Pat Bertram's Blog, page 32

Simple Arithmetic

I purchased a few items at the grocery store this morning. The bill came to $9.56. I had the coins plus a ten-dollar bill and seven ones. Not wanting that fistful of one-dollar bills, I gave the young clerk $14.56. She counted the money, then stared at me for a second before counting the money again. She kept the change and the ten and tried to give me back the ones because the ten was enough. I just smiled at her and told her to key in the amount I gave her as payment. When the $5.00 in change popped up, her eyes got big. She said, “I see what you did.”

I gave my stock response to such transactions, “Hard going in but easy coming out.”

It’s amazing that to me that people can’t do these kinds of calculations any more. It’s automatic for me, but obviously not for others.

I’m lucky, I suppose that simple arithmetic has always been easy. For example, adding $19.99 and $17.56 takes no mental effort. It’s obviously $37.55. Add a penny to the $19.99 to get $20.00. Subtract a penny from $17.56 to get $17.55. It’s easy, then, to add $20.00 and $17.55. Well, easy for me, even today. It was a lot easier decades ago when my mind was still blessed with the rapid synapses of youthful neurons.

I’d read once that educators had noticed some students being able to do such simple addition almost without thinking, and so they created common core math to even the playing field. Actually, that is not a good metaphor. When it comes to athletics, they still favor those with talent, but when it comes to mental exercise, they seem to want everyone to have the same advantages. Not that I blame them. Everyone should be able to do simple arithmetic in their heads without resorting to pen and paper, fingers, or calculators.

Like most others who had the benefit of learning plain old arithmetic and memorizing the times tables, I was appalled at what seemed an unnecessary complication to learning when they changed the curriculum so drastically, though their rationale made sense. When I looked up common core math to see what it actually was, however, I couldn’t understand it at all. So maybe that was what they wanted? Not to give the arithmetically unblessed a step up, but to bring the others a step down?

Not that it matters. I’m just glad my brain works well enough so that I don’t have any trouble counting out money at the grocery store. If they can’t figure it out on their end, well, that’s what the cash register is for.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Cheers!

Today was a day for celebration. I received flowers from my employers.

And a goodie-filled celebration station from my sister.

I also received a special gift for my house — the replacement greengage plum trees arrived today, and I have a commitment from my contractor to get them planted as soon as possible. I feel good about these trees. March 7th seems to be a lucky day for me. After all, this is the anniversary of the day I closed on my house, and for sure, that was a lucky day! So I have every expectation of these trees doing well.

While March 27th, the anniversary of Jeff’s death, is a day for me to reflect on the vagaries of life, March 7th is a day for me to celebrate the joys of life, serendipitous occasions, and unmade wishes come true.

I never wished for a house, never really even wished for a home of my own, never wanted the responsibility, and yet through a series of unlikely events such as actually finding a nice place I could afford in an area with an atmosphere that feels comfortable, here I am. It’s as if life reached inside me, pulled out a wish I’d never considered, and made it come true.

I suppose it’s fitting that the anniversaries of the two most life-changing events of my latter years occur in the same month. I’m glad this one comes first, though — I wouldn’t ever want to feel as if this house is a consolation prize for losing the love of my life. The two are separate events, and yet . . . not. Because obviously, if Jeff were still here, I wouldn’t have a house.

But that’s not a conundrum for today. Today is about celebration. And gratitude. Because I am so very grateful I have a lovely home in a nice town, with friends, a nearby library, a job. And people to help me celebrate.

Cheers!

***

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

An Exercise in Hope

I had a nice surprise today: snow! We haven’t had so much snow this winter that I’m sick of it, and anyway, it wasn’t much of a snow — just enough to cover the ground and my front ramp while leaving the sidewalks clear. But it was enough to make a day spent inside feel cozy, especially when accompanied by a book and a cup of lemony spiced tea.

More snow is expected for Thursday, along with frigid temperatures, but hopefully the intervening days will be warm enough for digging.

I’d planted three 6-foot- tall greengage plum trees at the beginning of last winter, which was supposed to be the optimum time for planting, so that’s when the nursery sent the trees. One of the trees did well, but two didn’t survive the winter, though sprouts did shoot out just above the graft mark. (I was hoping to get trees with greengage roots so the inevitable volunteers would turn the tree into a greengage forest, but I took what I could get.) I lopped off the trees just above the shoot, and one of truncated trees seems to be doing well, but still, the nursery said they’d replace both trees. (I had to pay shipping, which made those replacement trees rather expensive, but hopefully it will be worth it, especially since they won’t replace the replacement trees if there is a problem.)

They decided not to take a chance on the replacement trees not making it through the winter, so they promised to send them in March, which sounded good a year ago. Well, now it’s March. Those trees are slated to arrive tomorrow, which is why I’m hoping for decent digging weather. I can’t plant those trees by myself; even if I could dig the hole deep enough (which I can’t), I couldn’t hold the tree upright and fill in the hole at the same time. My contractor said he’d send someone to help, and I’m sure he will. Eventually.

Luckily, it will be cold enough that the trees shouldn’t come out of dormancy if they have to wait a bit. I suppose if worst comes to worst, I can do the planting myself over several days, but I doubt that will happen. I have been so patient with this contractor that generally when something is time-sensitive, he figures he owes me and he gets it done. (Oddly, these extra things he does so quickly for me are more in the line of favors since they are handyman jobs rather than typical contractor projects.)

As always, though, any gardening project is an exercise in hope. I hope the trees get here safely. I hope they get planted in time. I hope they grow. I hope they blossom. I hope someday to eat plums picked off my own trees.

A lot of hope!

But first, the snow.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Sanctioned Con Men

I came across an interesting line in a book so uninteresting I don’t even remember the title or what the story was about. I wouldn’t have remembered the line, either, except that I was so taken with it (and so untaken with the story) that I set the book aside to jot down the words: Beyond the reach of thought police and sanctioned con men . . .

What came after those few words, I don’t remember. And it doesn’t matter. Those last three words explain so much — to me, anyway — about the world we are living in.

Most of us are familiar with the thought police — we encounter it every day in places like Twitter and Facebook, where anything posted that goes beyond their “guidelines” is censored. You can still think whatever you want, but if goes against “groupthink,” then you darn well better keep it to yourself or suffer the consequences. As of right now, the only consequences are being censured by fellow users or by being put in FB jail and banned from posting anything for a certain number of days. (Unless, of course, one of their bots label your blog as spam — which is what happened to me — in which case it is banned for all time with no recourse and no possibility of a review by a real person.)

But “sanctioned con men”? That is a new one on me, though I know exactly what is meant by the term. I feel the effects of their con all the way down to my belly and sometimes back up again. The con is so insidious, few people call it a con, and yet it is. And not just con men, but also con women. I think the women are worse because they are better at portraying not just sincerity but also sympath.

In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m talking about the news we are fed on television. The sanctioned news. The “legitimate” press as it is called. The non-fake news (which is actually faker than the fakest fake news.) I’m sure it’s the same in the print news, but I haven’t seen a real newspaper in ages, and the only reason I am aware of broadcast news is that the woman I help care for likes to watch it.

Does anyone really believe they are being told the truth when they watch the news? Do they really believe they are being given a glimpse of the truth that lies in the dark underbelly of national or international politics? If so, it’s understandable because it’s hard not to believe that what we are being told is the truth when we see photos of unvaccinated people sick with The Bob; medical personnel sobbing about unnecessary deaths; cities being bombed by evil emperors; pretty and personable people telling us horrific tales with oh, so much compassion.

I’ve spent too many years of my life studying the truth behind the old headlines to believe any headline that I now read or hear. I can’t even begin to guess what is truly going on anywhere in the world, nor do I care to delve as deep as I would need to in order to find out the truth (though a few articles by alternate presses elsewhere in the world paint a different picture from what the sanctioned con men and women are portraying). All I know is that somehow, some way, we are being conned about all sorts of different things, and that current events fit someone’s agenda. Because what I learned during all those decades of study is that history doesn’t just happen. Someone (or a group of someone’s) make it happen.

I have no idea what got me on my soap opera tonight, especially since I realize few people agree with me (the best cons convince people the con is not a con), but I’m going to post this commentary about sanctioned con men anyway (nonspecific though it might be) because I spent so much time writing it that I now have no time to write something different.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Water Update

It’s been so warm here the past few days, I thought it would be a good idea to water my grass. I’m sure it needed the moisture — this has been a very dry year for us, with only a few piddly snow days — and it also gave me an excuse to spend time outside in the sun as well as reacquaint myself with my yard. A few sprouts are showing — mostly the larkspur that I’ve been trying to naturalize, which is good. What I mean is that it’s good there are a few sprouts and it’s also good that there aren’t more of them. The last frost typically comes the first week in May, so there would be plenty of time for the weather to kill off any baby plants that were so foolhardy as to show their faces. (Larkspur aren’t foolhardy, just hardy. They don’t seem to mind the cold as much as other new sprouts do.)

In other water-related news, I received my water bill yesterday, and this one is as mystifying as the pervious bill that showed a 19,000-gallon usage over my normal winter usage. When the people in the office saw that high usage, they sent the meter reader out to read the meter again. (It’s a fairly new meter, an electronic meter that was installed at the end of summer.) When he took a new reading, he said the meter was working perfectly and that there were no leaks, but the meter had already shown a usage of 3,000 gallons since the previous reading a few days before.

I called the office, of course, and they said the meters were guaranteed to work perfectly without error, and she told me I had to have an intermittent leak, like from a toilet that didn’t shut off. She wouldn’t listen when I explained that there was no problem with my plumbing, but a week later, she did send the meter reader out again. He shoveled the snow off the meter (this was right after the only real snowstorm we had all winter), took another look, and said the meter wasn’t running, which indicted there were no leaks. He had me go inside and run the water for a minute, and the meter showed a gallon usage, so he decided that meant the meter was working fine.

He suggested that someone might have stolen the water, but there was no outside tampering, no digging to get to my water pipe, and if by chance anyone had used one of my outside faucets (which I’d sealed off with insulation to keep the pipes from freezing), I would certainly have heard 20,000 gallons of water moving through my pipes. For that much water to be missing, they would have had to run the water continuously for days, and that simply had not happened.

Meantime, my contractor sent someone out to check my plumbing, and they found no leaks, no water, no anything to indicate what had happened to the more than 20,000 gallons of water that were now missing.

So nothing was done. The people in the office insisted the meter was working fine and that I must have leak. The meter reader said the meter was working fine, but there was no leak. The contractor said there was no leak, the problem was with the meter. I paid the inflated bill anyway, because the only thing worse than excess water would be no water.

So, fast forward to the latest bill.

This time, the overuse was about 3500, all of which had occurred between the time of the original reading to the time of second rereading. The last ten days of the billing period — from the second rereading to the final reading — showed my normal winter water usage of about 30 gallons a day.

Now I’m stuck without any recourse, because obviously, whatever set the meter off somehow self-corrected. My surmise is that the first subzero cold spell we had made the electronic meter go haywire, but who knows what the truth is. All I can do is hope that the meter continues to work properly and to monitor the situation in case it doesn’t.

I have taken away a lesson from all of this — if the people at the water company are not concerned about a hypothetically missing 20,000 gallons of water in a drought year, then I’m not concerned about wasting water by watering my lawn in the winter.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.

Downslope of Life

One good thing about being on the downslope of life is that after so many years of living, it’s easier to take some things in stride, such as the weather. I wasn’t able to be out in the warm afternoons the past couple of days, and yet as lovely as it would have been to go walking and enjoy the sun, I had other things I had to do. I consoled myself with thoughts of other such days because the truth is, they will come again.

First, of course, will be another spate of winter weather, and that too, is inevitable. Weather, especially weather in Colorado, is ever changing. I remember one year in my childhood when Christmas was sunny and warm enough that we were able to play outside without wearing coats or even sweaters. That Easter, it snowed, so I couldn’t wear my new Easter hat and shoes. (If I remember correctly, Easter was when I got new shoes for church. September was when I got new shoes for school, and if the old shoes still fit, they were relegated to play shoes.) Some years were like that. Other years, we were inundated with snow at Christmas and sweltering heat at Easter.

Something that doesn’t change with the years is . . . years. They keep adding up. Unlike weather, one’s age doesn’t go up and down, though health and feelings of well-being do fluctuate. But even those fluctuations are easy to take in stride because . . . well, because that’s life. That sense of the inevitability of aging seems to disappear when one is truly aged. I remember my father wondering when he will get “better.” He didn’t seem to understand that he wasn’t sick; he was old. And he wasn’t the only old elderly person I’ve encountered who had that same mindset of needing to get better; it seems quite common. (I use the seemingly redundant term “old elderly” because “elderly” covers a vast range of ages from a relatively youthful elderly age of seventy to an extremely old elderly age of close to one hundred.)

It’s hard to know, of course, what I will be like at that age, but I suppose I will lose my sense of taking things in stride and become as querulous as so many other nonagenarians.

But I’m not there yet. For now, it feels good to be able to take life as it comes, knowing that for every down there is an up and, unfortunately, for every up, there will come a down. Nothing lasts.

I remember as a child thinking that it would be eons before I ever grew up, and yet, here I am, eons beyond childhood. At least, it feels like eons. The actual number of years falls somewhat short of an eon.

Time passes.

Things change.

For now, I am grateful I can take such changes in stride and oddly, for today anyway, I am content to be on the downslope of my life.

This is an old photo because although I might figuratively be on a downslope, literally I live on flat prairie land with not a slope anywhere in sight.

***

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

Hard Things Are Hard

I came across this saying the other day: Hard things are hard. At first thought, the adage seemed redundant (as so many sayings do), but on second thought seemed right on the mark. This reminder about hard things being hard is particularly relevant when it comes to grief since many people who are in pain after the death of a loved one come to me searching for quick and easy ways to go through grief. I keep reminding people that grief is hard. And it is. There is no easy way to get through grief because hard things, like grief, are simply hard and there is no way around it.

There are some ways you can deal with intense grief to help get you through the first soul-searing minutes, hours, days — cry, scream, pound a pillow — but these things only relieve the stress of grief. (The death of a child or a spouse is the most stressful life experience, and the stress is one of the reasons that grievers have a 25% greater chance of dying from all causes than non-grievers.) They don’t relieve grief because no matter what you do, your loved one is still gone.

As grief continues, as it does, there are other things a person can do in addition to crying and screaming such as walking or attending a grief support group or saying “Yes.” Too often grievers refuse all invitations because it simply is too painful to be around people. For those who lost a spouse, it is especially painful to be around those who are still happily married. Yet if you get in the habit of saying no, the invitations stop. Chances are, some invitations would stop anyway, like those from other couples — not only do they not want to be reminded that what happened to you can happen to them, but they feel as if the situation will be too uncomfortable for everyone. It’s not a particularly nice reaction to someone else’s grief, but it is, unfortunately, a very human reaction.

Mostly, though, there’s nothing you can do but the hard thing — feel your grief. As painful as it is, grief is a process, a means of moving you from your shared life to a new life. When your life has been entwined with someone else’s, it takes time to unbraid that life and create something new. All that work is painful because although it is necessary, it is not something you want to do. It’s not something you think you can do. And yet, you do it without even knowing you are doing it.

If it were simply an emotional process, grief would be hard enough, but it’s also a physical process, a physical response to a perceived danger. You might lose your grip, your appetite, your health. Your body is flooded with adrenaline and other hormones in an effort to get you to fight or flee from the untenable situation. Brain chemistry goes haywire. You feel as if you are in a fog, numb, and totally overwhelmed because your brain simply doesn’t work. Your brain is on overload, trying to understand something that cannot be understood. So many things go wrong, making you wonder if you’re crazy, but you’re not crazy. You’re grieving. And it’s hard.

Hard things are hard. Sad to say, but really is that simple.

***

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

Changes

I’m getting over a rather severe allergy attack that kept me idle all weekend — a lot of rest punctuated by ginger-lemon tea and reading. Normally such an attack comes when I’ve let the furnace filter go too long without changing it, but that wasn’t the case this time, so I didn’t think it was the culprit. I changed it anyway. As it turned out, the filter was dark with dust, darker than normal, but I’d changed to a filter with a higher MSR (Micorparticle Performance Rating), so perhaps this filter does a better job of collecting dust than the previous one I used. Maybe, now that the filter is changed, my allergies will settle back down and give me a respite from the aggravation.

One thing I was remiss in changing is my water filter. I always let it go a couple of extra months because there is just me drinking the filtered water, and I haven’t been doing a good job of imbibing the stuff straight. I just use tap water for making tea, which I think is okay. The water here has a pretty good rating now, though once upon a time it was terrible — terrible tasting and terribly high in naturally occurring radioactive particles as well as contaminants from agricultural runoff. I hedge my bets by drinking tea with tap water, filtering the water for drinking, and occasionally buying bottled water (mostly because the bottles are easy to stow in a pocket or a purse). A water pipeline bringing water directly from the mountains has been in the works for decades, which is great, but by the time it gets all the way out here, I’ll be gone.

Since I’m talking about all the things I’ve changed today, this first day of the month, I might as well mention that I’ve changed tarot decks, too. This deck, I Tarocchi delle Stelle, is much more pleasing to me than the one I used last month. The cards have a good feel — both physically and psychically — at least compared to last month’s cards, and even though they are much larger than playing cards, I can still shuffle them without too much trouble.  The instruction booklet is written in an archaic dialect of Italian, which seems a bit ludicrous since the deck was published in 1991, but I can use the meanings I’ve collected from various sources to interpret the cards.

To my amusement, when I googled these cards trying again to see if I could find a translation of the booklet, I found a previous blog post of mine: I Tarocchi delle Stelle | Bertram’s Blog

In case you’re interested, today’s cards are the seven of wands and the king of pentacles. The seven of wands is about obstacles and overcoming opposition. The king of pentacles indicates that the way to overcoming is by being practical and methodical. (Actually, even if you’re not interested, those are still today’s cards.)

These are all the changes I’ve made today. So far, anyway. Most of the day is still to come.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of intriguing fiction and insightful works of grief.

Upcoming House Anniversary

One week from today will be the third anniversary of “wedding” my house. It seems a weird way of describing the purchase, but the house offers me much that has been missing from my life since Jeff’s death — stability, a home, comfort. It also offers safety and security, at least as much as is possible in turbulent times. Of course, it can’t offer companionship or conversation or love, though it does give me something to love and care for, which is important when one is alone and hasn’t any inclination for pets.

Because of this upcoming anniversary, I feel as if I should get the house a gift, though the house is spoiled enough as it is, with all the money I’ve lavished on it — not just a new foundation for the porch, but a basement floor, landscaping, sod, a garage, and a whole slew of minor gifts.

Still, if I think of something, I might consider getting something to honor the occasion.

The traditional third anniversary gift is leather, though there isn’t anything of leather my house and I need. Come to think of it, I can’t even remember the last leather thing I bought. I doubt there is even a single strip of leather on my shoes.

The modern third anniversary gift is glass, but even though I do have and do use things of glass, I don’t need anything beyond what I have. I wouldn’t mind another goblet to add to my collection of miscellaneous goblets, but there isn’t room in the cabinet, and besides, I seldom use stemware. My water receptacle of choice is an old glass peanut butter jar because I can put a lid on it to keep from spilling and to keep bugs out in the summer. (Too many times at night I’d reach over for the glass of water on my bedside table and miss. By the time I got out of bed and cleaned the mess, that would be the end of any chance of sleep. Even worse are the times I accidentally drank a bug a night. Eek.)

In the end, I doubt I’ll get anything to mark the occasion. After all, I celebrate this wonderful house and home every day.

I did get a present from my sister, though, which is very nice. She thought these bowls would make me smile, and they do. The house has yet to let me know what it thinks of our gift.

***

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

Beach Read

The term “beach read” was first used in 1990 as a way for publishers to market books to people going on vacation. These so-called “beach reads” have mass appeal, are not intellectually stimulating, are guaranteed not to ruin your summer vacation with unwanted — and unpleasant —- feelings or thoughts, and most of all, are easy to digest. Shortly after the term became popular, readers were inundated with novels sporting beach-themed covers and beach-themed stories, as if an entire generation of writers decided to take “beach read” literally.

It strikes me as strange that people would take a beach-themed beach book to the beach to read while at the beach. If one is at the beach, why read a book about the beach? Why not experience the beach at first hand? But then, I suppose, people who spend a lot of time at the beach get tired of the relentless tides and the incessant noise of the breaking waves and need something to divert their attention. It makes a sort of sense, then, to read about the beach because if you’re at the beach, you don’t want to be reading about backpacking in the mountains, otherwise it might confuse you about where you are and what you are doing.

I just finished such a beach read (out of desperation since I couldn’t get to the library), and what most intrigued me (and why I kept reading) is that, like so many of this genre, the story took place in the Outer Banks, with the ocean on one side and Pimlico Sound on the other. I knew the place because I’d been there — it was one the many locations I’d experienced during my cross-country trip.

There is something special about being able to place yourself in a book. When I was young, so many books were set in New York, so I knew New York better than any other city except my own native Denver. It helped that I had been to New York several times, so I knew the sound and the smell and the vibe of the place, but still, I knew so much more about the city than I could have known by real life experience. Oddly, although I knew Denver by experience, I never knew it literarily. Very few books were — and are — set in Denver; it has always been considered a literary backwash. A staple of my childhood, the Beanie Malone books by Lenora Mattingly Weber were a rare exception.

[Writing this made me remember a career day in high school when I was instrumental in bringing Weber (who lived in Denver) to speak to us about the writing life. Considering that I wasn’t blessed with self-esteem and wasn’t knowledgeable in the ways of the world — meaning I didn’t know how to do much of anything — you’d think I would remember how I did something so out of character rather than just recalling the end result, but I haven’t a clue how I got Weber there.]

Four of my books are set in Denver, though I’d never be able to use that city as a setting for any possible books in the future because it has changed so drastically since I last lived there, not just the skyline, but the ideology and politics of the place.

Despite my having spent time at various beaches on three coasts (east, west, gulf), I wouldn’t be able to write a real beach book, either, since I only know a fraction of the mood of those places, and my ignorance would be apparent. I suppose I could create a beach in my back yard — get some sand and a kiddy pool — but that certainly wouldn’t be the same.

I guess I’ll just read about beach places and remember how it felt — how I felt — when I was there.

***

What if God decided S/He didn’t like how the world turned out, and turned it over to a development company from the planet Xerxes for re-creation? Would you survive? Could you survive?

A fun book for not-so-fun times.

Click here to buy Bob, The Right Hand of God.