Twinkle's butterfly

I was sure I had blogged about this, long ago, back when it happened, but it seems I didn't. I went looking for it, and I'm really sad I didn't record it when it happened, because it was sublime and I owed it to my future self to get it down.

It happened in the weeks after Twinkle died. It was early in November, and I went out on one of my little photo walks. This one wasn't far. Not all that far from where I live, the Don Valley Parkway crosses York Mills Road. What's now the DVP/Hwy 404 between Lawrence and Steeles Avenues was, till the 1960s and 1970s Woodbine Avenue (and still is, north of Steeles). South of York Mills it was just a little dirt road that died on the heights and never made it down to Lawrence. There are still little hints of it, and I tried to get to one of them on the east side of the DVP just north of York Mills Road, but I couldn't. Fenced off. So I started back.

A monarch butterfly caught my eye and I watched it land in the middle of the strange interchange between York Mills and the DVP. I can't remember now whether it landed in the middle of a lane, or on the line between lanes, but it was someplace generally safe from the tires. I stood there for, I don't know, maybe five minutes, waiting for it, urging it, to take off. But it just sat there. Lights would change. Cars would charge. I kept fearing the worst, but it was never run over. Finally I couldn't take it anymore, and between lights, I went out, picked it up gently, and set it down on the grass on the far side of the sidewalk. I have no idea what happened next. Odds are, it was already dying. But I did what I could.

The butterfly reminded me of Twinkle... her strong tortie banding, black and orange; not subtle like Bonnie's was. I had to stand there watching Twinkle in the middle of her road. There was too much traffic, and urging her was all I could do. But this I could fix. This was in my power to set right, and I did. I can't believe it's taken a year and a half to write about it.

Mixed feelings on the mayor

I was going to start off with a Bob and Doug McKenzie joke about Mayor Rob Ford and his brother, city councilor Doug Ford, but someone at Toronto Life magazine beat me to it...

I'm not sure how I feel about all this... the whole sordid "maybe the Mayor smoked crack and made racist and homophobic comments in the company of two druggies who subsequently got shot, one of them fatally" thing.

I've never been a fan of Rob Ford. I'm stunned a city this cosmopolitan, educated, and buttoned-down (yes, in spite of it all, still) could ever vote a guy like that into office. I think he's loud, arrogant, doesn't think beyond the next sound bite, and grew up spoiled by rich parents. Toronto is one of the major cities of North America and not inconsequential internationally, and it needs a serious, full-time mayor. This one spends as much of his time as possible ducking out of council meetings he finds boring to coach a high school football team or stick "Ford for Mayor" magnets on the cars in the City Hall parking lot, and when he's not doing that, he's in court... defamation: defendant, litigant; conflict of interest... on and on. Now this.

My feelings are complicated. He's an embarrassment. I'd like someone else to be mayor. It's not just that I don't like his policies—some of them I do, actually—it's that it's pretty clear he doesn't have the judgement to be the mayor of a city. He's making Toronto look bad. Staffers are being fired or quitting on a daily basis. There are rumours of email deletions and actual warnings to the Mayor not to undertake that. The Premier of Ontario is having to look into the municipal acts to see what options the province might have, should it come to that. It's getting to be like Toronto's own mini Watergate.

But I don't want to believe it. This video hasn't actually surfaced, and as much of goof as I feel Rob Ford to be, I don't want to believe he's that venal or stupid. And I even find myself beginning to resent the way the media have gone after him; particularly The Toronto Star. There's reporting, and then there's vendetta, and The Star has crossed a professional line in my eyes and demeaned itself. I expect this kind of thing from The Sun and its pin-up page. Even The Globe and Mail chooses now to spring a story, supposedly 18 months in the making, that the Mayor's brother Doug, now a city councilor, dealt hash in the 1980s. It's looking less about the dignity of Toronto and its elected offices and more about "getting" the Ford family, and I don't care for that angle.

I want Ford to lose an election, fair and square, to a more progressive and responsible candidate. I don't want him hounded or, worse, torn from office and made into a martyr for the right wing. And speaking of them, aren't they supposed to be the stand-up, do-what's-right, law-and-order people? These are supposed to be the kind of people who'd say "oh, you were are a party in 1975 where someone had a joint in their pocket? Sorry, you can't be my mayor. How could I ever trust your judgement?" But no, his support remains solid in much of the suburbs. I guess if a guy cuts your taxes, hey, that's all that really matters. Apparently their civic pride ends in their wallets.

I don't know how it will play out, but if the Mayor comes through this, it's going to tarnish him, his office, and the city. I think, though, in the course of the next few weeks, he'll bow to the inevitable and resign, and let his crown of thorns become a halo to the right wing. We'll see.

Milestone

I've been blogging now since a couple of months after Jody died back in 2004. Getting on for nine years now. I used to blog just about everything... Nova Scotian comedian Ron James made a joke about blog entries. "I just washed my hair and now I'm eatin' chips!" Well, I was never that bad, but I did post a lot early on. Then it trailed off. It's picked up again a bit this year, and I just noticed this morning that I had 40 entries for May. I checked, and it's official: more postings this month than any other. If I wanted a tribute to Bonnie, I guess that might be it.

And this is 41.

Ask me if Ikea... :)

When I was shopping at Ikea on Sunday I was surprised to find them advertising, of all things, their Swedish meatballs, when there was a minor flap recently that they'd shipped some that were actually horse meat. (Yes, I know, some people don't care; but a lot of people do.) I thought it might be funny to 'shop in a new slogan for them. :)

Remembrances

Last week I bought a glass display table at Ikea and on Friday Larry helped me assemble it. Since then, I've added an LED lamp and a 15" digital picture frame that changes photos of my lost cats, Jody, and Georgette once an hour. Sunday afternoon I moved the urns and photos over, and I put the frame up on Monday evening. Larry brought me the LED bulbs last night and now it's pretty much complete.

Yesterday when after I got home the photo rotated to this one of Bonnie, taken around the time Jenny died, I think. At 15" it was virtually life-sized. I would have thought that would bring me down, but it didn't. It was very nearly like having her around again, in a casual, hey-how-you-doing, I-acknowledge-you-without-much-fuss kind of way. I'm glad now I got the frame. I think it's going to be important in re-enforcing my memories of how Bonnie and Max, in particular, looked an acted. Neither one has been gone even a year yet.

The naming of the cats

I've noted here a number of times that I've never in my life named a cat or dog and had the name stick. But I've given them tons of nicknames, though.

I thought I'd listed the nicknames for the cats over the years, but it seems I really only did it for Max. I can't find references to the others anywhere on here. This was just going to be an update for the new ones, but I think I owe it to be nauseating about them all.

Cat's name: Jenny
Nicknames
Jennifer
Refinnej ["Jennifer" backwards; supplied by Michelle one evening]
Gentlefur
Violin Voice


Cat's name: Bonnie
Nicknames
Pumpkin (Punkin)
Pumpkin Girl (Punkin Girl)
Pumpkin Bum (Punkin Bum)
Pumpkin Niceness
Pumpkinny (Punkinny)
Pumpkinny-Wumpkinny (Punkinny-Wunkinny) [this comes from an episode of Blackadder and is really the basis for all the pumpkin references]
Bon
Bon Bon
Little Girl ("Are you bein' my girl? Who's being my girl?")


Cat's name: Max
Nicknames
Wee Fellah/The Wee Fellah
Wee (Maxy-Wee)
Weasel
Wheezy
Squeezy
Squeezle
Squeeze
Squeezicus
Squeezicus Rex
Squeezicus Max/Maxicus
Squeezorama
Squeezetastic


Cat's name: Twinkle
Nicknames
Twinkly
Twinkly-Dinkly [Twinkle, unfortunately, didn't live with me long enough to have been encumbered with a long list of foolish nicknames.]


Cat's name: Ally
Nicknames
Alison
Alison James [play on "Alice in Chains"]
Alligator
Gator
Alberta
Albertasaurus
Sweetie
Sweetie-Sweetie
Little One [of her, Max, and Bonnie, she was by far the lightest until Bonnie really started shedding her weight this winter; she was and is a third or a quarter the weight of Seth]
Little Little One


Cat's name: Seth
Nicknames
Sethy
Sethy-Wethy
Sethticus
Sethticus Giganticus
Big Fella/The Big Fellah
Use the Scratching Post, Not the Carpet, You Idiot; What's Wrong with You? It's Right There! [unofficial]

This love was mine

This was recorded exactly seven years ago today, as it turns out... May 28, 2006, in the spare room of the place where we used to live. It's also the room where Jenny died in her sleep, August 15, 2002.

Look at all the silent meows I'm getting from Bonnie! I can't believe it. I've never gotten even one from another cat yet, so far as I know. Just her.

Still Yellow... still

I listened to Yellow by Coldplay for the first time in several years this afternoon. I'm delighted it remains one of the most beautiful and moving songs in the world. Letting its lyrics fall like tears is the closest I come to devotion. It makes me want to believe in a God like that.

Time to leave the song alone for a while. As I've said here before, I never want that song to become ordinary for me, or lose its power to move me to tears. It's a treasure having a song that can do that for me and I don't want to squander it.

I've expressed my feelings on the song a few times now, and I'm amazed that nearly a decade after I first heard the song, it still has the same power it did then, and six years later, and eight years later. I'm astonished to note that the second post about it was written exactly three years ago today.

Bonnie, home for good

When was the last "normal" day with the three cats I bought with me here? I look back at a comment that Twinkle hadn't been herself since the previous Tuesday. I seem to recall associating noticing she wasn't well with my dad's birthday. If that's so, Sept. 27, 2011, was our last (apparently) normal day together, the four of us. One by one they've gone. Now of us four, there's only me.

Bonnie returned home today, in a way. About 12:30 this afternoon I took the elevator down to meet the doctor in the lobby. She handed me a blue box, the third such box I've received since October, 2011. This one contained a ceramic pawprint and an urn that holds all that remains of my little Pumpkin Girl. We spoke for about ten minutes, near the conclusion of which, a man of retirement age came in, spotted my shirt, and interrupted us with "HMCS Haida?" Threw the vet and I both for a loop. The man went on to revealed he'd served on the ship, the last of its class remaining and now a floating federal museum, in the early 1960s, including the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a strange moment of deep sorrow splashed with a quirky happy coincidence.

Larry had the day off and he was upstairs in my living room. I brought what was left of my sweet Bonnie back home. In the elevator, alone for a moment, I hugged the box and was finally moved to tears. I had Bonnie back. Not the way I would ever have wanted, but... she was back.

So we put on a movie, Almost Famous, and with a few belts of maple-flavoured Crown Royal in Diet Pepsi, we set to work assembling the glass cabinet I bought Wednesday night as a newer, more fitting home for the cats and human whose remains I've gathered in the past 11 years. We built it in the living room over about half a hour or so, and moved it to the dining room where the bookshelves were till a few months ago. I haven't moved everything over yet. I think that's for tomorrow. For tonight, Bonnie is resting on the top shelf of the armoire in the dining room, at the far right side, along with Jody, Jenny, Twinkle, and Max.

I hope that's as many of these things as I'll have for a while.

Incidentally, and I mention this just in passing for future reference, this afternoon Larry also helped me assemble the bed frame that I got from Bolt, though that took only about five minutes. So, for the first time in at least I year, I have a bed properly off the floor again. In a way, I'm glad I the bed was lower. It made it much easier for Bonnie, and she never had an issue getting onto the bed. I remember just before Jenny died, she couldn't manage it anymore, and wanting her to feel normal again, I put her up onto it. She immediately decided she wanted down, and before I could catch her and help her, she awkwardly threw herself off and into the wall. At least Bonnie never suffered that indignity.

Due diligence

So... this is about the last of it. Bonnie comes home tomorrow, as such.

Not counting everything in between, it cost about ten times as much to say good-bye to her as it did to say hello, all those years ago. But at least there was hello, and every wonderful, loving moment in between.

Oakville to North York

Driving back from Oakville Monday night.

Loops

Every morning it's the smell of this place. It really is like breathing in the bitter, acrid scent of Twinkle's death over and over. It adds a bitter edge to every time I come here, because it's uniformly disturbing even without that association, but the fact is, it has it.

They do a trial period for working from home to make sure it goes smoothly. I'm thinking of setting a date for mid-July. It's when I'm kind of thinking of getting a kitten. Maybe I shouldn't, though. I'm going to have to paint the place at least, and two cats is enough to deal with trying to show the place. I'll have to think about it.

This morning I can't stop dwelling on Bonnie's last moments. Sense of betrayal, even though analytically I know we were really down to no realistic options. Extend her life; let her life to the end with some dignity. Pick one. It wasn't going to be both. But I invited a lady to come over and end her life. Me. I chose that. Obviously I didn't do it to save money. I did it to save her from dying by inches... which, I have to face it now, she had been, for weeks. Months. But no matter how I try to wrestle with it, it still doesn't sit right.

What I remember was how hard it was just to get that first needle into her. There was almost nowhere for it to go, and so it was hard. And I remember she raised her head and protested, gently but clearly. And it was as clear as if she's spoken English. "Ow, come on. Not another damn needle. I've had enough of those in the past month. Give me a break." And it was, really, pretty much the last thing she ever did. She relaxed again, drifted off into a sleep so deep even squeezing her paw didn't stir her, and then came the other needle.

I kind of wish that had been as quick as with Max. But with Bonnie, she lived about another five minutes, though I couldn't see her breathing. With Max, it was over. There wasn't time for me to sit there, second-guessing myself. With Bonnie, there was. All the while, there was this sad, pleading little voice inside my head, urging me, She's still alive... maybe they can still reverse this. Maybe you can still have her tomorrow. There's still time. Say something.

But louder, firmer... Tomorrow? Another day where, for whatever reason, she can't even drink water? And clearly, hasn't been eating, even at night when you can't see her? Who was I kidding? Just myself. Tomorrow is another day of hunger and diminishment, and now the torture of a thirst she can't slake. No, this is the right thing to do, and it has to be now. Tough it out...

I still don't have her ashes back. And it feels like the longer that takes, the harder it's going to be when I do get them. I'm trying to make plans for a new glass case for the now ponderous collection of the loved and lost, human and feline, I'm sharing my home with. They now outnumber the living. But I suppose in general that's always been true.

Victoria Daze

A lot of things in my life have pivoted around Victoria Day, or thereabouts. I moved out on my own in May; thirteen years later to the day, Bonnie died. I took possession of the place I'm living in now in May. Drove a car by myself alone for the first time in May (long ago!). Did... something else... for the first time in May. :) Ahem. (Again, long ago.)

Last night as I sat up there watching local folks send up fireworks all over the neighbourhood, I wondered if maybe I might be watching the next set from a different home. I suppose it's up to me. If I want to make that happen, I'm pretty sure I can. The primary obstacles seem to be lethargy on my part and unrealistic expectations. If I accept what I can do, and then push the first domino over, it'll happen.

So we've just come through another Victoria Day weekend, which is the unofficial "official" start to summer in Canada. It was a pretty busy one for me.

Saturday P-Doug had these tickets to an unusual sort of outing... a gathering of urban food trucks... y'know, chip wagons... on the Peller Estates winery in Niagara Region. So it it was this odd conjunction of sampling some of Ontario's prize-winning Niagara wines along with trucks that were selling wood-fired pizza and fish and chips. P-Doug and I had a few samples of white wines interspersed with trying a rubbed chicken sandwich and chicken tikka masala over chips (first curry I ever had, about 15 years ago now, was over chips). We were there about two hours. Parking was across the road and just about a kilometer away. The walk there and back, decorated with flurries of dandelion fluffy, did us good, P-Doug said.

I should point out the the first stop, however, was a huge book warehouse we've been to before. It used to be a yard for repairing steam locomotives, I'm told. I picked up a couple of puzzle books for my dad, and for myself, an excellent book about B&W digital photography (tricks on wringing great monochrome shots out of colour images), and autobiographies of William Shatner and Michael Moore. From there, it was off to Peller Estates and the ring of chip wagons. :)

After that we drifted north up the Niagara Parkway along the river toward Fort Erie. Eventually we passed the Falls... funny, there was a time that would have locked my attention but this time it was just a few casual glances. Well, it's not the same passing it in a car with it 100' away and 300 people blocking the view as it is getting up and there and barely having the nerve to step up the the retaining wall.

We got to Fort Erie and drove down a street even I remembered, with a Chinese restaurant on it that we've frequented a few times over the years. He and I didn't go there this time; he was looking for a corner store to get something to drink. A bottled water and a couple of small ice cream cones later we were back on the road. Toronto saw us having the baked wings and carrot sticks at the Three Monkeys. Nice capper.

Sunday it was my turn to go pick him up. I got him about 12:15 and we headed west to Dig's place for a BBQ. Bolt asked if I could pick him up on my way through Oakville. The traffic on the Queen Elizabeth Way that had been so clear on Saturday was a mess on Sunday; sheer volume of traffic, no accidents. We left the highway at Winston Churchill Blvd. and took Upper Middle Road across Oakville, but there was no avoiding getting back on the QEW to head to Dig's. It was slow going but it was moving as we crossed Burlington. I took the exit to the 403 for a couple of reasons. One was that I wanted to drop in on my folks for a couple of minutes to drop off the books for my dad. The other was that with the traffic still grinding on the QEW, it looked like the fastest way to get to Dig's was to take the expressways up the Mountain and back down to Stony Creek. And that's what we did. We arrived at about 2:30, which was over two hours after I got rolling.

Everybody who was invited eventually showed up. It was Dig and his missus, and me and P-Doug and Bolt, and eventually Larry dropped in. Burgers and sausages. Lots of conversation over five hours or so. Did everyone some good, I think.

After that we stopped in at Bolt's "new" place and hot tubbed in the back yard for a couple of hours. It's nice when the warm weather has finally gotten rolling but it was still chattering teeth time getting out around quarter after ten. Drove back to Toronto, dropped P-Doug off, went home, hit the hay.

Yesterday, Victoria Day, I'd promised to come back and help Bolt move some of the last of the significant furniture from his parents' place, which sold in April. We threw some stuff out in the bin in the driveway, but mostly moved and/or disassembled wardrobes and bureaus he wanted to keep. The wardrobe was the biggest hoot, oh yeah. Taking the doors and the back off it, getting it up out of the basement, getting it into the back of his pickup... all the while his sister was there, distracting him about who should keep what little nick-knack. For once, instead of standing around like a lump, I was proactive and kept moving whatever I could manage on my own, without being asked to... just using my head. I'm kind of proud of that; it's kind of a new feature in my character in recent years and I'm trying to cultivate it. Anyway, the fun started when we got it back to his new place. He wanted it upstairs. But the stairs, and their walls and ceilings, all got together on the first landing and said "nope.". Getting it to the point it got stuck wasn't too hard... but getting it unstuck, well... that was a different story. Eventually he had to get a screwdriver and loosen one of the sides just so we could get it back down off the stairs. He was pretty disheartened and on the verge of taking it back to dump it in the bin and just keeping the mirrored doors as wall decorations, but I reminded him of its stated sentimental value and he took my advice and we just put it aside in the back yard till he could get his new place in order and figure out what, if anything, he wanted to do with it. In pretty short order he was making plans for using it to store the robes he wants to get for his hot tubbing guests.

A couple more trips back and forth saw us move another bureau and a bookshelf his father had inherited from the U of T where he was an engineering professor. The wood was stamped T. Eaton and Co., which means it was manufactured by Eaton's, a long time ago. These days, that alone marks it as a piece of Canadian history.

Though it wasn't my intention, I came out of it a little ahead, too. First of all, Bolt paid for lunch, which was chicken shawarma at a place he frequents for lunch. I also got a rake and a spade he was throwing out with an eye to our recent project of improving P-Doug's back yard. And I got the queen size bed support rails he was about to get rid of (he only wanted the Mennonite-carved headboard), to replace the ones I threw out about a year ago. Having a bed that's not on the floor like a hippie flophouse, I think, will slightly improve how my place shows when I get around to putting it on the market.

After that we went to Philthy McNasty's for supper, which was fajitas but with a new twist I got to introduce Bolt to. Bolt was diagnosed with diabetes last fall and I have to say he's taken it seriously. He's lost something like 20-30 pounds since then, and he's pretty scrupulous about watching his sugars. I can't remember where it was now... ah, yes, now I can; The Occasions Restaurant in the Beaches, I think... where they serve something like fajitas but instead of using tortillas, they bring you half a head of lettuce and you just wrap everything in the leaves. It's a nice, crunchy change and since there's not much to lettuce, it was a good replacement for the flour in tortillas. We talked the restaurant into cutting a head of lettuce in two for us and ate the chicken fajitas on that instead. Bolt was pleased and he's armed with a new idea for enjoying something he likes without the down side.

I got home about 9 and dumped the bed rails beside the bed. I'll have to see about assembling them sometime this week. I'll see if I can get Larry's help with that. But anyway, that was the weekend that was. Busy busy busy. Which kind of kept my mind off the fact that it's been two weeks now since Bonnie died; two weeks since I was just planning to get her stitches out on Tuesday and had to make that long-dreaded decision on Monday instead. It kind of reminds me of Linus's observation to Charlie Brown at the end of A Boy Named Charlie Brown after he's narrowly lost a national spelling bee competition: "But did you notice something, Charlie Brown? The world didn't come to an end." Well, I guess it did for Bonnie. But I, and the rest of the world, are still here, and we have to keep chugging, at least for a while yet, and this weekend past, I did.

Summer On Four Paws

I noticed this a few days ago on Flickr. It's from November, 2005, as winter was setting in, and it must have been among the first things I put up. I'd pretty much forgotten about it. It's nice to know I already had this kind of regard for her long before we were even half way through our journey together.

Summer On Four Paws, originally uploaded by Lone Primate.

Summer On Four Paws

Awake, asleep, alike

Morning light squeezes through the blinds, spread fine across the ceiling

Her purring is the sunlight on my neck;
The brushing of her tail over my arm,
the aimless spring breeze

At my arm, the whispered promise
of warmth and life reborn
to a land where water's sharp as glass:

She is summer,
sleeping close by.

Pinning pictures

I have an email pen pal in Australia, and I was trying to go through photos last night to show him pictures of the people I'm talking about in emails to him. But the computer was slow and cranky and I gave up... not before noticing I took an astonishing number of photos of my cats over the years. Good for me.

It surprises me that Max and Bonnie really did look different when they were younger. They were more wide-eyed and didn't quite have the edge that they took on. They don't look quite like themselves, back ten or eleven years ago. If I may say so, I think Bonnie grew noticeably prettier, and Max took on a rugged, handsome air he didn't quite have at first. I wonder if I'll think the same of Ally and Seth someday.

Anyway, I mentioned here last week how I used to get into grudge matches with Bonnie over her ancient habit of peeing on my bed, and how after one bout, I went out and got her a silver and amber pendant as a gesture of apology and a reminder to myself whenever I looked at her from then on. I happened across photos of her from July, 2003 where it doesn't look like she has it, and then a handful from August 4 that seem to make a point, in some shots, of showing it. Thanks to those photos, I have a pretty good idea when I got it for her. I knew it was in the summer, and I knew it was on a weekend. August 4, 2003 was a Monday. So it's a good bet that I made that gesture August 2 or 3. Bonnie wore that pendant for the rest of her life, nearly ten more years. Right now it's on her last collar, sitting on the shelf by the ashes of Jody, Jenny, Twinkle, and Max, waiting for her return.

The one thing I can say about this photographic hobby and how I've held onto pretty much every photo I've taken since 2003 is that if I'm willing to put in the time to go look, I can usually use those photos to pin down dates and give a context to my life in the past 10 years or more that I would otherwise probably have lost to the murk of fallible memory.

Coming and going

I've said I'm not eager to work from home, but given that I don't work here with anyone, it hardly seems any different.

One thing I won't miss is the smell. Let me set the stage here.

I started working here, in this office, less than 48 hours after Twinkle died. I'd been working from home while our office was transitioned. My stuff had been sitting here about a week. But with her gone, there was really no more reason to work from home. It was more or less at that time, too, that I decided to hell with the bus. Why spend more money than I would on gas to stand around waiting, brave the cold, sometimes not get a seat, leave myself without the ability to run little errands at lunch time or on the way home, and spend more of my life getting to and from work? So, that morning, I drove in. I was one of the first people on the floor. I had no idea where my desk was and I slightly scared a woman working on the floor when I suddenly appeared, asking about a seating map. I found my spot, shared with a 2' concrete pillar. I had to open a box and start putting things together there in the dark at 6:30 in the morning, late in October. More than anything at that moment I wanted not to have to be alone with my thoughts, but I was. It would be most of an hour before I could even get the laptop up and going.

But the thing that really caught me, and remains the thing that brings me right back to that dismal moment every morning when I walk in here, is the smell. Swear to God, it's like the maintenance staff comes up here at 3 in the morning, unwraps a fresh Barbie doll, and sets its hair on fire. In some places it verges on nauseating. And every morning, that's the smell of that morning walking in here after watching Twinkle gasping for breath in her litter box, dying. Besides the constant association, whatever it is, it can't be healthy. That's one thing I won't miss in working from home, anyway.

Booze power

Here in Ontario, the provincial government holds an essential monopoly on the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages other than beer (which is a private monopoly), via the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, generally known as the LCBO. The first long weekend of the short Canadian summer is coming up... Victoria Day, also known as "May-Two-Four", both because Victoria Day, always the third Monday in May, buzzes around and sometimes falls on that day, and because "a two-four" is local slang for a case of 24 bottles of beer. It's the weekend that the cottages open up, you see.

The union to which LCBO workers belong has chosen this moment to strike. Odds are, at midnight tonight, they will be going on strike. The radio stations are telling us to expect long line-ups as people stock up in advance of the province going dry (at least for wine and liquor) till who-knows-when.

I do drink again; after taking two years off, I decided to start enjoying beer when I go out again. But I'm not keeping it around the house, so I'm not really inconvenienced by this all that much. I have a strange relationship with unions... I'm pro-collective bargaining; I think it's an important feature of a democratic society and the only real hedge we still have against the rich simply siphoning off every drop. But I hate strikes! I hate the inconveniences. The disruptions. So I was kind of miffed when I heard about this, in the abstract.

Recently, though, I heard the practicalities of it. There are a lot of people working for the LCBO part time. Many of them took the jobs in the understanding that, shortly, they'd be full time. Some people have languished in part time positions at the LCBO for years. The issues of the strike seem to be job security and putting more of the current workers on full time. I think these are laudable goals. I stand behind them.

Every time some politician or right-wing newspaper wonk gets on his soap box and recommends selling the LCBO off to the private sector... like one of his big business buddies, say... we hear the same old song about how the LCBO is actually a money-spinner for the province, bringing in billions of dollars in revenue every year. Okay, fine. We pay slightly higher prices and have no competition, but we have two advantages: a wide variety of items since the LCBO is one of the world's largest single buyers of wines and spirits, and the revenue stays in the province and goes into the till. So I say, if we're making good money off of it, let's put some of it into giving the people keeping the lights on and the shelves stocked a decent wage and standard of living. In my mind, any good business should accomplish that before anything else.

What you keep

Look at this.

What you're looking at is a daily reminder of my grandmother. Hard to believe, right? A bit silly. When she died way back in 1989, and we went to Montreal to help clean out her apartment, this happened to be something I picked up simply out of practical need. And for some reason, I've had it ever since. It's been in bedrooms, bathrooms, and five or six different offices and desks in the past almost 24 years. I've had it more than half my life. The original lens cleaner in it is long, long gone, replaced by Windex and then more actual lens cleaner.

It's amazing that this is what her life comes down to, for her grandson. The only other thing of hers I know for sure I have is a letter from the British Ministry of Defense that summarizes her father's service record, which told me just enough that I was able to work out which regiment he was in, and that he died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. That, and the opportunity to acquire Irish citizenship by foreign birth registration, which I did back in 2002. (Which reminds me; I really need to get around to renewing my passport; it lapsed over a year ago now. Had that in the works when Twinkle got sick.)

I really don't have anything else of hers that shows who she was, what she cared about, what she took an interest in. I was just getting to know her as a person, rather than as a grandmother, when she died, and I've always regretted we didn't have a few more years. She was the last of my grandparents. With her, that generation passed in my family.

You'd look at this bottle and just see it as one more incidental nick-knack in the jumble of pens and paperclips here on my desk. You'd never know the bottle is anything special. Without me to provide the context, it's not. It's kind of sobering when you think about it that way. Unless you're someone hugely famous, your life and its meaning is given context by the people who know you and care about you. And after them, we're lost in the pond as the newer, stronger ripples supersede us.

The internet's still a relatively new thing in human society and sometimes I wonder if this blog will long survive me if I just leave it up, and if anyone decades or centuries after I'm gone will ever come across it and take a passing interest in it. It strikes me that that would be rather a deeper personal legacy than my grandparents were able to leave behind, anyway.

Coming to more grips

There was something I realized I forgot to mention this morning in terms of coping with losing Bonnie, and that is that almost immediately, literally within an hour or two of her death, I was being tasked by Dig and his wife with a way to take control of the debt that's been on my back since Twinkle became sick. Suddenly, in all that despair, there was light, a way, a path. Something constructive to take my mind off what had just happened and been going on for weeks, months. I had a project and I grabbed it with both hands. I suppose finding a new place to call home is a part of that. That's going to be strange... surrendering the place Bonnie lived in and breathed her last, and never seeing it again. But on the other hand, never having to see it again, not being forced by my circumstances to glance to my left and see, a foot away, the place she died, every day.

I've talked about how I held up when I faced Bonnie's illness and, finally, having to spare her from suffering by ending her life. Those were, in some ways, practical matters. There was emotion in them, of course; I can tell you right now that if the doctors had said, "yes, we can lick this and she'll have another two good years, but you'll have to come up with another five thousand dollars," I'd have done it without flinching. Even ten thousand dollars. She meant more to me than just the meaner living paying that debt off implies. But over top of it all were the clinic, sensible decisions I was making, without getting balled up about the money. It's not trivial, and obviously it worries me, but I felt it was the right thing to do. But what's got me scared now is when her ashes come back. When there's nothing I can do for her, and everything she was is gone and all that's left is some dust hidden inside something about the size of a coconut in my hands, and that lively, loving girl is set on the wardrobe shelf to sit and collect dust forever... when there's no clinical, hopeful, or morally necessary decision to be made that will stiffen my spine, I wonder then. Will I cry at last? Or close my eyes, sigh, and accept this too?

At this point, I'm honestly not sure which I'd rather. But there'll come a moment when I'll feel both, and I'll have to force that river down one channel or the other.

Zap!

Crop of a frame capture from the dash cam on the 401 eastbound on my way to the car dealership this morning.