Bertram's Blog

Four Years and Two Months of Grief

May 25, 2014 — Pat Bertram

In two days it will be four years and two months since Jeff — my life mate/soul mate — died, and even now I can feel the effects of his goneness. I still have occasional grief surges that bring a quiet bout of tears and a great yearning to see him once more. Chances are, I will have will have such upsurges for the rest of my life, though perhaps at a continually diminishing rate.

I keep busy, so I’m not subjected as often to the desperate loneliness and aloneness that plagued me for the first three and a half years of my grief, but holiday weekends, when everyone else is involved with family, brings the loneliness home to me. (I’m not strictly alone, but my 97-year-old father is involved with his personal end-of-life rituals, and my dysfunctional brother is . . . well, let’s just say I am much better off when he leaves me alone. Neither man sees me as real, so although I am not strictly alone, I am actually more alone than if I were truly alone.) Sometimes I wish I had someone for my own, but I’m not interested in getting involved. Not only is it too soon for another connection, but a connection would pull at me, keeping me from doing what I want/need to do — whatever that might be. So I deal with the loneliness as best as I can.

For thirty-four years, I was connected to another human being on such a profound level that when he died, it felt as if half of me went with him, as if I were straddling the line between here and eternity. I don’t feel the nearness of eternity any more, don’t feel the awesome gap between life and death — in that respect, my life has gone back to “normal.” But even after all this time, something in me yawns wide and cries out to be filled. Sometimes I try to fill the emptiness with physical activity. Sometimes I try to fill it with chocolate and other treats. Sometimes I try to fill it with reaching out to others. But it is always there, an itch beneath the surface of my consciousness.

Despite Jeff’s absence, despite my brother’s presence, I am happier than I ever thought possible, and yet . . . Jeff is still gone. Still dead. Still, strangely, a part of my life.

I went walking in the desert today. I haven’t been out there for a while, keeping my ambulation more as a means of transportation than recreation, but it felt right. I used to talk to him in the desert, used to feel close to him in the vastness the open land, used to show him the steps and positions I learned in my various exercise classes, but today I just walked. Felt the ground beneath my shoes, felt the heat on my shoulders. Just . . . felt.

(I did ask Jeff if he’d watch over me when I took my epic walk, but he didn’t respond.)

I know he couldn’t have stayed. I know I couldn’t have gone with him (except for the part of me that died when he did). I know I’ve had and will continue to have many adventures I never could have had if we were still together. I know, though I seldom admit it, that when I am finished with my responsibilities here and head out on my own, my life will be better without him and the demands of his illness.

And yet. And 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 grief, life, relationships. Tags: effects of grief, four years of grief, grief and loneliness, grief upsurges, loneliness, walking in the desert. 4 Comments »

Midnight, Meteors, and Mockingbirds

May 24, 2014 — Pat Bertram

There was supposed to be a meteor shower last night, the first of its kind. Since I’d never seen shooting stars, I made sure to go outside at 11:00 pm PT to see what I could see.

Clouds. That’s what I saw. No shooting stars. No stars of any variety, for that matter.

I went out again at midnight. The clouds had moved away by then, and I saw the usual scattering of stars. (The city lights out here are too bright to show the true beauty of the night sky.) I didn’t see any part of the meteor shower, though perhaps I gave up too soon. Instead of the spectacle of hundreds of meteors an hour the news media had tantalized us with, there were actually only about five to ten per hour. Maybe if I had known where to look, or that I would have had to be out for longer than a few minutes, I would have waited.

Still, it was a joy to be out in the midnight air since it’s something I seldom do. I stood in the middle of the driveway, and listened. There was no sound of cars, no human voices, and oddly, no dogs barking. Most of the houses were dark. It was just me, the chirping of crickets and other incessant insect noises, and . . . birds singing.

Birds singing? At midnight? I’d never heard such a thing. I’m used to birds singing reveille, urging the sun to rise above the horizon. I’m used to birds singing sporadically through the day, or calling as they pass overhead. I’m even used to a few warbles as the sun goes down, but when night falls, the birds fall silent. (I just though of something — the sun falls below the horizon at the end of day, so how can night fall, too? Shouldn’t night rise?)

Hearing birds at midnight was so out of my ordinary, I checked online for night birds in this part of the world. I’ve heard owls, of course, but owls tend to hoot or screech. They don’t warble, and they don’t crow. (Besides the warblers, I heard ravens. I don’t remember ever hearing ravens crow at night, but that doesn’t mean they don’t.)

Apparently, what I heard were mockingbirds. Maybe there were no ravens last night. Maybe the mockingbirds were pretending to be ravens. For all I know, the mockingbirds were the whole dang chorus — crooning, cawing, and chirping.

The noise level surprised me, making me wonder about the feasibility of taking some sort of epic walk. I’d stay in hotels when possible since I’m not much of a wilderness sort, but there would be times I would have to find a place outside to bed down for the night, and how the heck would I ever be able to sleep with all that racket? And what about all the other nocturnal creatures slinking around without making noise? Could be more than I am prepared to handle.

If I remember, I’ll go out again tonight to look for meteors. It’s possible, some astronomers say, that the shower didn’t fizzle, but was simply delayed. I’ll also listen for mockingbirds and enjoy the unaccustomed sound of birds singing at midnight.

***

Posted in culture, life. Tags: birds singing at midnight, epic walk, meteor shower, meteors, midnight, mockingbirds, night noises. 7 Comments »

Stale Plot Devices

May 23, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I’m still researching mystery clichés to use for the novel I’m planning to write, probably because researching is easier than actually sitting down and writing. To be honest, though, I don’t need to research clichés. I’ve read thousands of mysteries of all kinds — suspense, gothics, detective stories, cozies, police procedural, legal thrillers, medical thrillers, crime fiction — which certainly qualifies me as an expert on stale plot devices. In fact, when I started writing, I thought these devices were a necessary part of the genre because they were so common. It was a real joy to discover that I could write whatever I wanted — I didn’t have to follow in the fingerprints (I’m trying unsuccessfully to be non-clichéd here, using “fingerprints” rather than “footprints”) of those who have gone before.

Besides, mystery clichés seem to be everywhere. I’ve been watching tapes of “Mystery Woman,” TV movies originally released by Hallmark Channel, and these are the absolute most cliché-ridden mysteries I’ve ever had the misfortune to watch. The only reason I have the tapes is that Jeff (my life mate/soul mate) taped them before he died. (Well, obviously he taped them before he died. As far as I know, there aren’t any VCRs where he is. Come to think of it, there aren’t that many here anymore, either.) The movies are so bad they were funny when we watched them together, but somehow the humor escapes me when I watch them alone. If the clichés were presented in a whimsical manner, as I hope to do in my story, then the movies would have been redeemable, but presented as they are in all seriousness, oh, my. So not fun!

For example, though the location doesn’t seem to be specified in the scripts, the movies were filmed in Simi Valley, and the real bookshop is in Pasadena. Big areas. And yet every mystery the mystery woman gets involved with, the police chief himself shows up. No underlings. Just the police chief. He is such a bumbling idiot that he doesn’t know the first thing about law, doesn’t know when it is acceptable to arrest someone, doesn’t know how to interpret the evidence. He needs the assistance of a DA to keep him on the right track legally, and the assistance of the mystery woman to interpret the evidence. How the heck did he ever become police chief if he’s so ignorant, to say nothing of being rude, cocky, and boorish?

Not only does the police chief show up for every murder in the city where the bookshop is located, when the mystery woman discovers a dead body at a spa sixty miles away, the police chief shows up there too. This silliness makes it seem as if there is only one person employed in law enforcement for sixty miles around. Even if he were the police chief of a one-cop town, he would not be investigating a murder so far from his base. That privilege would fall to the county sheriff.

Worse yet, when he threatened to arrest someone (the wrong person, of course) he said he’d take them “downtown.” What cop talks like that? “Downtown.” Sheesh. When cops arrest someone, they take them to the police station. Or to jail. Not “downtown,” whatever that means. I tried to find the origin of this cliché and couldn’t, but my guess it is that it could have come from either Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series or perhaps Dell Shannon’s Luis Mendoza mysteries.

Just as bad, in the movie the people who owned the spa sixty miles away had hired the mystery woman to film a brochure, which is why she was on the site to find the body. And yet it had never been established that she was a photographer. So why didn’t the people at the spa hire a real photographer? How did they hear about her? And why would they hire someone who was notorious for solving mysteries since they had something to hide?

Worst of all, the mystery woman has a caretaker for her shop, an enigmatic character who can do anything, and if he can’t, he knows someone who can. He can find any bit of information, hack into any computer, has access to the DMV, IRS, CIA. In itself, this is a bit of a cheat. Anything she wants to know just falls into her lap without effort. Well, almost anything. In one episode, where the mystery woman’s DA friend won’t let her see a will even though wills are public record, the mystery woman had to break into the deceased’s house to steal the will. Apparently, her caretaker can find out anything except things that are public record.

Maybe I’m going to have to rethink the whole idea of spoofing mystery stories for my book. After watching these movies, clichés no longer seem fun.

***

(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 books, writing. Tags: cliché-ridden mysteries, cop clichés, downtown, mystery cliches, Mystery Woman, research vs writing, take downtown. 6 Comments »

Something Fun

May 22, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday a fellow author said her muse had deserted her, and she asked for suggestions as to what she could post for her blog. I sent her this list of possible topics:

Something fun — a favorite photo, a special recipe, a secret (and impossible) dream.
Something that makes you smile, that comforts you, that makes you want to dance.
How writing changed your life or how it made no difference at all.
Your muse. Who or what is it normally? Maybe post a photo of your muse. Or write a letter to your muse begging him/her to come back.
The one letter you wish you’d never written, the one letter you didn’t write but wish you had.
Something you should have thrown away a long time ago, but can’t part with.
Your wildest non-erotic fantasy.

She didn’t use any of my suggestions, but ironically, my own muse has deserted my today. Well, not really — I don’t have a muse, but I am sitting here with such a blank mind that a ready list of blog topics is nice to have.

So, something fun . . .

One day when I was out walking in the desert, I saw this television sitting right there on the path as if posed for a photograph, so I took the picture, then I pasted the photo itself onto the television screen because the idea amused me. Hope it amuses you, too.

***

Posted in blogging, photography. Tags: blog topics, muse, something fun, television in the desert. 8 Comments »

Maybe I’m Not as Sane as I Think I Am

May 21, 2014 — Pat Bertram

For the past few months, I’ve been researching mental disorders, trying to find a classification for my dysfunctional homeless brother to see if there would be some indication of how I could get him out of my life. I thought he was bi-polar since he does suffer from depression, manic episodes of anger, and grandiosity, but he exhibits too many strange, sometimes terrifying, and often irrational behaviors to have a simple mood disorder.

A good indication of his problems has been the names he calls me, and the disorders he accuses me of having. So often people — even so-called normal people — project their problems onto others. And I seem to be my brother’s projection screen. He tells me I have a dissociative personality disorder. He tells me I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. He tells me I don’t care about anyone but myself.

Sounds like a good place to start looking for what ails him. The closest thing I’ve found to describe him is schizoaffective disorder with some OCD mixed in. Or a paranoid schizophrenic with bipolar disorders and OCD. One of the indications that he’s had a break from reality is his spitting. Such a simple thing to create chills — that ptoo-ptoo-ptoo makes me want to run far, far away. I’ve had a hard time tracking down the symptom since it doesn’t seem to be all that common except in certain cases of bipolar disorder and narcissistic rage (and wow, does he have rage!), but recently I’ve found instances where some paranoid schizophrenics spit for the same reason my brother does, to “get rid of the poison.”

I’ve learned a lot through my researches, especially how prevalent mental disorders are, which makes me feel so very lucky, but finding some sort of name for what is wrong with my brother helps not at all. He’s still swinging from one mood, one personality, one delusion to another. (Though oddly, he seems to save his invectives and delusions for me. He seems to react normally — normally for him, that is — with other people.)

I’ve been taking my blog readers’ advice into consideration and researching various options, but there aren’t many. Current laws say that the most you can institutionalize someone without his consent is 72 hours. Perhaps they could keep him longer, but once the episode passed, they would probably let him go with a prescription for drugs he would not take. And after all the hassle, I’d be back where I started. I could also call the cops, but here they just warehouse the mentally ill and do nothing to get them help. And again, after all my efforts I’d be back where I started because they’d just let him out since he hasn’t really committed a crime except harassing me. In addition, someone who used to be a chaplain for correctional institutes told me the other inmates tend to beat up those with mental problems, so the jails try to get rid of them as quickly as possible. I can understand that — I have my own times of wanting to beat my brother just to get him to shut up and leave me alone, though I’ve been channeling my frustrations into less violent activities such as researching.

As inhumane as it might be to consign him to the garage (it’s not much different than confining the insane to an attic), it’s the only way I can live with the situation. It gives me comfort knowing he is locked out. He won’t break into the house because even at his most psychotic, he is careful not to do anything to anger our 97-year-old father. (He seems oddly protective of the old man, but that is probably just another of his delusions since he thinks I’m trying to strangle our father and inherit this house. But I don’t inherit the house. In fact, once father is gone, I will be temporarily homeless. Well, without a home base. That’s a better way to phrase it.)

I can see, though, that there could come a day when I do run away. He’s starting to get demanding and threatening. Right now it’s “get me a beer, bitch, or I’ll let all the air out of your tires.” I’m not getting him a beer, of course, instead I’m researching portable air compressors. (Most of the cheap ones plug into the car’s cigarette lighter, and I don’t have one in my car.) I’d get a room for the night to give me some respite, but then there’s my father to consider. If I leave him alone, and something happens to him, I could be arrested for elder abuse. Cripes. The situations I get myself into. Maybe I’m not as sane as I think I am.

***

Posted in life, relationships. Tags: bipolar disorder, mental disorders.schizoaffective disorder, narcissistic rage, paranoid schizophrenic, spitting and mental illness. 10 Comments »

Wake Up and Die Right

May 20, 2014 — Pat Bertram

At an exercise class today, we talked a bit about the murder mystery I’m going to write about the class (assuming I get myself in gear), and then we did warm up exercises while the teacher sorted through her music to find the recording she wanted to play. When she couldn’t find the right DVD, she muttered, “Wake up and die right,” which stopped me in my tracks.

“What did you say?” I asked, not sure I heard correctly. She repeated the phrase, and I laughed. I’d never heard the saying before, and coming as it did right after a discussion about our fictional murder, it seemed even more amusing. And a bit gruesome.

Wake up and die right. Oh, my.

Odd words, phrases, and sayings often stay with me, rattling around in my brain until I can make sense of them. (In fact, just yesterday I railed against the appalling sentiment, “He deserved to die.”) The more I thought about “wake up and die right,” the more it made sense. We die right if at the end, we have no regrets. We die right if we’ve lived life to the fullest and used ourselves up, if we’ve danced and laughed, if we’ve enjoyed the company of those who enrich us, if we feel the sunsets and smell the rain-washed air. (If you live in the desert, of course, that rain-washed air comes so infrequently you better smell it when you can because it might be many months before you get another chance.)

Wake up and die right. Oh, yes.

Apparently, the saying came from World War II. Soldiers who let their attention wander were told to “Wake up and die right” — to pay attention, to fight, to get a grip, to die like a soldier if necessary. The adage migrated to the general population and seems to have been prevalent during the late forties and early fifties, but its use faded as memory of the war years became supplanted by other invasions with other jargons — the Beatles, the Viet Nam “police action,” the drug wars.

Today, more than sixty years after the maxim had been laid to rest, it came to life once again. I suppose in a way, it’s reminding me to just sit down and write the book about the class because, of course, I would regret not having written the story. I just need to wake up and do it so my designated victim can die right.

***

Posted in culture, history/myth, writing. Tags: dying right, living life to the fullest, odd sayings, wake up and die right, WWII adage. 5 Comments »

He Deserved To Die

May 19, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I watched a movie the other day, not paying enough attention to be able to tell you the name of the film or any of the plot, but one line caught my attention. “He deserved to die.” We’ve heard that sentiment so often that it’s become all but imperceptible, and yet, for that brief moment, I actually heard the words and now the phrase keeps rattling around in my head.

He deserved to die.

The “he” in question was a bad guy, that I remember. So is death a punishment? Is that why he deserved to die? Since most people seem to believe in some sort of paradisiacal afterlife, it would make more sense to say that he didn’t deserve to die.

Either way, there should be no “deserving” when someone talks about death. Death comes for all of us — young, old, middle-aged, saintly, wicked, average. We don’t really know what is in people’s hearts and mind, so perhaps everyone is deserving of death. And yet, stillborn infants have not done anything to deserve death — have not done anything at all, in fact — but they are doomed to die before they’re even born.

If the dead deserved to die, does that mean the rest of us deserve to live? But there is no deserving when it comes to life, either. We’re simply born. What we do with our life is up to us — at least in theory. Often we have no choice as to our circumstances, so we do the best we can.

Deserved to live.

Deserved to die.

After the death of my life mate/soul mate, I used to get lost in the conundrum of death, wondering which of us got the worst end of the deal. If life is a gift, why was it denied him? If he is in a better place, why am I still here?

I still don’t know the answer, but I do know he didn’t do anything to deserve to die, and I did nothing to deserve to live. It’s just the way things are.

Deserved to live.

Deserved to die.

Strange words that don’t mean much of anything.

***

Posted in culture, life. Tags: conundrum of death, deserved to die, deserved to live, who deserves to die?. 8 Comments »

Grief’s Strange Blessing

May 18, 2014 — Pat Bertram

We think we know who/what we are, but that image of ourselves is often at odds with what other people think. For example, if I disagree with some people, they call me negative. If I say no when someone asks me to do something, I risk being called contrary. If I want to do things my own way, I’m accused of being manipulative. If I try to set boundaries, I am called a vindictive, vengeful bitch.

Actually, only one person in my life ever dared called me a bitch. If anyone else did, he would not be in my life. It’s not that I want such a person in my life, of course, but my father allows my homeless brother to camp out in the garage, and it is my father’s house. (I don’t want to get into the morality of the situation, or how I am “enabling” my brother by not calling the cops, or how I should leave and let my 97-year-old father fend for himself. I’ve heard it all before, and anyway, that’s not what this post is about.)

When you live with someone with mental problems who insists that it is you who are out of touch with reality, it’s even harder at times to know the truth. Perhaps I am vindictive and vengeful as he says. Perhaps I’m negative, manipulative, and contrary as others say. I don’t think I am, but if I were, would I know?

A friend’s mother is going blind. One day this friend wore a pair of mismatched socks (they were part of a fun set of puposely mismatched socks, not mismatched by accident). The mother looked at the one purple sock and the one pink sock and said, “I love your red socks.” No amount of talking could convince the woman the socks were anything but a matched pair of red socks. It’s what she saw, and since she believed her eyes, what she saw must be the truth. And in a way, it was the truth — her truth. She did see red socks even though everyone else saw pink and purple.

Besides all the other nastiness my brother spews, he claims I have a dissociative personality disorder. If I did, would I know? I think I would — there should be gaps in memory, strange looks from friends, questions about things I have said — but my brother is the only one who insists I said things I don’t remember saying, who says I did things I don’t remember doing.

There was a time in my younger years where I would have worried about the truth of his allegations because I did feel unbalanced, as if one mental step to either side would send me over a cliff to insanity, but now I know the truth. I am sane. (It’s possible, of course, we are all insane, that life is a form of insanity, but that’s a path I don’t want to explore.)

So, what gives me the confidence to believe I am sane when others allege the opposite? The profound grief I experienced after the death of my life mate/soul mate.

Grief is a totally insane situation, with hormones of all kinds on overdrive, brain chemistry out of whack, emotions out of control, pain so deep it makes it impossible to breathe, tears that flow like open faucets without your volition, dizziness and nausea and a loss of equilibrium that make the world seem totally alien. And yet, somehow, through it all, I could feel the truth of grief, that whatever I experienced was normal. It’s this belief in the normality of grief’s insanity that gave me the courage to write about grief and connect with others going through the same thing. It’s what gave me the ability to explain grief to my fellow bereft, and to assure them that despite what they were feeling, they were not crazy.

And neither was I.

Grief brings strange blessings, and this was my blessing, the thing that is now helping me through a bizarre situation — the utter belief in my sanity.

***

Posted in being me, grief, relationships. Tags: belief in my sanity, can we know the truth, dissociative personalilty disorder, grief and insanity, vindictive bitch, what's the truth. 3 Comments »

In a Cavern, in a Canyon, Excavating for . . .

May 17, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Unlike Clementine’s father, I haven’t been excavating for a mine, but I have been excavating in the caverns and canyons of my workspace.

I turned on the computer a couple of hours ago to write my daily blog. Although I began this blog in 2007, I’ve only been daily blogging for the past 966 days. The miracle is that I’ve found something important to say each of those days (important to me, anyway), but today I’m dragging my feet. I don’t want to talk about what is most on my mind — the insanity of my life. My 97-year-old father is continuing to decline, and my crazy brother is getting increasingly crazy, blaming me for everything wrong in his life. He claims I am the one who’s crazy, tells me I am a jealous, revengeful bitch, but the truth is, I am too tired to be anything but what I am — a person who is doing the best she can under burdensome conditions.

Not wanting to go into the particulars of today’s insanity, I’ve been procrastinating writing this blog, cleaning around my computer and sorting through all the notes that accumulate.

I found a note indicating that, as of right now, Jeff — my life mate/soul mate — has been dead for 1513 days. Although I am not actively grieving for him, I still feel a blankness inside that his presence once filled.

I found an information sheet from my poppy trip that I hadn’t yet read. Apparently, the local Indians believed the Great Spirit sent this Fire Flower to drive away the evils of frost and famine, and to fill the land with warmth and plenty.

I found a phone number, and when I googled the number, discovered it was for a dollar store, though why I have the number, I can’t say. I also found an address for the county jail, and I do know why I have that. I had to go pick up my brother one day after he’d been arrested for public intoxication.

Barely discernible on a paper with many strange hieroglyphics — long forgotten calculations and cryptic notations — I found a great quote: Screw Romeo and Juliet. I want a love like Gomez and Morticia. Oh, my, yes! Now that was a great love affair, albeit unsung. It’s only those who die for love who become fodder for the bards. To be honest, though, I don’t want any love affair. One excavated note reminded me that my subscription to the dating site OurTime expires at the end of the month, and I don’t intend to renew it. I considered asking the one guy who didn’t pose with a motorcycle if he’d like to go to lunch just so I could say the subscription wasn’t a total waste of money, but I only sent him a brief lob to see if he’ll return my serve. (What I know about tennis is almost nothing, so I have no idea why I used a tennis metaphor, especially since I don’t know if I used it correctly.)

The most interesting thing I found in my excavations were notes about Blackwell’s Island. Apparently my family comes by its insanity naturally — we inherited it. Our great-grandfather, who once worked with Edison, and who invented the postmarking machine that continued to be used until the digital age made it obsolete, had been married twice. One wife he threw down the stairs. The other he consigned to the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (renamed Roosevelt Island in 1973). The asylum was supposed to be a state of the art facility, with patients classified as to their illness, rather than all thrown in together, the violent and harmless alike. The Asylum was also supposed to be moral, treating the patients like humans rather than like depraved animals. This humane mental institution never materialized. Instead, the asylum was a dreadful place that journalist Nellie Bly described as a “human rat trap.” Even worse, since convicts from the nearby penitentiary were used as guards and attendants, the patients were “abandoned to the tender mercies of thieves and prostitutes.”

No one knows which of my great-grandfather’s wives is my great-grandmother, but even if she weren’t the one committed (especially since there’s a chance he had her committed for his own reasons rather than her mental state), the insanity could come from good old great-grandfather himself.

The best part about this excavating through the caverns and canyons of my workspace is that now the space is neat and clean. And I did write a blog after all.

***

Posted in blogging, culture, life. Tags: Blackwell's Island, inventor of the postmarking machine, Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island, miscellaneous notes, Roosevelt Island. 3 Comments »

I Am Not an Arthur

May 16, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Last night I got together with some people for a group walk and the first thing one of the women said to me was, “Are you an arthur?” Although my name is not Arthur, I knew what she was asking. A bit hesitantly, not sure if it were something to be proud of or ashamed about, I admitted I was an author.

The woman said, “I’ve just started writing. You should come over to my house so you can take a look at what I wrote and tell me what you think.”

I didn’t know this woman. Had just met her a few seconds before. And she wanted me to look at her writing? Eek.

As graciously as I could, I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t do that.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because it’s a good way of making enemies,” I responded.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because people don’t like what I tell them.”

“Why?”

“Because I tell the truth.”

“That’s what I want,” she said. “The truth.”

By this time, I was feeling besieged. I live with people who constantly want/need things from me. I am always fielding online requests for help from people I don’t know and a few that I do. What I needed last night was a respite from such burdens.

Still trying to be gracious, though my irritation seeped through, I said. “No you don’t.”

And it’s true, whether she knew it or not: she did not want the truth as I see it. She had no writing experience. She wrote longhand and, because her wrists hurt, she hadn’t written much. She admitted she didn’t know how to spell, and when I told her that computers did that for her, she said she didn’t have a computer, didn’t know how to use one. She didn’t know grammar, either. Didn’t read books on how to write, didn’t read anything, actually, except a very occasional Stephen King.

So yes, I can guarantee she wouldn’t like anything I had to say about a few scribbled pages full of misspellings and grammar errors, and an absence of story elements. What she wanted was 1) for me to tell her that underneath all the obvious errors her writing was great and 2) for me to tell her everything I knew about writing in a few quick sentences. And there was no way I would do either. Besides, even if her writing was execrable, it’s not my place to tell her so and ruin her enjoyment.

I suggested that she read, but her wrinkled brow told me she couldn’t see the similarity between writing and reading. Finally, I told her just to write. To have fun with it. Not to worry about anything else. (Without a computer and with no desire to learn how to use one, she could never be anything but a hobbyist, so she might as well have fun.)

I learned something from last night’s experience, though — the next time anyone asks me if I’m an arthur, I’m going to say no.

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