I lost Clove to death on Friday, 13 January 2012.  He was my perfect cat, a confirmed pedigreed Siamese with perfect confirmation....hence being called my "perfect" cat.  He was less than perfect in most every other way...his nickname was "the evil cat," or the "bad boy."

Clove was born on 8 September 2004 and I brought him home on Halloween 2004.  He was born in Holland, Michigan and my friend Angie went with me to pick him up from his cattery...he was just 8 weeks old when I got him and he cried every mile between Holland and Lansing, Michigan, horrible, howling cries, when Angie couldn't stand it any longer and then she held him the rest of the way to Flushing...he instantly loved her and purred the rest of the way home.  Two things you always noticed about Clove, outside of his ill-behaving ways:  his purr (so loud you could hear it a few feet away from him), and his cry (the annoying sound could be heard on the second floor of the house and Clove was in the basement).

When I say that Clove was ill-behaving, I utter the truth, but he had a way of daring you with his Siamese blue eyes to not be captivated by him in spite of his poor manners.  (He loved to jump on the counter, sleep on chairs,steal my mother's jewelry--he loved bling...the list goes on and on of his daily terrors).

One time when I was taking a nap, on a hot spring day, he woke me up by jumping off the kitchen counter continually with a loud jump every time near where I was sleeping until I was so angry that he wouldn't let me sleep that I got up and watched him jump back up on the counter and look out the kitchen window and I was about to wring his scrawny Siamese neck when I heard crackling noises and smelled smoke out the window.  I forgot about yelling at Mr. Bad and went outside the house to see the fence on fire!  I was able to put out a fire that my neighbor set (lighting a propane grill with lighter fluid on a windy day).

Another time when I fell down the stairs into the basement and my legs were all twisted at queer angles on the stairs, Clove came to sit beside me until I could compose myself and unbend my crooked legs.  Other times if I cried he would come by me and hunker down beside me until I was calm again...

I still miss him and Cinnamin has become more attached to me in Clove's absence.  My "perfect" cat was a bad cat but with a large, comforting presence.

Childhood memories....

I was looking at some origami that a friend of mine (Jenny Jones) had made for me above and recall with great sentimentality that Jenny would make these for me!

I have loved origami for years, going back to 1969 or 1970 when I was 9 years old, or nearly so,  At this time, my mother and father played host for the Imlay City Lions Club to a gentleman (Mr. Miyahari) from Japan who was a member of the Lions Club in his Japanese hometown.

Mr. Miyahari stayed with us for a weekend perhaps.  I had the flu when he was with us and he was very concerned for me and he made me a purple origami lily.  I was enchanted with this paper flower.

My grandmother Dorothea Tellis took this origami lily away from me very shortly after Mr. Miyahari left.  She thought I wouldn't take care of it and she took it from me.  She kept it for over 20 years...it wasn't until 1992 when we were cleaning out her house for selling that I  took the orgami lily back.  She never knew that at age 31 I retrieved a gift to me from a far-away friend and I wonder that I waited  23 years to get the courage to take it back.  My grandmother abused my mother and her sibblings as she did most of her grandchildren...she was a emotionally-starved person and couldn't accept love without conditions...I never kissed her butt so I knew the venom of her words from an early age...however, when she died on New Year's Day 1996 I was bereft and cried and cried.  Life sucks sometimes...I loved her and she scarred my memories with the things she has done to me as a child.  I have moved on, and I forgive her.  :)

Today the tears flowed thinking about Dad

I am still mouring Dad dying 6 months ago.  Today the memories are more alive to me about Dad than the 13 years he spent in the nursing home from 1997 to March 2010 when he died. 

Mom came to work and ate lunch with me.  We talked about Dad and I cried and cried.  Dad wasn't perfect, he was a human being with complex thoughts and at times did some pretty foolish things.  But Dad was a loving, kind man, he looked for the good in everyone and he was seldom disappointed in his love for everyone.

When Dad went into the nursing home in Marlette in October 1997, after being severely disabled from brain tumor surgery.  In a way I shut off my emotions about him living there, living half a life there (to me), gone were the times I could just talk to Dad on any number of times we loved to discuss, history, world affairs, reading...

So I put away from myself that Dad was disabled and not as he was before the brain tumor manifested itself.  I would see Dad and love Dad but it was like my father was a beloved child, not the complex, thought-stirring man who guided me in my ways of thought and knowledge.

Dad suffered three times before he died in March.  He suffered the brain tumor which disabled him,  he suffered prostate cancer and endured radiation therapy which made that prostate tumor go away, and then he had pancreatic cancer which took his life in nine months.
I miss Dad more now than I did when he lived 13 years in Marlette.  I am awash with the memories of  dad's part in my life.  Sunday School, Band trips, my sisters' weddings, working 6 years with you...our many talks we had while I was his secretary and supposed to be doing his clerical work and we'd run down history lane discussing Uncle Herbert in World War I, Sir Winston Churchill and his patriotic speeches during the beginning days of World War II, my own interest in Eleanor of Aquitaine...whereever I wanted to go in talking history, Dad was right there with me just as interested.

Above all things, Dad was about love.  Love for mom and us his daughters, and then the grandchilden...Dad expressed love in his smile, his handshakes and his bear-hugs.  "You know I love you?"  Dad always asked me...and I so miss this love today.

A great stir about voting...

My dad always said to me to consider someone else I might not like by "putting myself in their shoes."  Dad was using a saying of Jesus on his Sermon on the Mount  found in the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew's version of the phrase can be found in Matthew 5:41 which states that "If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles." NIV

My dad, from this saying, however evolved from Jesus above, was trying to have me begin to understand that if you walked in someone else's shoes you might not so easily judge, or condemn. I don't always live with this philosophy but I try to see someone else different from me as a unique human being, and if I don't, then I should, I don't want to condemn anyone for being different than me.

I voted early this morning and fucked up my ballot.  So the stupid ballot counter started beeping and as I couldn't exit the building, the door was stuck fast, the oldsters (see I'm judging, sorry!), the people who run the polling stations, got me to come back and vote, yep, sure enough I didn't listen and fucked up the ballot pretty good.  Oh joy.

Making the donuts...

I went in to work today as a sub, dishing out the donuts for three hours.  For some foolish reason, I believed I would be in browsing and the department would be quiet and I could do stuff to while away the time, but no, people needed 40+ cds placed on reserve with their library card, and while I did this the people continued to talk to me.  I learned something in this incident, you can't reserve 40+ things on your library card, the system will only allow 30 items and by the time I discovered this, Mr. Yackety-Yack had moved on to other parts of the library.

I'm in a funk and have been for some time.  Is it all the combination of having cancer two years and going through surgical menopause via hysterectomy, watching my father die, and having friends leave and move away, in addition to the fact that the library millage might not be passed by the voters?  I suspect all of the above.

I subbed today and earned $48.00, and after the subbing I went shopping and spent $55.00.  Total results of today I'm more in the red than I was in the black yesterday being pay day.  I did get some lovely garnet earrings at  Oliver T's in Grand Blanc.  It's all about the jewelry.

A name change...what does it mean?

I just changed the name of this blog.  It started out being a narrative about Colin Firth and my two Siamese cats:  Cinnamin and Clove, but a few months ago, my father, James Warren Brooks died, and this blog changed to reflect the grieving I was going through (and still experience).  Colin Firth became a forgotten entity on this blog.  Sorry handsome bloke!  (Give me some better movies to watch!!)

I hope to start blogging again.  The content could just be on anything.  I'm in a transition since August 2008 when I had a Uterine  Sarcoma and during this transitional period, other transitions insert themselves and I'm in a bloody fix, treading water fractiously, looking for some point of land on the horizon to swim to.

Life, perhaps, is all about transition.  I am pretty much in a stir these days.

nothing much in particular

What a mess I am...I reread these posts on Dad and I start blubbering up all over again.  Didn't I just write earlier that I was having a difficult time remembering memories of Dad.  All I have to do is look at these posts here and the waterworks begin again.  By the way, I'm a terrible writer off-the-cuff.  There are so many mistakes in these posts, missing words, or misspelled words.  But you will never see that I am confused about your, and you're, or they're, there, and their.

Dad never had this problem either, he knew the English language inside and out, remembering everything from his public school days in Elmodel.  It probably helps that he was a teacher for three years also.  Today I took Mom to the airport so she can join my sister Jennifer where she lives. The passing of Dad has permitted Mom to travel and not worry about him back in Marlette, but now she doesn't have him to call every day. 

There's no real blessing in Dad's death, except that he doesn't suffer anymore.