I Don’t Believe in Women’s Issues

March 17, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I made a comment to a friend today about a writer with an over-inflated sense of his talents, and the friend responded, “Did you know he’s a champion of women’s issues?” That made me stop to think. I came to three conclusions: first, women’s issues don’t have much if anything to do with good writing; second, I don’t know what women’s issues are, and third, whatever they are, I don’t believe in them because they are, by definition, gender specific. I don’t even know what plain non-gender-specific “issues” are, so I’ve spent the last hours researching issues and women’s issues, starting with “issue.” “Issue” tugofwarmeans 1) an important topic or problem for debate or discussion and 2) personal problems or difficulties.

Whatever my personal problems or difficulties, I don’t consider them “women’s” issues. They are my issues, and I don’t primarily define myself by gender. Frankly, I don’t define myself at all. For a while, after the death of my life mate/soul mate, I defined myself by his absence since his goneness was so much a part of my very being, but now that the void isn’t as apparent, I’m just me again — a work in progress, a being in flux.

As for women’s issues — the right to bodily integrity and autonomy, to vote, to hold public office, to work, to fair wages or equal pay, to own property to education, to serve in the military or be conscripted, to enter into legal contracts, to have marital or parental rights, and whatever else is on the agenda — they seem more a matter of politics, and I am not a political creature. To be honest, I don’t believe in conscription for anyone, and I’d just as soon we all got along so we could get along without any sort of military. I don’t believe in contracts, either. Since contracts can be broken, entered into with bad faith, ignored, they are only as good as the lawyer you hire, and . . . well, I don’t believe in lawyers, either. (Do you see a pattern here?)

The issues I believe in are the non-gender issues of fairness, freedom, truth, love, kindness, respect, purpose, generosity of spirit. Any so-called women’s issue falls into one of these areas of belief. Equal pay is a matter of fairness. No rape is a matter of freedom, respect, and kindness. Pregnancy/abortion is a matter of freedom, sometimes love, often purpose or fairness. Equal responsibilities for both partners in a domestic situation is a matter of fairness, love, kindness, respect.

Men’s issues are also incorporated into the issues I believe in, especially fairness. Yes, men have “issues.” Although most of the high paying jobs are held by men (at least that’s what is said) some men have a hard time getting any sort of work at all. Sometimes men get passed over because of women’s issue politics — if experience and expertise are equal, the job often goes to a woman for no other reason than she’s a woman. Men are discriminated on the basis of height. Tall men (and women) have the advantage when it comes to high paying jobs because height connotes power. We want leaders we can look up to, not down on. Although height is something we have no control over, short people, especially men, are sometimes seen as weaker unless they have something else going for them — money, aggressiveness, a resounding voice. Men also have more problems with homelessness, violence, workplace deaths than women do, and almost as many problems with domestic abuse and depression.

In a perfect world, everyone’s “issues” would be addressed. And this could be a perfect world. We all — men and women alike — have the capacity for fairness, freedom, truth, love, kindness, respect, purpose, generosity of spirit.

Maybe I should start with myself and refrain from making ungenerous comments about other writers’ abilities.

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

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Life Is An Epic Adventure

March 16, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Recently I’ve been thinking and blogging about my need for an adventure, such as walking up the Pacific coast, thru-hiking a national trail, or visiting all the national parks. Something life changing. Something truly epic.

I’ve never been a particularly adventuresome sort, but the waning of grief over the death of mate/soul mate has left me with a vast restlessness and a desire for expanding my boundaries, both personally and geographically. From the beginning (the beginning of my grief, that is), I’ve been determined not to waste his death, and somehow settling down somewhere and living a tame life seems a waste. I want to explore the wild woman within, find out what she is capable of, live a bolder life than I’ve always lived. (Well, bolder within certain parameters. I certainly have no interest in bold pursuits such as skydiving or jet skiing. Walking, one foot always solidly on the ground, is more my style.)

I don’t know if I will ever be able to follow the call of adventure — responsibilities and physical capabilities could be a deterrent. But the truth is, life itself is an adventure of epic proportions. From the moment we are born, we grow and learn, always trying to expand our reach. We love and hate, laugh and cry, connect with others and disconnect, dance, tell stories, wish upon a star, dream of things that never were. Some people have families and children that bring them sorrow and joy. Some people have wonderful careers that sustain them. Some people have otherworldly experiences that that comfort, challenge, terrify. Some people are lucky enough to fall deeply in love, and sometimes those same people fall deeply into grief. Such epic experiences!

Although I dream of a separate epic adventure within the adventure of life itself, I do try to see the epicness of each day and experience whatever life brings me. Sometimes I find myself in the mountains, in the desert, or by the coast. Sometimes I find myself offering support or accepting comfort. Sometimes I find myself at lunch with friends — and what a privilege that is! It’s amazing how the turns of life often bring people from all over the world to a single place for a while and then with another turn, disperses them.

I suppose even sitting here writing this is an epic adventure. The internet, which burst into life a mere 25 years ago, connects people in a way that even the vicissitudes of life haven’t managed. Break Time, the steampunk the anthology I’m putting together with authors from New Zealand, Australia, Canada, USA, could only be the product of the internet with all of us coming together (without ever meeting) for such a fascinating project.

Still, even though writing might satisfy some folks’ idea of adventure, right now the sun beckons me. I think I’ll go out for a walk and experience the epicness of life first hand.

***

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

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Patterns of Grief

March 15, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I’d like to clarify what yesterday’s post, Challenges of the Fourth Year of Grief, was all about. I did not mean to imply that everyone’s grief is the same, that we all face the same challenges, and I especially did not mean to imply that these “challenges” are stages people are going through or will go through. I am not a therapist or a grief counselor, so of course I don’t know how a wide range of grievers feel. Nor am I dispensing advice. I do have many friends who are pretty much on the same grief track that I am, however, and all I did was express publicly the things we are talking about privately.

I certainly am not trying to undermine the grief community’s efforts to get rid of the whole “Stages of Grief” mindset. I have railed against the stages of grief from the beginning. Kubler-Ross’s supposed stages of grief do not in any way reflect what my friends and I have gone through and continue to go through, which is why I started writing about grief in the first place — to provide a more realistic view of grief, even if it is just a recounting of my own grief experiences.

Even though everyone’s grief is different, there are still patterns of similarity.

For example, most of us (most of my friends, that is, not most grievers) are being swept by an inordinate need for adventure. This need seems to be a reflection of our birth age as well as our grief age (by grief age I mean how long it’s been since our mates have died). Younger woman still have families to care for, and in older women the need for adventure seems muted (though several have admitted to being more adventuresome then when they were married). Maybe it’s the long, empty, years that stretch before me and my friends that make adventure a necessity. Maybe it’s that grief is so epic that only an epic adventure can make us come alive. I truly don’t know where this need for adventure comes from, but the truth is, most of the women I know who are on the same grief track as I am, desperately crave adventure. Again, I don’t mean to imply that all grievers go through this, but it is a pattern, and more than anything else, I am drawn to patterns.

Which is all I was doing by describing some of the little known challenges of grief — showing a pattern.

And one of the patterns I found is that during the fourth year, most of the people I know did make the big disconnect from their mates, realizing in the depth of their being that we are each on our own path, and that whatever we do or do not do cannot affect the deceased. We only have to deal with ourselves. This understanding is why so many women wake up on the fourth anniversary to find a renewed interest in life. Maybe find they are happy. Maybe find they are in love with life again. For some people, of course, this understanding comes much later, occasionally earlier, and sometimes not at all.

The truth is, no matter what the pattern of grief, your own or someone else’s, grief is hard work. Sometimes it’s nice to know how others feel. It’s especially nice to know that we aren’t alone in how we feel.

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

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Challenges of the Fourth Year of Grief

March 14, 2014 — Pat Bertram

The challenges we face during the first year after the death of a life mate/soul mate (or any other significant person in our lives who connects us to the world), are too great to enumerate. It’s all we can do to cope with the seemingly endless chores of laying our beloved to rest while dealing with the emotional shock, the physical pain, the psychological affront that are our constant companions. Sometimes the first anniversary of his death is one of peace when we realize that we managed to survive the worst year of our life, but then we wake up to the second year and find a whole other set of challenges to meet.

The five main challenges we face during the second year after the death of a life mate/soul mate are:

1. Trying to understand where he went.
2. Living without him
3. Dealing with continued grief bursts.
4. Finding something to look forward to rather than simply existing.
5. Handling the yearning.

There are other challenges, of course, some unique to each individual, but all the challenges are dealt with the same way: by continuing to feel the pain when it erupts rather than turning away from it to satisfy the concerns of those who don’t understand; by taking care of ourselves even when we don’t see the point; by trying new things.

In other words, we meet the challenges of the second year by living. It sounds simple, but nothing about grief for a life mate/soul mate is simple. By living, we begin to move away from our pain, but we also move away from the person we loved more than any other. For some bereft, this feels like a betrayal of their love — how can you continue to live when life on this earth is denied him? For others, it seems like a betrayal of themselves — how can you become the person you need to be without betraying the person you once were?

The third year of grief seems to be a year of transition with only one new challenge — beginning to rebuild our lives. (We still have upsurges of sadness, still miss our loved one, still yearn for him, but these feelings are not as prominent as they once were.) Most of us no longer feel that continued life is a betrayal of our love because we understand that we had no choice in the matter, either in his death or in our continued life. Nor do we feel we are betraying the person we once were — we are no longer that person, though we have not yet developed into the person we are to become. Most of us are still trying to figure out who that person is and what that person wants and needs.

You’d think by the fourth year there would be no challenges of grief left, but for most of us, this is the year where we make the necessary disconnect from our loved ones, and that is big though necessary step. No matter how close we were to our mates, no matter how much we felt as if we were two parts to a whole, we realize that in terms of life on this earth, we were two separate beings on two separate journeys. The questions that haunted us, such as the big question of who got the worst end of the deal, seem muted. Our mates had to deal with death and dying, and we had to deal with grief and living. It all seems the same now — life and death — though perhaps it’s more that we’re used to them being gone than that we made any great leap of understanding. We also don’t feel their absence the way we once did. The clawing yearning to see our mates once more has by now muted to a gentler feeling of intermittent melancholy.

Although my fifth year of grief doesn’t start for another two weeks, I am getting an inkling that this is going to be the main challenge of the coming year — dealing with grief’s absence. Grief was a part of my life for a very long time and the immensity of the loss and the enormity of the pain gave my life a feeling of epic importance, as if I were standing on the very edge of eternity. Well, eternity has retreated, and I am left with the ordinariness of life, and that ordinariness seems . . . well, it seems ordinary. Still, the lessons of grief taught me well, and so I will continue to take each day as it comes. Continue to find something to look forward to rather than simply existing. Continue to look for something to be passionate about, even if it’s just life itself.

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

Posted in grief, life. Tags: , , , , . 19 Comments »

More “More Deaths Than One”

March 13, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I seem to be fascinated by characters who die “more deaths than one.” In my novel of that name (taken from Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” — he who lives more lives than one / more deaths than one must die), poor Bob Stark returns home after living in Southeast Asia for eighteen years to discover that the mother he buried before he left is dead again.

The steampunk anthology I am helping put together begins with my story about Florence Giston, Flo for short. (I couldn’t resist that name. Flo Giston. Phlogiston. Seemed appropriate.) The opening paragraphs of that story read:

The first time her husband died, Florence Giston felt such feral grief, she feared she’d never survive. She’d always tried to look on the bright side of things, but she could find no bright side to this situation. Her husband was dead, and she felt as if she had died, too.

“You can’t let it get you down,” said Alexander Giston, her father-in-law. “Just because Robert and Mary died, it doesn’t mean they are gone forever.”

The second time Robert died, Florence’s already broken heart shattered beyond repair. Robert had been her whole life, and to lose him twice seemed unbearably cruel. She vowed never to go through such trauma again, yet when Al announced he intended to try to save his wife and his son again, Flo begged to go with him.

“I need to see Robert once more,” she said. “Need” seemed a paltry word to describe the yearning that clawed at her, but Al must have understood her desperation, because he agreed to let her accompany him on his second trip to their shared past.

Time travel brings with it delicious ironies. In this case, Flo’s view of Robert — and herself — isn’t exactly what she expected.

A young woman stepped outside. “What’s going on?” she asked, her voice soft and tremulous.

Flo stared at herself, at the brown lace stockings, the brown gored skirt, the brown jacket, the brown plumed hat. What was I thinking? She vowed to throw out all the brown clothes she owned, including the brown shirtwaist she now wore.

“This is dad from the future,” Mary said. “He’s come to save us from certain death.” Catching the irony in her mother-in-law’s voice, Flo wondered if she’d underestimated the woman. Mary had always seemed so drab despite the bright colors she chose to wear. Was nothing as she remembered?

“Good of him,” Robert said. There was no irony in his voice, no affection. “We can take the aeroship.”

“Well, no.” Al scuffled his feet. “I already saved you once. I came back and made you take the aeroship, and it crashed. They never found your bodies.”

Flo stifled an urge to laugh, but Robert didn’t even crack a smile. “I’ll drive the Steamer,” he said.

“Couldn’t you just stay home?” Al asked, a note of pleading in his voice.

Mary shook her head. “It’s my father’s funeral. I have to be there.”

“We’ll be fine,” Robert said. “The Stratosphere Steamer is the safest automobile on the road.”

Also the fastest, Flo thought, but she kept her mouth shut. So far, the Gistons hadn’t noticed her, and perhaps it was just as well. Robert had never seemed to be able to handle one of her; two might overtax his feeble imagination.

Appalled at the direction of her thoughts, Flo slipped back into the lab. She’d loved Robert dearly, had mourned him twice, so what prompted her to be so dismissive of him now? Remembering how besotted she’d been, she wondered if love hadn’t been the blessing she’d always presumed it to be, but had instead been a prison, keeping her emotionally shackled to a man for whom she had little respect.

This anthology is scheduled to be published in May. I’m looking forward to seeing it finally in print.

breaktime-3bsmall

***

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

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Happy Anniversary, WWW

March 12, 2014 — Pat Bertram

The World Wide Web is twenty-five years old today, just beginning to feel the full weight of adulthood. According to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web and the author of the first web browser, “the underlying Internet and the WWW are non-hierarchical, decentralized and radically open. The web can be made to work with any type of information, on any device, with any software, in any language. You can link to any piece of information. You don’t need to ask for permission. What you create is limited only by your imagination.”

We’re so used to the internet as a vital part of our lives that it seems impossible that it’s so new. I got my first computer and first taste of the internet in 2007. Even then, the internet seemed old, and I felt as if I were jumping too late on the bandwidth wagon, but at that time, the internet was only eighteen years old, still just a youngster feedeskling the first stirrings of freedom. We now have music downloads, ebooks, videos available at a touch of a button. Anyone can publish anything on the web, anyone can promote whatever they wish, anyone can write a journal and maybe even be read. Odd to think that this is just the beginning. I cannot even imagine what the future of the internet will be and how it will affect us.

My computer, so awesomely powerful in 2007, is getting slow — not because of age but because of the proliferation of video ads. By design, I’m sure, ads load first, which means that the content comes long after everything else appears. If it weren’t for the slowness of my computer, I wouldn’t mind the ads — I’d just ignore them. I don’t much of anything anymore, except for the basics, and I seldom buy anything just to buy it. It is interesting, though, how ads dog us — a friend mentioned in a blog comment that he is reading Long Man, and now wherever I go, I see an ad for that book. It makes me wonder if in the future, the internet will be mostly ads with any content buried beneath a string of product links.

As long as I have my small corner of the web (this blog, of course!), I’ll be happy. How I access this blog in the future, however, will be a different matter. I like PCs with its unvirtual keyboard (as long I can attach a mouse to the computer), but PCs are going the way of vacuum-tube computers. I’m not interested in tablets, and phones, no matter how smart, are difficult to use to write a blog. As for voice activated software, no thank you. I like silence. Still, progress beckons whether I wish it to or not, and who knows, someday there will be a device I like as well as I do my PC.

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

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Steampunk Anthology Coming Soon!

March 11, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Two years ago, a couple of authors approached me about doing a collaborative novel similar to the Rubicon Ranch collaboration I’d been writing with other Second Wind authors. We invited a few other authors to do this new collaboration. Two of the authors suggested we do steampunk.I’d never heard of steampunk. Couldn’t even guess what it was. To be honest, I’m not sure I know even now what it is. Still, we all agreed. Such a collaboration is about stretching ourselves as authors, and how better to stretch than by doing something we’ve never done before.

The two authors who talked us into doing steampunk ended up walking away, leaving us with a story no one knew how to write. The rest of us decided to stick with the project anyway. Why not? We’re writers. We can fake it. We also got the internet with all its research capabilities to help us.

Wikipedia defines steampuSteamnk as “a sub-genre of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, horror, and speculative fiction that came into prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s. Steampunk involves a setting where steam power is widely used — whether in an alternate history such as Victorian era Britain or “Wild West”-era United States, or in a post-apocalyptic time — that incorporates elements of either science fiction or fantasy.”

In “How Do I Write A Steampunk Story?” Dru Pagliassotti says, “Steampunk fiction consists of two elements — the steam, or gaslamp aesthetic, iconography specific to the genre — and the punk, a critical ideology or political stance that satirizes, challenges, or subverts societal trends.”

Most of us writers were in a strange non-writing mode, so it was hard finding the time or the words. Although a chapter was supposed to be written each week, with each of us taking a turn, life often got in the way, and those weeks turned into months. Instead, the others decided we should finish the book not as a collaborative novel but as an anthology.

The anthology is almost finished now, and it’s actually quite an interesting collection of stories, all written around a single theme of time travel and “killing steam.” (The time traveler’s wife and son were killed in a steam engine accident, and since he couldn’t bring them back, he decided steam was to blame and so traveled back in time to try to divert the progress of the steam engine.)

I feel good about finally winding up this project. I have no real desire for longterm projects right now. My life is up in the air, and I don’t know from day to day what is going to happen. (Well, that’s true of everyone, of course, but generally people feel at least a bit settled.)

The anthology will be published both as a book and as a blog. I’ll let you know when it’s finally available.

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

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Requiem for a Website

March 10, 2014 — Pat Bertram

In October of 2007, I entered a contest on gather.com — the Court TV Search for the Next Great Crime Writer contest. The winner of the contest would win a $5,000 advance and a publishing contract. My entry, More Deaths Than One, was not a detective story, and it certainly was not a cozy mystery, but it is the story of a crime: identity theft. This theft is an actual theft of a man’s identity, not a paper one.

I did very well in that contest, too. As of November 17, 2007, I was ranked number one, but I finished up about sixth or seventh. (I could tell you it was because my mother died and I had to go to California for her funeral and I broke my ankle while there and was off the internet for a week, but the truth is . . . come to think of it, I don’t know what the truth is.)

The contest started out being great fun but devolved into all sorts of infighting, faked votes, and terrible reviews that RIPwere posted for no other reason than meanness. Still, it turned out to be a pivotal point in my writing career.

I became friends with many of the contestants, and casual acquaintances with others. I met other writers that I am still connected with today.  Because of the contest, I eventually found a publisher. The link to the publisher’s website was posted as a comment on one of the writer’s articles, and since I was in querying mode, I immediately shot off a query letter. The publisher loved my book A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and sent me a contract. Turns out, I already knew him through the contest, and he asked if More Deaths Than One was still available. It was. Second Wind Publishing has now published five of my books — four novels and one non-fiction book, Grief: The Great Yearning.

Until the crime writer contest, my online presence had been confined to my blog, but after the contest I posted articles on gather, and I also migrated to other sites, such as Facebook, Goodreads, and Twitter. I mostly hang around Facebook now because of my discussion groups there, but I always return to Gather, especially on Thursday evening when I used to do a live chat with my No Whine, Just Champagne discussion group. I started out knowing only a few people online, now I know hundreds.

And all because of a contest.

Now, Gather is in its death throes. Because of the spam that clogged the site, Google stopped referencing its content in searches. The site has been sold a couple of times, and neither of the new owners seemed to have any interest in revitalizing this once active online writers community.

Most of my Gather posts have been posted elsewhere, usually here on this blog, but a lot of the discussion topics were too brief for a blog post, so I’ve been mining the site so my content doesn’t get lost. Considering that there were almost two hundred live chats alone in my discussion group, that’s a lot of content! I hope I get time to go through the discussions and look for pithy comments I might have made, but if I don’t, well, no problem. Maybe my comments should pass into oblivion along with the site. And who knows, maybe someday the site will be resuscitated.

Until then, rest in peace, Gather.

***

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

Posted in internet, writing. Tags: , , , , . 9 Comments »

Looking For Life in all the Right Places

March 9, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I went hiking yesterday, looking for life wherever I might find it,

and ended up on the shores of a lake.

This lake is actually a man-made lake with a drowned settlement at the bottom. Ironically, the once living town of Cedar Springs had plenty of water with abundant rain, spring runoffs, and a year-round stream, so the residents (first ranchers, then homesteaders, and finally townspeople) never expected to have water problems. But when the state needed reservoirs to store water for its ever-growing population, this shallow canyon seemed a natural location. And so the town with plenty of water was killed by even more water.

I didn’t think of that poor drowned town when I was hiking, of course. I just enjoyed the walk through the woods to the shores of the lake. It was a gorgeous day, and even the difficult footing, rivulets to cross on slippery rocks, and fallen tree trunks to clamber over didn’t dampen my pleasure at the stunning scenery.

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

Posted in life, photography. Tags: , , , . 12 Comments »

Friday Night, Date Night

March 8, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I signed up for an online dating site two or three months ago. It took one entire sleepless night to make the decision to do so. I’m not sure what I was afraid of — moving even further beyond my deceased life mate/soul mate perhaps. Or maybe falling in love again and tying my future to another person. (I’m not ready for that. I still need to find out what my life alone will bring.) Although I’m not looking for a serious relationship, I did think it would be fun to meet people, maybe go on a few dates, but the site turned out to be anticlimactic.

Inadvertantly, I’d created a profile that guaranteed I wouldn’t catch anyone’s attention — I told the truth about myself, used more than 95 words, didn’t downplay my intelligence, didn’t show cleavage, didn’t use words like “fun-loving” that could connote an eagerness for mattress games, and most of all, I didn’t lop years off my age.

Not surprisingly, nothing came of my fishing in the online dating pool. Not a single date. Not even a real message or connection, which I find strange. I frequently make connections over the internet. All sorts of interesting people find their way to me online. Many of my offline friends were once solely online friends. Many other online friends will one day become offline friends when we finally meet in person. And yet, on a site geared to bringing people together, I can’t make a single connection.

Still, I wanted a date, so last night I took myself out. Went to a fair. It wasn’t big as fairs go, but it had a Ferris wheel and that’s all I really wanted. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me go on the ride by myself. “It’s fair policy,” the ticket taker said. (I’m not sure how fair this fair policy is, since one of me is easily the equivalent of the the two children who climbed aboard at that momeFerris wheelnt.) As I turned away from the wheel, a young woman asked me, “Did he say you can’t go by yourself?” When I said yes, she looked disappointed and replied, “My daughter wants to go on the ride.” “Don’t you want to go with her?” I asked. She shook her head. I volunteered to partner up with her little girl. And she agreed.

So, we rode the Ferris wheel together, this little girl and I. We marveled at how beautiful the fair looked from the air and how small everyone seemed. She told me she was learning sign language and taught me how to say “I love you.” After thanking her for accompanying me and thanking the mother for letting her daughter chaperone me, I wandered around the grounds. Ate a caramel apple. Tossed pelota balls in a basket (all but one jumped right back out). Threw darts at balloons and won a stuffed frog.

I’ve always thought such games a waste of money — I could have bought a nicer frog for a fraction of the cost — but it wasn’t about the frog. It was about the experience. Immersing myself in a night of sponteneity.

On the way home, in the continued spirit of sponteneity, I stopped for an ice cream cone. (I can’t even remember the last time I did that.)

It was a great date. Maybe I’ll do it again some time.

***

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

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