life | Bertram's Blog

Strange Twist Of Fate

March 17, 2015 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday was a strange day. First was all the frustration with the intermittent internet connection and getting that repaired. In the middle of all that, while I had a few minutes of connection, I tried to make sense of Twitter and researched book promo again. (Like my internet connection, my research has been intermittent, searching for answers until I get frustrated then days or weeks or months later, trying again.) And then the strangest of all . . .

I’d gone to the Sierra Club conditioning walk in an effort to walk more. (Ever since I started yammering about an epic walk of some sort, I’ve been walking less, as if talking about it precluded actually putting one foot in front of the other.)

On the way back, I was driving down a mostly empty street. I was on the far left lane, and I could see someone paused in the center turn lane. As I neared that vehicle, it suddenly swung out in the street and crossed directly in front of me. I had no time to put on the brakes, so I veered into the curb, hoping to get away from her. Apparently, she had been trying to get into the driveway, and never did anything to avoid me. Didn’t put on the brakes, didn’t try to get away from me, didn’t do anything, actually. So I ran into her.

It scared the heck out of me, seeing this car perpendicular to mine and not being able to do anything to avoid a collision, and yet, I was able to slow down enough that not much damage was done. A bit of a bent fender on my car, an indented scratch on hers. She jumped out of her gray Hyundai and blamed me for driving with my lights off. Huh? How could I have seen the road if my lights were off? By that time, of course, my lights were off. When I shut off my engine, the headlights go off in a battery-saving effort, and since I had turned off my engine, the headlights were off, too. But she kept on and on about how it was my fault.

The cops showed up, and talked to us separately. One police car had been driving by and might have called for backup, or maybe someone else had called them and he waited until the others came. But two or three vehicles pulled up at once (one could have been an ambulance, I’m not sure. As I recently wrote, I’m not the most observant person in the world.)

From the cops’ point of view, the whole matter was trivial, and so they didn’t write a report. (At least that’s what they said. I’m sure they logged it into their call records or whatever they do to keep track of their activities.) It’s possible the other woman talked them out of filing a report because they told me she agreed to take care of her damage if I took care of mine. Some people think this sounds strange, but I understand. The cops hadn’t seen how close to death I had been. If I’d been second slower or her one second faster, she would have rammed into the side of my car, and who knows how badly I would have been hurt. I was just glad the ending of the story was so felicitous. The tow truck driver they called pulled my fender away from the tire, put on my spare, and that’s all it took. At one point, I told the cop I couldn’t stop shaking. He shrugged and said, “This is all very minor.”

Luckily, I hadn’t yet taken the VW into the body shop to do what restorations they can and I hadn’t yet gotten new tires. (I would have had to get them in a few months, so I’m getting all new tires instead of just the one.)

Oddly, I’ve been extra careful lately when driving, feeling some sort of doom in the air. Even odder, I didn’t really have any reaction to this strange twist of fate except the physical result of adrenaline. No anger, no tears, nothing but confusion about how it could have happened.

I consider myself fortunate. Death was riding on my shoulder (or maybe it was standing on the shoulder of the road waiting), and it decided it had no use for me. At least not yet.

***

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.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in life. Tags: accident, avoiding an accident, fender bender. 7 Comments »

Sitting on the Wall

March 14, 2015 — Pat Bertram

It’s hard to get anything done when I’ve spent half the day outside sitting on the wall separating my dad’s property from the one next door so that people looking at the house can have privacy, but luckily, I don’t need to get anything done. I can simply sit and enjoy the blossoms dancing in the warm winter air. (80 degrees today. And it’s still technically winter!)

It’s funny that I dreaded this period in my life when the house was on the market making my time not my own, when homelessness (or rather rootlessness) was incipient, when things were about to change in some as yet unfathomable way. But none of this is bothering me at all. In fact, other people are more concerned about what I am going to do than I am.

Either things will work out or they won’t. It’s as simple as that. And if they don’t work out, there is nothing I can do now to make them work out because I don’t know what the conditions will be at that particular time, so there’s no point in worrying about it.

My situation is apparently one that galvanizes imaginations. Each person’s suggestion for what I should do is more a response to their own yearnings and inclinations than to my needs. Buying an RV and living in an RV park was one of today’s suggestions. The woman admitted it is what she would do and thought it was a good idea for me. And yet, if I did get an RV, why would I stay in one place? The whole point of a recreation vehicle is to go recreationing.

But there are dance classes to take into consideration . . .

I have offers of spare rooms and couches for a few days that I can accept in an emergency. Or I could stay in a motel. Or take off on a road trip. Or any number of things.

People keep telling me I have to make a decision, if not now then soon, and I just shrug off that dictum. Again, this advice is more of a response to their fearful imaginings than my reality. I don’t have to make a decision. I can simply do whatever is I feel like doing when the time comes. Knowing me, I’ll probably cry. Grief seems to rise up during times of change, because I am reminded of why I am so rootless, but even that is okay.

But for now I am enjoying sitting on the wall and letting the future take care of itself.

***

Posted in culture, life. Tags: enjoying today, future, letting the future take care of itself, nowhere to go, selling a house, sitting on a wall. 6 Comments »

The Most Observant Person in the World

March 13, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I do not know who the most observant person in the world is, I just know it’s not me.

When I took my car in to a new VW mechanic (new to me), he told me I should be using 91 octane gasoline. That stunned me. I’d never used anything but the cheapest regular gas. In fact, since these old air-cooled engines are not exactly luxury models, I figured they were built to use plain ol’ regular gasoline. When I voiced my surprise, he said that the octane rating was marked inside the gas flap, but that it had probably been worn away.

I had to laugh today when I opened the flap to get gas. There is was. Not even faded after 43 years. I have opened that flap a thousand times or more over the years. I wonder when I stopped noticing the message? Years. Maybe decades.

I must have seen it when the car was new. Odd that it never occurred to me what the words meant even though the notification was in German. Odder still that all the mechanics I’ve had over the years told me plain old regular was okay.

I just checked my manual — I still have that after 43 years, too. Apparently, since I’d been driving VW bugs for years before I got one of my own, I never bothered to read the manual, because the necessary octane was listed there, too. And so was the information I’ve been seeking ever since lead was removed from our gasoline supply — Yes, I can use unleaded gas. VWs were built specifically to use unleaded gas. I had a small stock of lead substitute that I’d been using, and it worried me what I would do when it is gone, because when it is, it is gone permanently. Not available anywhere.

One of these days I should read the whole manual to find out what else I never knew. Or not. The car has managed to survive all these years, and now that I’ve found a real VW mechanic, it runs like it always did.

I’ve known for a long time that I’m not observant, so I try to pay particular attention to things. The bark on a palm tree.

The tiniest wildflowers,

The prickles on a baby Joshua tree.

If I keep at it, maybe I will become the most observant person in the world, but honestly, I’m fine with just noticing . . . anything.

***

Posted in life, photography. Tags: being observant, Joshua tree, noticing, palm tree bark, VW & 91 octane gas. 8 Comments »

A Fighting Optimist

March 12, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I was on the yearbook committee senior year in high school. I can still remember sitting in someone’s living room looking for quotes to put under our classmates’s photos. We were laughing and having a good time matching our friends with the appropriate saying until it came to my photo. A few hems and haws and a lot of silence. I was never quite sure what silence meant, but I just shrugged and picked my own quote: The only truly happy man is always a fighting optimist. (I was naïve about feminist ways at the time and took “man” to mean “humankind.” I still don’t make an issue of such words — I include myself in even if the male-oriented words were meant to include me out.) Some people called me negative back then (or rather pessimistic since “negative” as a buzzword didn’t show up until much later) but I knew the truth: I was a realist who fought to be optimistic.

It’s odd that I have remembered the quote all these years when so much else has slipped into the muck at the bottom of my mind, but perhaps it’s because I often think of it. This is a world where optimism and positivism are almost religions, and if you don’t believe, or if you believe in truth no matter what form the truth takes more than in being positive at all costs, you’re called negative.

My copy of the yearbook is long gone. (I lent my high school yearbooks to the son of my mother’s best friend because he wanted to look up a girl he was infatuated with, and I never saw them again.) So when that quote popped into my head again today, I looked it up online to see where it came from. The quote I used is only half of it. The full quote is: The only truly happy man is always a fighting optimist. Optimism includes not only altruism, but also social responsibility, social courage and objectivity. — W. Beran Wolfe, author of How To Be Happy Though Human

Natural optimists might be happy, but so often they live in a fantasy world where the truth is fogged in under a pink cloud of hope, denial, and lack of objectivity. (I’m not referring to you, of course.)

It’s entirely possible I misinterpreted the quote — he seems to be saying that to be happy you need to be optimistic and fight for what is right, not just fight to be optimistic, but either way, the saying seems to hold true.

So what does this have to do with my present life? Not much, I suppose, except that I notice more moments of happiness and optimism — feeling uplifted even when there is no particular reason to feel uplifted. It’s as if somewhere inside of me, something is smiling.

Twice in my life I heard a voice deep inside of me speaking without my volition. The first time was a few minutes after I met Jeff, the man who was to share my life for thirty-four years. “But I don’t even like men with beady brown eyes and blond hair,” the voice wailed. I didn’t hear it again until a year before he died. At the time, we knew he was bad off, just not how bad. I’d made a point of hugging him every morning, thinking that each hug would be the last. One morning I inadvertently touched his ear, and he shoved me away. (I now know the cancer had crept up his left side from his kidney to his brain, and every bit of that quadrant was one huge mass of pain.) We were connected in some profound way that neither of us understood, and I thought that when he died, he’d pull me with him. But that day when he pushed me away, I heard the voice again. “You might be dying, but I have to live,” it said. And I knew then that he would be dying alone.

I wonder if that’s who is smiling inside me, whoever or whatever it is that spoke those two times.

I’m sitting here smiling at the whimsical thought. Who knows? It could be true. Maybe someday I’ll even meet her. Or be her.

Meantime, during the not so uplifting times, I will still fight to be an optimist.

***

Posted in being me, life, relationships, writing. Tags: fighting optimist, fighting to be optimistic, How To Be Happy Though Human, W. Beran Wolfe, yearbook committee. 2 Comments »

A Life That Ambles

March 11, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I haven’t been walking in the desert lately. I’ve been mostly wearing myself out packing, and when I do walk, I’m going to or from dance class on city streets.

Cities have their advantages.

Where I used to live in rural Colorado, there wasn’t much in the way of amenities, except things for cattle and horses, like alfalfa fields.

So I enjoy the lovely and whimsical sights that cities offer.

Class was cancelled today, and since there is little heavy work to be done to sap my strength, I took myself out to the desert.

Walking in those barren, path-strewn hills, I was reminded of my life — lots of paths going nowhere, somewhere, anywhere. The straight path to . . . wherever . . . is there, but it eludes me. I am left to clamber around the expanse, not knowing if there is a pattern to my life, not knowing if I am going anywhere in particular, not knowing much at all, if the truth be known.

And yet, hidden in the barren expanse are magical vistas,

colorful gems,

and lovely surprises.

There is a lot to be said for a life that ambles — literally and metaphorically — without a set destination. Such a life might not afford the luxuries that money provides, but oh, the benefits to such a life are beauty and joy.

***

Posted in being me, life, photography. Tags: alfalfa fields, cactus flower, desert path, desert photos, desert walk. 2 Comments »

The Reality of the Realty Situation

March 10, 2015 — Pat Bertram

People find it appalling when I tell them the realtor asked me to leave the house when someone comes to look, but oddly, it doesn’t bother me. As a writer, I understand perfectly.

In the literary world, there is a thing called the “fictive dream.”

From a writer’s standpoint, the fictive dream is when the writer forgets the words s/he is writing and instead sees the characters as alive and moving about his/her mind as if in a dream. The more the writer works on the story, sharpening the words and images, the vision becomes “more lucid until reality, by comparison, seems cold, tedious, and dead.”– John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

From a reader’s standpoint, the fictive dream is when the reader is drawn into the story, so much so that the outside world fades from mind, and they are living the story like in a dream.

A skilled writer knows how to pull readers into the story. Unskilled writers often use various tactics that draw attention to themselves, and those self-aggrandizing elements destroy the fictive dream and catapult reader out of the story.

(I know the fictive dream more from a reader’s POV since I was a reader long before I was a writer, and I often let myself be pulled into the story. I know how to write to keep the dream going, but I have never experienced the writer’s fictive dream. Writing for me is more of a slog than a dream — I have to pull the story out of the slushpile I call my mind, one word at a time.)

In the real estate world, there is something called the buyer’s dream (and if there isn’t, there should be). Would-be buyers need to imagine themselves in the house, want to dream of their new life in the house they are looking at. If they can imagine it, they will be more inclined to buy. The presence (or near presence) of the person currently living in the house pulls lookers out of the dream, breaking their connection with the house and the real estate agent. This might not be fatal, of course, but it does make sense that buyers need to bond with both the house and agent, and the presence of anyone else breaks that bond.

So far, only one person came to look at the house when I was here. (The rest of the time, I’ve been gone.) With nothing else to do, I sat on the small wall dividing this property from the next, and basked. Scents of new blossoms drifted to me on quickening air currents, as did the sounds of birds singing in the warm sun.

I don’t often have an excuse to just sit and feel my connection to the world, and lately, I haven’t been creating the excuse.

I’d been dreading this particular phase in my life, having to live pristinely with everything packed out of sight and being at the mercy of lookers and realtors, but it seems as if the reality of the realty situation will have its merits.

***

Posted in life. Tags: buyer's dream, buyer/realtor bond, fictive dream, reader's fictive dream, selling a house, writer's fictive dream. 9 Comments »

I’ve Got Nothing to Say Except . . .

March 9, 2015 — Pat Bertram

***

Posted in life, writing. Tags: hello. 3 Comments »

What It’s All About. Maybe.

March 6, 2015 — Pat Bertram

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be finished with weeping. It’s possible that when Jeff died, the pain dug such a deep well into my psyche, it tapped into an everlasting underground river of tears, and so they will be with me on and off for the rest of my life.

I never expect the grief upsurges. After each one, I think I’m done with the tears, but apparently, the well is deeper than I ever imagined. I should have expected today’s upsurge, though. This is the countdown to the fifth year anniversary of his death, and each day is the anniversary of a last time — the last time we talked, or hugged, or smiled at each other. Of course, in addition to the coming anniversary (the days before are the hard times — the anniversary is an anticlimax), I am still dealing with the fallout of the emotional trauma of the past couple of years, am grieving my father’s death, and am dealing with my impending anchorless and unknown future. (I’m also doing some online tasks for someone I didn’t think I’d ever be working for again, and that adds a whole other layer of remembered pain.)

Still, there are big changes. In between the days of tears are days of feeling great, even feeling sanguine about the future. I can feel the warmth and perhaps even the radiance of my smile, which I haven’t felt in many years. And I’m developing an appreciation for the macabre. (I keep wanting to type macable. What a lovely word that could be! I might have to use it sometime.)

For example, I lost Jeff the other day. Literally lost him as in could not find him. Or rather, could not find his ashes.

When I first got the ashes from the funeral home, I wrapped his robe around them to keep him warm. (Yeah, I know — he couldn’t feel the cold, but such is the magical thinking of grief.) And when I got here, I set the bundle on the couch in my living room, and there it stayed until a week or so ago. I had to clear things out of that room so it could be cleaned, and I placed the bundle in a box in the garage with my packed things, and somehow, I moved the box without remembering what was in it. What a scramble to find him! It truly is time to deal with those ashes. If I remember during the next windstorm, I’ll go to the top of a nearby knoll and let him decide where he wants his ashes to rest. Or I’ll take a trip to the ocean and return him to the font of life. (We are, after all, creatures of water and stardust even more than creatures of the dirt.)

Adding to the silliness someone sent me a gift and inside I found a pair of solmate socks with the logo, “Life is to short for matching socks.” “Yep,” I thought, “lose one soul mate, find another.”

There are some good things happening — I’m finally starting to fathom the way men think, which is not at all the way I think. It’s like the storybook problems of grade school arithmetic. Men jump right to the answer, leaving only sporadic hints of how they got there, and I need to see the whole dang train of thought because important information is contained in each step that is often missing from the solution.

I’m still doing things I would never have imagined myself doing. Today I went shopping for fishnet stockings, not something that had ever entered my mind, but I need them for my jazz costume.

And my car seems to be purring along, frisky and quiet at the same time. After all my plans of traveling the world and not settling down, I might have to move here permanently. Adventure can be found anywhere, but a good air-cooled-VW mechanic is a rare treasure.

Sounds like my life is purring along, too, doesn’t it? Sorrow, smiles, and silliness. That’s what it’s all about.

Maybe.

***

Posted in grief, life. Tags: air-cooled vw engine, fishnet stockings, losing a loved one, losing ashes, silliness, soul mates, unmatched socks, VW mechanic. 3 Comments »

Voluntary Retrograde Amnesia Day

March 5, 2015 — Pat Bertram

I’m declaring this Voluntary Retrograde Amnesia Day. I mean no disrespect to people who suffer involuntarily from such an ailment, but it seems to me that the rest of us could use a bit of amnesia.

We often talk about living in the present, though generally what we mean is we will try to concentrate on today and let the future take care of itself. But the past is always with us. It’s hard to block out memories of past hurts, misunderstandings, bad behavior, and to treat people as if we have just this moment made an exciting new friend. There is much history, even good history, between us and the folks we know, history that shades our relationships. There are many established patterns of communication that may now be outdated because one or both of the people have changed, yet the habits remain.

I have a dear friend that I cannot seem to re-establish lines of communication with. We both have our idiosyncrasies to such an extent that, like England and the U.S. we seem to be two separate countries divided by a common language. Just for today it would be nice if neither of us remembered our differences and started out with new points of view. Or started out with no points of view at all. Just a willingness to see where life takes us.

And so, with that attitude in mind, I am declaring this Voluntary Retrograde Amnesia Day.

Hi. My name is Pat. I don’t remember ever seeing you before. It’s so nice to meet you!

***

Posted in culture, life, relationships. Tags: amnesia, miscommunication, retrograde amnesia, separated by a common language, starting over, voluntary amnesia. 5 Comments »

A Perfect Day

March 3, 2015 — Pat Bertram

This is one of those perfect days, a gift from the universe. The weather isn’t particularly nice, none of my problems have been resolved, I’m still facing life alone and yet . . . and yet . . .

I’m walking around with a smile on my face. (I’m cracking up here. I accidentally wrote “with a simile on my face”, and I suppose that could be true, too.)

It’s possible my recent bout of tears/sorrow/grief shook something loose in me and when things settled back into place, they settled into a more harmonious whole. It’s possible I’ve reached a new level of acceptance of my life, because as I have discovered, every step forward is accompanied by an upsurge of grief for what I am leaving behind. It could be that the grief I’ve felt over the loss of a friendship has smoothed over with the realization it’s how I feel about the friend that counts, not what the friend feels about me.

Or it could be the alchemist affect.

People frequently remind me that the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting a different result each time, and if we lived in a closed system where everything remained the same, repeating the same ineffective actions would be insane. But every day things are different. And it’s that difference the alchemists banked on. We picture the alchemists doing the same procedure repeatedly in a crazed attempt to perfect their experiment, but the truth is, they did the same thing over and over again in exactly the same way in the hope of getting different results. Sometimes everything came together as they hoped, and they transformed lead into gold or themselves into a higher form of life or atoms into energy.

The alchemists knew the truth — that we do not live in a closed system.. The earth hurtles around the sun at 67,000 mph. The sun hurtles around the galaxy at 140 miles per second. The entire universe is also moving and expanding, so from one second to the next we are in a completely different place with a possibility of different factors. Add in more localized variables, such as humidity, temperature, sun spot activity and solar winds, and it would seem insane to do the same thing over and over again and expect the same results.

Does it really matter why I feel good today? Not particularly. It’s enough to know that it is possible for me to have a day that makes me feel good even though such days are as incomprehensible to me as those where I can’t stop crying.

For all I know, it’s not even me who cried the other day. Maybe it’s not even me who feels good today. Maybe I’m just a conduit for unrecognized cosmic energies.

Which would make today exactly as I said, a gift from the universe.

***