Bertram's Blog

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

January 16, 2014 — Pat Bertram

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

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

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

Excerpt from Grief: The Great Yearning

Day 288, Grief Journal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yay! I’m a Winner!

January 15, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Today I received the following email:

Google Security Department®
Belgrave House,
76 Buckingham Palace Road,
London SW1W 9TQ,
United Kingdom.

Dear Lucky Winner.

We wish to congratulate you on this note, for being one of our lucky winners selected this year. This promotion was set-up to encourage the active use of the Google search engine and the Google ancillary services. Hence we do believe with your winning prize, you will continue to be active and patronage to this company. Google is now the world leading search engine worldwide and in an effort to make sure that it remains the most widely used search engine, an online e-mail balloting was carried out on the 21st of December 2013, without your knowledge and was officially released recently.

We wish to formally announce to you that your email address was attached to a lump sum of ?750,000.00 {Seven Hundred and Fifty Thousand Great British Pounds Sterling} only.

A winning Cheque will be issued in your name by the Google Promotion Award Team, and also a certificate of prize claims will be sent alongside your winning Cheque.

Your Award Winning Details.
Code Number: GUK/3554749405GK
Ticket No: GUK/1008272745GK
Winning Number: GUK/99334353734GK

Information’s required from you are part of our precautionary measure to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program. To claim your won prize, please contact the Google Award claims Manager (McCarthy Robert) neatly filling the payment release form below.

PAYMENT RELEASE FORM.

*First Name
*Last Name
*Residential Address
*Telephone/ Mobile
*Nationality/Country
*Age
*Sex
*Occupation/Position
*Amount Won
*Alternate Email
*Have you ever been an Online Winner?

You are advised to contact your Foreign Claims Manager with his private email details below to avoid unnecessary delay and complications:

**************************************************

GOOGLE AWARD CLAIMS MANAGER.
Dennis Morris
Google Security Department (United Kingdom)
E-mail: mailoffice1a@yahoo.co.jp

************************************************

For security reasons, you are advised to keep your winning information’s confidential till your claims have been processed and your money remitted to you. This is part of our precautionary measure to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program. Please be warned.

Note: You can fill your payment release form by printing and manually filling or you can fill directly on mail, or provide the details on Microsoft Word.

Please do not reply if you are NOT the owner of this email address.

Congratulations from the Staffs & Members of Google Board Commission.

Yours Sincerely,

George Wilkins.

Regional Coordinator,
Google United Kingdom.
©2013 Google Corporation.

I sent them all the information they requested, and will soon be rich!!

Well, no. I didn’t send them the information. This is a scam. But I got a blog post out of the deal, so I actually am a winner after all, just not a rich one.

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Posted in internet. Tags: email scam, Google Board Commission, Google United Kingdom scam. 7 Comments »

Today I Will be . . . Habromaniacal

January 14, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Most days, I post a resolution on Facebook. I need to post something, and since I don’t have cute cat videos, dear dog photos, or pithy thoughts that can be posted in the few words that most FB perusers can absorb in the few seconds they allow per post, I’ve been posting resolutions. Even if no one reads them, it’s a way of concentrating my thoughts on a particular area I need to work on that day, and it helps. Yesterday, for example, I knew I would have to be conciliatory and kind to someone I wasn’t feeling kindly toward, so I posted, “Today I will be . . . humanitary.” I couple of days ago, I needed to be firm and steadfast in a decision, and so I chose “staunch.”

At the beginning, I just chose one of the words from the word art I use as my cover photo for my profile — words such as playful, daring, intense, bold, whimsical, mysterious, legendary. But when I stumbled on the book, The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate by Eugene Ehrlich, I started using words that few people knew, words such as alcatory (depending on luck or chance), magniloquent (lofty in expression), veridical (truthful), cachinnate (laugh loudly). The odd thing is that most of the adjectives in those 192 pages were not exactly uplifting. As interesting as the words look, dysphoria, fractious, louche, purulent are not states to which I aspire.

It’s become something of a treasure hunt to discover hidden gems such as eupathy, which means a happy condition of the soul. Don’t we all strive to be eupathic? It gave me great pleasure to bring this jewel to light.

Today I discovered another wonderful word. Habromania — a kind of insanity in which there are delusions of a cheerful character or gaiety. [It comes from the Greek words habros meaning graceful or delicate and mainesthai to be mad] I don’t imagine that it’s a comfortable state since it is a form of insanity after all, and yet, those who have it would, by definition, be happy. David E. Kelley, the man responsible for Ally McBeal, seemed to like habromaniacs since he used them occasionally in the series. In one show, an old man was wonderfully happy, giving away his fortune to the dismay of his children. It wasn’t until the man’s wife died and he found himself unable to cry or even be sad at her passing that he allowed himself to be treated.

It seems to me our world could use a few more habromaniacs — people who are happy even though sanity seems to dictate misery.

So, today I will be . . . habromaniacal.

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Posted in being me, life. Tags: Ally McBeal, daily resolutions, delusions of cheerfulness, eupathy, habromania, insanity. 1 Comment »

Is Marriage a Good Thing for Men?

January 13, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Three months ago, someone left the following comment on one of my blog posts:

Only an INSANE man would get married in America today, considering how biased the divorce courts are against men and how useless 99 percent of American women really are.

71 percent of men between the ages of 18 to 34 in America have no interest in marriage:

http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/young-men-and-women-differ-on-the-importance-of-a-successful-marriage/

And the following essay really explains very lucidly exactly why so many men are avoiding marriage:

http://dontmarry.wordpress.com/

Why Modern, Western Marriage Has Become A Bad Business Decision For Men

The above comment didn’t fit with the post on which it was supposed to be a commentary, so I’ve kept the comment in moderation all this time, thinking I would use it as a blog post sometime, but I could never think of anything to say about the situation. I’m not a man, so I don’t know the man’s viewpoint, but it seems to me from my research on various online dating sites, that many men are looking for wives. These men, of course, are way beyond the age 34, so perhaps the statistic about the huge number of men younger than 34 who don’t want to get married is a sign of their immaturity, not having met the right person, meeting too many willing partners, no interest in progeny, or a total focus on business. Or something else entirely — skewed statistics perhaps.

At any rate, I thought the points in the articles were interesting enough to save.

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Posted in relationships. Tags: marriage and men, men avoiding marriage, why men don't want to get married. 14 Comments »

Waiting for Late-Blooming Genius to Flower

January 12, 2014 — Pat Bertram

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

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

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

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

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

On Writing: Get Off the Bus!

January 11, 2014 — Pat Bertram

In a blog post on the Second Wind Publishing blog, author Paul Mohrbacher wrote: “At a writing workshop two years ago I heard this advice: Don’t spend time driving from one place to another in your fictional story. All you can do in a moving car is talk, talk, talk, or if you’re alone, think, think, think. It slows your story down. There is no room in a transit narrative for action. Get off the bus!” (Click here to read the rest of the article.)

This is actually good advice, and yet there are many novels that take place on a trip — on trains mostly, which makes sense. A train trip is leisurely, which gives plenty of scope for both character and plot development, and is much more romantic than a bus ride.

I wrote an entire suspense novel that takes place on a small bus, one that was big enough to fit eight people (because that’s how many characters I had!). In Daughter Am I, my characters are going cross country to find out who Mary’s grandparents were, why someone wanted them dead, and why her father had disowned them. Much of the story is “story time” — the characters telling about their past, and it is in these stories that Mary finds the truth. Of course, they do get off the bus occasionally, but emotion and connection are part of the “action” of a story, so as long as they are present, it’s okay for characters to stay on the bus. Also, in Daughter Am I, the drive makes it seem as if the story itself is going somewhere, not just the characters. Each leg of the trip carries with it the hope of finding the end of the quest, and instead turns them in a different direction. Literally.

Two of my other novels also involve lengthy trips. In More Deaths Than One, Bob travels halfway around the world on a quest to find out the truth about himself, and in A Spark of Heavenly Fire,, world-famous actor Jeremy King travels to the ends of Colorado in a quest to save himself from the disease that ravaged the state and the quarantine that was supposed to keep the epidemic controlled. During each of these journeys, the characters learned more about themselves or we learned more about them and their quest, so the journeys were important to the plot.

Sometimes, though, a trip was just a place to get the characters from one place to another, in which case, I skipped any narration about the trip, merely saying they are going to a specific place and picking up the story again when they arrive.

And sometimes (though never in my stories) there is a lengthy car chase. Car chases seem to fit more with the visual construct of a movie than with a written story, because viewers see the narrow escapes and so get involved, though such chases also find their way into novels. Either way, I find them boring. In fact, they put me to sleep.

So yes, get off the car, or bus, or train, or airplane . . . except when something important to the story is happening in the vehicle.

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Posted in books, writing. Tags: Daughter Am I, get off the bus, quest stories, traveling in stories, writing advice. 12 Comments »

Where Do the Misfits Fit?

January 10, 2014 — Pat Bertram

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Posted in culture, life. Tags: fitting into the world, intoxication in public, jaywalking, misfits, where do the homeless fit. 18 Comments »

Online Dating: Diane Lane I am Not

January 9, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Until the last month or so, the only thing I ever knew about online dating sites and services was what I’d heard second or third hand and seen in movies. I thought you signed up, paid a fee, filled out a questionnaire, and they found a perfect match for you.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who presumed the same thing since such a scenario seemed to be a major plot point in the movie Sneakers. The collaborators needed to bypass a voice recognition security device, so they had Mary McDonnell pose as a computer date for Stephen Tobolowsky and record the necessary words. All goes well until Ben Kingsley discovers that Mary is supposed to be Stephen’s date. He says, disbelieving, “A computer matched her with him?” And so the story took a turn for the worse for the collaborators.

Now that I know the truth about computer dating — at least the sites I signed up for — the movie seems a bit less riveting.

To the extent that the computers are matching me with anyone (it doesn’t seem as if they are really finding matches, just notifying me of a random mix of people in my current geographical area), they seem to think I am looking for an inarticulate, overweight, tattooed smoker who rides a motorcycle. (Um, no.) The two characters in the movie were a much better match for each other than any I’ve been paired with. In fact, when I was watching the movie, I thought that very thing, that the two characters had a lot in common — both were educated, fastidious, articulate, and lived well.

Another movie that deals with online dating sites as a major plot mover is Must Love Dogs. Diane Lane seemed to find plenty of dates almost immediately, yet after five weeks, I haven’t managed to connect with a single person. Of course, she is Diane Lane, and I obviously am not. Also, the photo used for her profile was her high school photo, and that makes a big difference. As I wrote before, a woman’s desirability online peaks at 21. At 26, women have more online pursuers than men. By 48, men have twice as many online pursuers as women.

What started out as a sort of a leap into the future or maybe even just a fun dating game has fizzled into . . . nothing. One or two men did manage to tear themselves away from their motorcycles long enough to send impersonal replies, another two or three approached me and begged for my phone number and email address first thing as if they thought I were so desperate that I would pass out such information like pretzels at a singles bar. Such tactics might even work — apparently, a lot of people think the computers on the sites have more insight than they do, or the members are so psyched to go out that they go on a date with the first person who makes any sort of move.

I’m used to meeting people online who live on the other side of the mountains, the other side of the country, even the other side of the world, and it is a bit disconcerting to think I am making myself known to locals. Sometimes I wonder if anyone would recognize me if they saw me on the street, but I don’t think they would. So far, I’ve managed to remain invisible, both online and off.

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Posted in culture, internet, relationships. Tags: computer dating, computer matches, Diane Lane, Must Love Dogs online dating, online dating, Sneakers and online dating. 9 Comments »

Why I Signed Up for an Online Dating Site

January 8, 2014 — Pat Bertram

I never thought I’d join an online dating site. I’m not particularly interesting in dating, and I don’t really care if I never fall in love again, but I would like to have friends. The sad truth is, after a certain age, meeting people is difficult, especially if you’d like to make friends with someone approximately your own age and with approximately your level of fitness. It isn’t necessary to be with someone your own age, of course, but it is nice to be with someone who has the same general memories you do. (What the heck does an old man talk about with a much younger woman, or an old woman with a young man? But maybe talking isn’t the point . . .) And it’s nice to be able to do things together. So often, one of a couple is active and the other inactive, which adds an extra bit of frustration to the relationship. For example, if one person wants to go out dancing and the other wants to just loll around watching television, they either compromise, grow apart, or never grow close in the first place.

When you’re young, people your own age are everywhere. If you attend a big state college, for example, you live in a world of tens of thousands of people about your own age, the vast majority of whom are not married. Everywhere you go, you see people your own age, talk to people your own age, connect with people your own age, bump into people your own age, make friends with people your own age, meet potential mates your own age.

And then all of a sudden one day decades later, you wake up to find yourself in a world where no one is your age. Ever since the death of my life mate/soul mate, I’ve met a lot of people in a grief support group, the Sierra Club, yoga and exercise classes. Guess how many people approximately my age I’ve met during the past four years. 4. That’s it. 4. Three women, one man. If you forget the chronological age and just go by relative fitness age — people who can walk, move without a lot of pain, have relatively few physical limitations — that number is also 4, just a different 4. All women.

My life mate/soul mate died relatively young, leaving me in a strange twilight world. Most people my age are married and married people generally do things as a couple and are friends with other couples. Guess how many people of any age or gender I’ve met who I can call up on the spur of the moment and ask to meet me for lunch (or whatever). 0. Even those who aren’t married are in committed relationships or are taking care of an aged parent or young grandchildren. Many have jobs, as would I if I weren’t here to look after my father.

I’m not interested in dating for the purposes of mating. Nor am I playing the dating game to find love. But I do not intend to be a hermit the rest of my life, and the way the society is set currently set up, unless I go out and actively search for people to be friends with, I am doomed to a life of aloneness.

I’m extremely personable, able to talk to or listen to anyone in just about any circumstances, and I have a radiant smile. And yet, despite my various physical activities, social events, and familial obligations, I spend most of my time alone or online. It would be nice to meet someone I can call up late at night when I am most lonely and just say hi.

Actually, I’m even getting used to the aloneness and loneliness, which is a good thing. Even though I have joined three dating sites (one paid and two free) I have yet to make a connection with anyone. (Which seems strange to me, considering how many friends I have made online over the years.)

I don’t know what the answer is for me or anyone in my position. If I could, I’d go home to my life mate/soul mate, but that is not an option, so I can only go forward, and in this cyber age, online dating sites, with all their limitations, seem to be the way to go.

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Posted in culture, internet, relationships. Tags: joining an online dating site, making friends in mid life, meeting people your own age, searching for friends, why online dating. 6 Comments »

Alternatives to Online Dating Sites

January 7, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Ever since I mentioned that I signed up for an online dating site, people have been suggesting alternative ways to meet people. Apparently, despite all the wonderful stories we hear about two people meeting on one of those sites and living happily ever after (well, at least happily ever after up until now), a lot of women have terrible experiences, such as the woman who agreed to go out with a guy who looked good online and communicated well in messages but showed up for the date in pajamas. Yikes.

To make sure I don’t lose this list, I thought I’d post it here. Feel free to use any of the suggestions or add tips of your own.

1. Hikes with the Sierra Club. When I heard that the local Sierra Club did a group walk three nights a week, I knew that was for me! I’ve met a lot of wonderful people on the walk — all that adrenaline and endorphins make this an easy way of getting to know people. I’ve even made some good friends.

2. Bird walks with the local Audubon. A friend suggested this, and she said that for some reason the bird watchers (in more than one locality) have been the friendliest and funniest of all groups.

3. Trips with a local astronomy club to look at the stars.

4. Follow your interests. Join clubs or do volunteer work in fields that interest you, such as Habitat for Humanity, museums, garden clubs, book clubs.

5. Join a local dance club.

6. Use http://www.MeetUp.com to activities and groups in your vicinity. There are discussion groups of all kinds, dance groups, special interest groups, and just for fun groups.

7. Participate in church and church activities

8. Take classes at community colleges — art, music, acting.

9. Join a local theater groups.

10. Join a gym.

11. Do yoga or Tai Chi.

12. Take a pottery class.

13. Go to a donut shop every morning and talk to five people.

14. High tea. I’ve never heard of other towns doing this, but where I’m staying they have coffee, tea and cookies once a month at the town hall. (Cookies and tea is not exactly a high tea, but I suppose anything in the high desert can be considered “high.”) I have it on my calendar to attend this month.

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