seem as if this area is a protective bubble.) Then, with tears in his eyes, he admitted that he was worried because even though he was safe, he had family in big cities. I offered words of sympathy, and he responded, “But everything will be better after this.”

That’s when I realized I really am old, not just in years, but in experience. Things might be better after this — I suppose it’s possible. But I’ve seen too much, been around too long, been pulled this way and that by too many power struggles of all kinds (including those in the volatile interracial neighborhood I grew up in) — to believe in easy answers and simple words.

One good thing about being old — I don’t have to pretend to have any answers. I can leave the world to the young, and maybe that’s as it should be.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in culture, history/myth, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 9 Comments »

Needing Heartenment

June 4, 2020 — Pat Bertram

After writing what was supposed to be today’s blog post, I was so disheartened that I decided to save it for tomorrow and post something a bit more heartening today. A lot more heartening, actually.

Although the yard is still cluttered with building materials and scrap lumber, and although the yard is still mostly dirt and dead weeds, there are a few bright spots, such as this gorgeous poppy. I’m not sure where it got that color because the seeds came from a red poppy, but I love the bright pink.

Most of the trees (twigs, actually) that the Arbor Day Foundation sent me aren’t doing anything, and a couple for sure are dead, but one crabapple is showing signs of life. Yay! Even better, the lilacs I received because of a different offer are all doing well for only having been in the ground a little over a week. I water them and shower them with love and hope that’s enough. I know that particular area of the yard has soil compatible with lilacs because there are two other bushes in the vicinity, so there’s that.

The cactus I transplanted from my neighbor’s yard that I thought was dead is alive and shows new growth. The poor thing was so white and limp I considered digging it up and throwing it away, but the thought of having to deal with the prickles stayed my hand. I am so glad! It looks so green and stalwart that it lightens my heart.

And oh, I so needed that today!

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in house, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 3 Comments »
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