Pat Bertram's Blog, page 39

Wishes for You

If you don’t celebrate this day in some way, I still wish all these wonderful things for you.

If you do celebrate Christmas, then choose your preferred greeting: Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season’s Greetings, Peace and Joy, Warmest Wishes, Happy Solstice, Good Yule, Noel, Good Cheer, Good Tidings, Merry Xmas, Happy Holy Holidays, Warm Greetings, Holly Jolly Holidays, Let it Snow, Ho Ho Ho, Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noel, Mele Kalikimaka, Buon Natale, Buone Feste Natalizie, Feliz Natal, Nollaig Shona, Fröhliche Weihnachten, God Jul, Wesołych Świąt, as well as any other greeting you use to acknowledge this special day.

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

Festivities

Today was another windy day, though not as devastating as the windstorm we had a week or so ago. Still, I played it safe and stayed home except for a brief jaunt to the library before the winds got too bad. It was a treat. When my knees were acting up, I got in the habit of going to the library when I got out my car each week. It was just so much easier making the extra stop than trying to wield a satchel-full of books as well as a walking stick. But today I took a chance on walking, and it all worked out well. Even better, I got plenty of books to tide me over until after Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas — everyone who has come to the house the past couple of weeks has remarked on all the Christmas presents I’ve received, which made me smile. True, my coffee table is piled high with festive boxes, but almost all of them are empty. I use the gift boxes I’ve collected over the years to store my lights and ornaments, so after the tree is up and decorated, I don’t have to find a place to store the boxes. I just leave them out in plain sight. (If I had a big tree, I’d put them under the tree, but since my trees are small, I use the coffee table.) All those seasonal boxes not only make the place look festive, but it gives me a sense of wealth seeing all those gifts, even if the “gifts” are filled with nothing but air.

And speaking of festivities — in the book I’m reading, a character mentioned May baskets, which brought forth a whole stream of memories that have been long out of mind. When I was in grade school, my mother sometimes made cupcakes that looked like May baskets for me to take to class on May Day. And oh, were they beautiful! Basically, they were just cupcakes with icing to match the pipe cleaner “handle,” and the handles were decorated with dime-store flowers. It sounds simple, but I remember she spent a lot of time making those baskets, and eventually, she had to give it up, not just because it was too time-consuming but because those tiny flowers disappeared from the stores.

In my early twenties, I again started the habit of May baskets, but I followed the original tradition of leaving the baskets on people’s doorsteps. I stopped when the husband of one of my friends threw the basket out in the street because he thought it was a bomb. This was decades ago, long before people in safe neighborhoods had to worry about such things, but his actions broke my momentum, and I never did such things again.

It does make me wonder, though, if this would be a good time and a good place to reinstitute the practice. I enjoyed making the baskets and leaving a surprise for people, and I doubt any of the people I would leave a basket for would immediately think “bomb” when they saw a basket of flowers and small gifts.

But May is a long way away. (Though at the rate time is moving, it will have come and gone before I get around to making any baskets.)

Meantime, there is Christmas to get through. I don’t imagine I’ll have any problems; in fact, I am actually looking forward to spending the day by myself, reading, playing on the computer, and eating good food. Oh, and opening the gifts I did get. I’m especially looking forward to seeing what the plant fairies and garden gnomes sent me!

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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.

Have a Good One

When I was young, clerks were taught to tell customers, “Thank you.” As a representative of the business, it was the clerk’s responsibility to let people know their patronage was appreciated. Somewhere along the way, it became the customer’s responsibility to thank the clerk for helping, though why this should be, I don’t know except that perhaps the clerks were young and had no manners, while those who shopped were a bit older and still under the influence of the etiquette they were taught.

Now, though the culture at large seems to talk more about being grateful — practicing an attitude of gratitude, as they say — people still don’t say thank you. In fact, customers have even stopped saying “thank you.”

For a while, the standard replacement for “thank you” was “have a nice day.” Then, apparently, even those trite words became too obsequious for that particular generation of clerks, and the best a customer could hope for was a pleasant rather than surly, “There you go.”

Now the standard exit comment seems to be, “Have a good one,” which irks me with its ambiguity. Have a good one what? Being too kind for my own good, I keep my mouth shut, offer a smile and say, “Same to you.” (That’s why I used to like self-checkout — I was at least guaranteed a pleasant checkout experience. Now, though, I am too lazy and too rebellious to use the self-checkout, so even when they are available, I don’t use those lanes.)

I’d worry about becoming a curmudgeonly old woman, ranting about the bad manners of the youth today, but the truth is, I am already a curmudgeon. Another truth is there is no reason to rail against the unmannerly young because few people of any age have manners.

I just googled “why don’t people have manners anymore,” and got over 200,000,000 results. Apparently, I’m not the only one noticing the lack of simple manners.

If I had to pick one of those numerous responses to explain this lack, I’d have to say it has more to do with a growing sense of entitlement rather than the decline of the family or the rise of electronic communication devices. People seem to think they don’t have to apologize to those they consider inferior to them, nor do they have to thank them, and in an entitled society, everyone thinks they are superior. (It’s one of the reasons many Americans supposedly will never penalize the rich, even the robber-baron rich, because they assume they too will be rich one day.)

Truthfully, I don’t care what the reasons for unmannerliness are. And as long as people treat me well, I don’t really care what words they use to acknowledge me. Mentioning the evolution from “thank you” to “have a good one” is more of a curiosity than a curmudgeonly outcry.

But, whatever.

Have a good one.

***

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.

Pretending

The theme of the book I finished read last night was about lies, both ancient and not so ancient, and how those lies changed people and places even decades later. A secondary theme was about what makes a home a home. It wasn’t a particularly enthralling book; in fact, the story was rather predictable.

At the end, the female character was walking down the aisle, to “her friend. Her groom. Her home.” And suddenly, I was sobbing. I hadn’t been emotionally invested in the story, so my reaction to the ending surprised me, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. It was a reminder of what I have lost and that I am alone. Even worse, that I am alone at Christmas. Jeff and I never celebrated Christmas except by default, sort of like my Jewish friends who watch movies and eat Chinese food since there’s nothing much else to do, but it’s still an emotional time of year for those of us who are alone.

I don’t have to be alone, of course. It’s my own choice not to try to shoehorn myself into other people’s family gatherings despite their kind invitations, but whatever the reason, I will be alone while others are celebrating with their loved ones.

The upsurge of grief didn’t last long, not more than a few minutes, but it did make me wonder how much I’ve been lying to myself, merely pretending to be happy in my new life. I focus so much on the good things and the things I can do, such as having a house and friends, creating a home and a garden, and that focus blocks out the unpleasant truths, such as Jeff being dead and me being alone (and lonelier than I admit even to myself).

But those sad thoughts disappeared in the bright light of morning. Today I’m fine with no lingering aftereffects of that reminder of my loss. I also have no lingering afterthoughts about my contentment being a pretense. It might, in fact, be a pretense, like a kid playing house, but I don’t see what difference it makes. As I keep saying, what it comes down to is taking each day as it comes, being grateful for what comes, and letting go of old hopes and dreams to concentrate on creating new ones.

Which is what I am doing. There is a certain amount of pretense to hoping, dreaming, and recreating a life for oneself, and that pretense is what helps bring forth the reality. So if I am pretending, it’s all to the good.

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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.

Happy End of the Creeping Darkness!

The creeping darkness ended this morning at 8:58 MT. “Creeping darkness” is a phrase I created, so unless you read this blog, it’s a term you probably haven’t heard of before. The correct term, of course, is “winter solstice.”

For the past six months, ever since the summer solstice, darkness has been creeping into our days and stealing our light. Today we have reached the end. Tomorrow the light begins to grow, but only in the northern hemisphere. Down under, they begin a time of creeping darkness.

“Solstice” comes from two Latin words, sol meaning “sun” and sistere meaning “stationary” because on this day, in the northern hemisphere, the sun seems to stand still, as if garnering it’s strength to fight back the darkness.

Technically, the winter solstice marks the moment when there is a 23.5-degree tilt in Earth’s axis and the North Pole is at its furthest point from the sun — from here on, the days will get longer, gaining us an additional 6 and 1/2 hours of sunlight per day by June 21st when the days begin to get shorter again. (This is reversed in the southern hemisphere, so today those down under will be celebrating their summer solstice.)

Though neo-pagans have claimed the solstice for their own, this is one of those natural holidays (holy days) that we all should be celebrating. The end of the lengthening nights. The triumph of light over darkness. We don’t even need the metaphors of light=good and dark=bad to find reason to celebrate this day. It’s simply a day of stillness, of hope. A day to give thanks for the promise that even in our darkest hour, light will return.

My celebration will be simple. I turned on my bowls of light and toasted the sun when the morning clouds drifted away and showed me Sol’s shining face.

Whatever hemisphere you live in, I wish you a day filled with light and lightness of being.

***

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.

More Truth and Secrets

Yesterday I pondered a saying I’d read, that the truth of a person lies in her secrets. I wasn’t, and still am not, convinced of the truth of that particular sentiment. For one thing, I think we are more than whatever secrets we might have, and for another, I’m not sure if we ever can know the truth of a person, whether our self or someone else.

I do know that what we secretly value tells us more about us than our secrets. For many of us, our secret values are the same as our overt values, the results of which anyone can see. In my case, this blog attests to my valuing truth, honesty, integrity, good writing, friendship, home.

For others, the values they brag about are at odds with what they secretly value. Some politicians are a good example of this. They are revered for their public service, and in fact see themselves as public servants, when what they secretly value is the power and money that accrue to them for what is so euphemistically called “service.” They do serve their constituents to the point where they can keep getting elected, but more than that, they serve those who can bring them the wealth and power they want. Public service? Baloney! If all public service were so lucrative, making these self-serving “servants” millions over the course of their tenure, we all we would be out serving the public. (The definition of “public service,” according to the Cambridge dictionary is “something necessary that is done or provided for the public without trying to make a profit,” which is the opposite of people earning millions as so-called public servants.)

The truth of us might also lie in how we view ourselves, whether that view is true or not. Again, in the example of some politicians, despite the money and power they crave and do all they can to garner more of each, they might truly see themselves — and cherish that view of themselves — as public servants, doing all they can to better the world. That what they are doing might be actually be worsening the world is ignored by even their inner voice because it does not fit with their cherished view of themselves.

All of this, of course, comes down to one of my original points in the first paragraph, that perhaps we can never know the truth of a person. Nor do I suppose it matters, except in the case of a writer constructing a character for a novel. Other than that, we deal with one another — and ourselves — the best as we can despite whatever the truth of us might be.

***

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.

Truth and Secrets

I came across an interesting quote today: The truth of a person is in her secrets. I know this is true of fiction, especially mysteries and suspense. You learn about a character from what they are willing to do to protect their secrets, and what you think they are willing to do. For example, a reader could think a particular character might be willing to kill to protect that secret, but the character would not take a life under any circumstances.

But is this true in real life? Oh, not the killing part, but the bit about the truth of a person being in her secrets. If so, I have no truth because I have no secrets. I have habits I would prefer people didn’t know about, such as an unconscious tendency to bite off hangnails, and while that might tell you more about me than I would like you to know, it’s not exactly a secret except perhaps from me. If I knew I were doing it, I wouldn’t.

I paused here to look up the definition of secret to see if there is a secret to “secret” I didn’t know that would further explain the quote, but no . . . it’s as I thought. A secret is something that is kept or meant to be kept unknown or unseen by others.

Although I might prefer the people I see regularly to know less about me than I disclose here (though surprisingly, it isn’t as uncomfortable as I thought it would be, and in fact, it’s rather nice not having to talk about the minutiae of my life since they already know it from reading my blog), nothing I write about is a secret. When I was writing about my grief, people offline did not see the same sort of grief in me that I wrote about online, but that’s just the way things were. Even if I was hurting, I generally didn’t show it when I was around people. Like every other griever, I soon learned to hide was I was feeling to protect others from having to deal with my pain as well as to protect myself from their well-meaning (and sometimes not well-meaning) platitudes, such as “You have to move on,” and “You need to get over it.”

But as for secrets? Nope. None.

Some people have accused me of being secretive, confusing secretive with reticent, but the truth is that not everyone deserves to know everything about anyone. There needs to be boundaries, and people who try to look beyond the boundaries aren’t necessarily looking for the truth but are simply being nosy.

I do generally answer direct questions, mostly because I am not as devious as I should be and so don’t lie, nor have I ever learned to graciously deflect questions, but I tend to resent probing questions, and it shows. I don’t ask such questions, either, which becomes a problem when I am talking with someone who thinks that probing questions is how one converses. These people generally don’t want to wait until I volunteer information, which I will when it come up naturally in a conversation without the resentment I feel in an “interrogation.” And they feel belittled because they think I don’t care enough about them to ask them questions.

(Jeff and I were both of the “ask no personal questions” school, and yet over the years, we learned almost everything there was to know about each other, the information coming out in myriad conversations.}

This essay has devolved into a discussion of various means of conversing rather than the topic of the truth being in the secrets, but I suppose the two are opposites sides of the same coin. If you don’t divulge personal information, the other person sees secrets rather than reticence.

But it still doesn’t answer the question about the validity of the quote: the truth of a person in is her secrets. I don’t think it can be true except in the case of someone who is nosy enough to want to invade a person’s privacy. The truth of us might be in our most secret self, but that self is for us to know, not for general consumption.

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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.

Knowing and Not Knowing

We generally know what we know, and sometimes we even know what we don’t know — or at least we feel there is something we don’t know. This second feeling gives rise to conspiracy theories because we know that there’s more to many news stories, for example, than we are being told.

But we can’t know what we don’t know that we don’t know. Or maybe I mean we can’t know that we don’t know what we don’t know. An example of this is grief. I thought I knew what grief was, and I thought I knew that there was more to grief than I knew, but there was no way I could have ever known the truth about the epic grief after the loss of a life mate/soul mate. How could I? I didn’t know that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Only those who experience it can know the truth of it. Until you’ve been there, you don’t even know there is such a feeling even when people tell you there is.

This is also true of mundane things. For example, I am reading a book about the blue people of Kentucky.

What? Blue people? Yes, there were such people. I didn’t know about them, and it shocked me to realize that I hadn’t known that I didn’t know, but it shouldn’t have shocked me. How could I have known such a thing if I didn’t know it? It’s not as if blue (Blue Man Group aside) is a color we associate with humans on a regular basis. Oh, there is that whole blue blood thing, but that’s different than skin color. Supposedly the phrase originated with the Spanish — the purebred Spanish were white skinned, and so the blue of their veins was easily visible, but as they intermarried with the Moors, those hybrids had a darker skin and so their veins weren’t as visible.

On the other hand, the blue people of Kentucky actually were blue, though it wasn’t a skin condition. Rather, it was a rare hereditary blood disorder called methemoglobinemia inherited through a recessive gene from both parents. Their blood was blue due to a lack of oxygen in the hemoglobin. In the 1960s, doctors discovered that a commonly used dye called methylene blue could donate a free electron to the methemoglobin so it could bond with oxygen.

The blue people of Kentucky weren’t the only blue people — some isolated Inuit communities in Alaska were also blue. And there must have been others because the two people who were responsible for the blue folk of Kentucky were not blue themselves — the man was a French orphan, the woman a red-haired, pale white American, but both had the recessive gene.

Which makes me wonder if there really were blue blooded royals in ancient Spain, and that the story of their veins showing through their pale skin was simply that — a story.

All this brings me back to the whole thing about not being able to know what we don’t know that we don’t know. There are a lot of things I don’t know, but I know I don’t know them such as fractals or string theory. But since I can’t know what I don’t know that I don’t know, how could I ever learn about things I don’t even know exist? I suppose it comes down to the simple truth that I don’t need to know such things, and if I do need to know them, I will either be forced into the knowing, such as with grief, or stumble upon the knowing, such as with the blue-skinned people.

Either way, from your standpoint, it’s probably not worth your time trying to untangle these thoughts. It’s enough to know what we know and know what we don’t know without going further into the mental maze than that.

***

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.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Because of various Bob-related issues around town, I haven’t been working much lately, which has been nice. I like having my time to myself to do what I wish (and even what I don’t wish but need to get done).

Sometime during the next couple of weeks, things should settle down enough that we (my fellow caregiver and our client) can get back to our regular schedule, which will also be nice because the extra company is good for me and the extra money helps pay for a few frivolities, such as groceries and grass (the lawn kind, not the erstwhile illegal kind). Still, I’m okay with whatever might happen. Over the past decade or so, I’ve learned to be resilient enough to take whatever comes my way, though I do reserve the right to whine a bit if I feel it.

In two weeks and a day, we start a new year. I’ve never been particularly excited about a new year since basically all it means is a clean calendar and learning to put a different year on the few checks I write. Even worse, we carry our old selves into the new year, so despite all our resolutions (or lack of resolutions), the old year folds into the new one without a hitch. For some reason, though, perhaps because of uncertainties The Bob is still causing, I am looking forward to this new year with a bit of hope, as if it is actually something new.

For sure, it’s a new month, one that will bring me closer to spring and spring flowers to brighten my day. It will also bring my closer to another “elder” birthday, but that’s not a problem. The actual number of years don’t matter, of course, though what all those years have done to me does. I can still do almost everything I want to, but I am slower, and I find myself tilting forward when I stand or walk. It takes a concerted effort to remember to roll my shoulders back and stand up straight, but I can still do that, which is good. (In his old age, my father tilted forward when he walked, too, and I always wondered why. Perhaps our sense of equilibrium goes out of whack like so much else.)

The other thing that the new year will bring is an end to my 100-day blogging challenge, though that won’t be the end of the daily blogging. Although sometimes it’s hard to come up with something to say, it’s still a good exercise for me, so I will continue at least until I reach the 1000-day mark. (183 more days.) Or not. Life itself is a continual challenge, and we never quite know what each day will bring, but if everything goes as planned, I’ll be here every day until the middle of June.

Meantime, there’s the rest of today to enjoy, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

***

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.

Lazy Days

Yesterday was a lazy day for me. The winds were so strong, I barely made it to my mailbox. There was no way I could water the grass or take a walk or any other outside activity. And because of those gale force winds, I was too unsettled to do much of anything, so I spent the day reading and playing games on the computer.

Gale force winds is not a figure of speech. Gale force is 34 to 40 miles per hour, and I’m sure the winds were at least that strong. In a nearby town, the wind was clocked at 107 mph, though luckily, we were well below that number. Still, the winds wreaked a considerable amount of damage, so today was anything but a lazy day.

When I went out to water my grass, I was shocked to see the lawn covered with leaves. I have no idea where all those leaves came from because I made sure that there were no leaves on the nearby trees when I did my final raking — or rather, what I thought was my final raking. Before I turned on my hoses, I had to rake up all those leaves. It was so not a job I was prepared to do, yet I did it. I also had to gather shingles that had rained in my yard from the roof of my neighbor’s garage, and I’ll probably have more to do tomorrow since I only dealt with the largest pieces today.

I should be grateful (and I am!) that those were the only two problems I had from the wind. Other people spent the day clearing out the downed tree branches and getting estimates from roofers. I had to call someone, too, though not for me. A neighbor of the people whose house I am looking after called someone who called someone who called someone who called me to tell me that shingles had blown off the roof. (Come to think of it, next time I see that neighbor, I should give her my phone number so she could call me directly.) So I called my contractor who went out to take a look at the damage.

If that wasn’t enough for one day, I still had to go to the library to return books that were due and to get gas for my car. Now that inclement weather is popping up, I don’t like my tank to get too low in case of emergencies. Nor do I like the idea of running out of books to read. I’m sure I did a few other chores, though I can’t think of any offhand. Not that it matters — what’s done is done, right? (Obviously not, or I wouldn’t be sitting here listing all the things I did today.)

Considering the dryness and the winds, I’m glad I haven’t yet planted my wildflower seeds — they would have ended up all over the neighborhood and come spring, I’d have wondered why I didn’t get a single flower out of the bunch. I’ve been waiting for the first snow before planting, which helps glue the seeds to the ground, but I might have to make alternate plans, such as waiting for a week when the highs are only in the forties, and those weeks are coming. Around here, so I’ve been told, February is the coldest month, and this area is noted for its late snows. Besides, I’ve had enough to do without worrying about those seeds.

Tomorrow might be another lazy day, and if not tomorrow, then Saturday. The best I can say about the weekend forecast is brrrrr.

***

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.