Saturday's shopping experience was different than our usual Friday-designated day for picking up the groceries we require to see us through the week. The supermarket where I generally shop was packed with shoppers, a situation I'd never before witnessed, not to the extent that it presented itself, with even shopping carts being in short supply, let alone parking spaces.

My husband, as usual, waited for me in the car, since our little dog pines when he's left on his own at home, and we will not leave him alone in the car. That occasion of quiet rest gives my husband the opportunity to look through the daily newspapers.

I usually become so engrossed in the shopping process that I barely look about me, to notice other shoppers. Three-quarters of the way through the aisles this Saturday, I happened to glance up and saw a young girl struggling to place her younger sister in the seat of one of those shopping carts equipped with more robust seats meant to properly seat and secure young children. I swiftly assessed the situation, and left my cart to offer to help.

There were four little girls of East Indian extraction. Typical long black glossy braids, bright inquisitively intelligent eyes, and beautiful beyond belief in their freshness and innocent sweetness. The oldest appeared to be around ten or eleven, the second-oldest around eight, the third I judged to be about 6. All the little girls were slender and appeared tall for their age. The mother, in contrast was neither slender nor tall. I had the impression she was slightly shorter than me, at five feet. She wore a Muslim scarf, the little girls wore frilly dresses.

The mother of these children looked young enough to be their (much) older sister, not their mother. And she obviously had her hands full, holding in her arms the very youngest who looked about a year-and-a-half old, the image of her older sisters. "She's heavy", the mother protested, as I bent slightly to pick up her 6-year-old whom the 12-year-old was unable to adequately lift. But she wasn't, not the least bit, and I lifted her easily and placed her in the car seat, while her two older sisters observed me quizzically.

The young mother thanked me profusely, I smiled and moved on with my food shopping. And was surprised at the sheer level of gratitude expressed yet again when the mother of the little girls approached me while I was looking through the dairy products. It was my pleasure, I told the mother, and commented appreciatively on the beauty of her children.

It had been pleasurable, the sight of those little girls and the lively family scene was touching and beautiful. And it presented no problem for me, aiding them in such a small way. I suppose it was my grey hair that had given the mother pause.

And then I paused later when, approaching the cash-out registers, one of the cashiers leaned over to speak to me as I lined my shopping cart up behind another shopper. I was unable to make out what she was saying, asked "pardon?" twice, before I could finally make out her reminder to me that I was waiting in an "express" line-up, with far too many purchases in my shopping cart.

Shopping in our immediate area has expanded exponentially, there is absolutely no category of goods or foodstuffs that is not available to us within an extremely close circuit surrounding this residential area. My husband had cautioned me yesterday morning based on his having ventured out earlier to pick up more grout to finish the tile wall he has just laid on our family room fireplace wall that the roads are packed with cars.

Still nothing prepared me for the shock of the reality when I entered the supermarket I've shopped at for the past fifteen years and more to see that the area of the large vestibule usually tight-packed with shopping carts was almost devoid of them. When I entered the store itself it was to discover that the usually-quiet shopping I indulged in there was not going to happen this time around. The densely-packed shopping crowd presented a picture of noisy pandemonium.

The store, like all other retail establishments, had been closed on Good Friday. People were obviously making up for that one day when they weren't able to shop.Which still didn't logically explain the numbers crowding the spacious aisles of this store.

There was a sign up where bananas are usually kept, to advise shoppers there were none. They had run out of their regular delivery because they had advertised them on special for Thursday at half-price, hoping no doubt to entice shoppers to attend to their food shopping a day earlier rather than a day later than they usually do. It hadn't enticed me. But it had obviously brought to the attention of those many people who have a habit of drifting from store to store to pick up advertised specials, to respond, and they obviously had.

I was thankful that this was the only product unavailable, but still felt resentful since bananas represent an important staple in our diet; we each consume one daily and it's my habit to pick up two to three large bunches once a week to see us through. There evidently were a few small bunches available prior to my arrival, for I saw in several peoples' carts mean little bunches of no more than three or four stunted bananas. At one point I saw a plastic shopping bin that appeared to have been abandoned, with a few items including four little bananas. I had to convince myself not to avail myself of them, for perhaps the bin hadn't been abandoned, simply left there while the shopper went elsewhere for a moment?

As it happened, my husband after delivering me back home to get busy unpacking the volume of food that I'd bought, ventured out briefly to another store, this one a newly opened oriental specialty store nearby where he was able to buy bananas and pick up a few other items not normally available where I shop; like snow peas from Latin America, rather than from China, which we refuse to buy.

What a refreshing breeze wafting out of one of the smallest yet most high profile states of this world. Vatican City and the Roman Catholic faithful are witnessing the transformation of the highest office of their religion. The new Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, has named himself after a humble messenger of the faith, and is himself, humble, inclusive and conciliatory.

This is a man who does not seek to portray himself as other than a servant of God. His official title may be Bishop of Rome and Vicar of Jesus Christ but he does not present himself behind a veneer of holiness. In that way resembling in some manner the populist and beloved Pope John-Paul, far less his successor the Emeritus Pope Benedict.

He appears to be busily involved with, without being unduly concerned about upsetting tradition and church convention, moving his Church closer to what the values famously attributed to a young Jewish figure of ancient times himself valued and demonstrated in his daily life. A life celebrated for thousands of years, which his worshippers have always been exhorted to emulate, but few manage.

This pope's robust humanity stands as a testament to those values.

Pope Francis waves to members of the media upon his arrival for a private audience Saturday at the Vatican

This is a man quite like most others who has no doubt battled thoughts and impulses and emotional yearnings that mystify and perhaps even dismay him as he struggles against the same base instincts that afflict all of humanity's creatures.  He chooses, it seems, not to hide behind artifice, and the protection of his office from public scrutiny.



It appears, from all the evidence presented at this early date in his investiture that he intends to serve the ordinary folk, not only within his religion but globally. To further interaction and understanding and patience within his own faith, and between other religions of the world. His outreach began the moment he took on the mantle of pope - without actually adorning himself with the traditional pomp and ceremony of the ermine-rimmed red velvet mozzetta - preferring his simple white cassock.

Only good, we hope and pray - even those not vested in belief of a divine - can come of this impending transformation.

Te Deum Ecuménico 2009 in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Santiago, Chile

Even in winter nothing seems to dampen the enthusiasm of the area's social deviants, young people who having nothing better to do with their time, wreak nasty mischief in the ravine. One mightn't imagine that these young miscreants would be enthusiastic about setting fires in the depth of winter, but obviously some view it as a challenge several seasons removed from the tinder-dry conditions of deep summer.

There was one giant pine in particular that seemed to attract their malice. There were two venerable pines side by side that intersected one of the trails at a point where it dips toward the ravine, and a bridge handily takes the trekker over to the other side. The two pines leaned outward rather than toward one another, and there was a narrow little space between them where the trail continued onward. One of the pines had suffered some natural damage at some point in its life, and it was within this barkless portion penetrating roughly several inches into the tree that area youth kept trying to light fires. Many years ago they succeeded in burning the tree at that point about a third through to its heartwood. The fire service had responded, putting out the blaze. But it wasn't the only occasion. Eventually the tree had suffered so much damage it presented as a threat to public safety, and the municipality cut the giant down. In their wisdom they also destroyed the pine beside it, and their corpses now litter an offshoot rivulet of the main ravine creek.

What remains now are the stumps of both trees, silent witness to a casual juvenile atrocity. And the young thugs haven't let that stop them. Though they continue to light fires elsewhere in our beautiful natural wooded ravine, they have returned time and again to those great stump remnants, lighting fires on them. The snow has not yet melted, there is a huge snowpack from this year's almost-record-breaking snowfall. There, the still pristine snow environment has been insulted by the presence of charred remnants of the latest fire, blackening the snow.

Ugly reminders to constant ravine users who deeply appreciate nature's gifts to us, that within any population there exists scum who see no value in anything but their disgusting idea of what constitutes pleasurable challenges.

Canada got there first, its next-door neighbour, an initial source of anxious same-sex partners aspiring to marriage-status travelling temporarily to take advantage of an opportunity to marry, is now itself grappling with the legal ramifications through the U.S. Supreme Court of extending the institution of marriage to gays.

While pondering the issue a majority of justices are now questioning the constitutionality of the Defence of Marriage Act of 1996, with a swing-vote justice, making common cause with the four liberals, questioning the definition of marriage as the union of opposite genders reflected in over one thousand American federal laws and programs.

Currently, in 2013, eleven countries -- Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden -- and a few jurisdictions in Brazil, Mexico and the United States permit same-sex couples to marry. In other countries of the world, as diverse as Colombia, Germany, Nepal, New Zealand and Taiwan, bills are pending allowing legal recognition.

France's socialist government has gone through the first phase of passing a "marriage for everyone" bill, but it has come hard up against a roadblock of a public enraged by the move, unwilling to see that legislation passed. That loud and vociferous masses of objectors prefer to maintain current laws recognizing the covenant of marriage between heterosexuals.  And the United States seems to be facing a similar polarity of views.

Progressives in Canada appear to have somehow managed, under the previous Liberal Government of Prime Minister Paul Martin, with the full support of the NDP, the news media, unions, academia and the Supreme Court of Canada, to pass legislation enshrining same-sex marriage as a right in Canada. Canadians, wedded to social fairness and urged under the concept of equality, to accept the change in status of the marriage vows between genders simply shrugged.

It appears that gays and lesbians within Canada also shrugged for the most part. They may have celebrated a victory for equality as they recognize it, but most of them seem disinterested in taking personal advantage of the same-sex marriage law. A scant 16% of Canadian couples who are gay have chosen to avail themselves of this enfranchisement, this legal change in fortune for the gay community.

Symbolic of popular culture, norms have been turned on their heads in the instance of gay marriage recognition. Civil unions which legally entitled gay couples to claim all the benefits accruing to married couples just didn't seem to satisfy the demands of newly societally and legally empowered gays.

Their victimhood status within societies which had so long oppressed them seems to have spurred them to a kind of juvenile pay-back. Society has meekly accepted the accusation of its shame in the past treatment of homosexuals. Which, needless to say, represented a legitimate issue of shameful acknowledgement, while the surrender of an entirely different social more was completely unnecessary.

If the institution of marriage was withheld from them, and maintained solely for the beatification of heterosexual couples, excluding homosexual couples, it was a manifest instance of blatant discrimination and as such intolerable. An ancient custom and tradition of formalizing the institution of marriage for the sake of stability in families benefiting offspring suddenly sprang a huge, unstoppable leak.

Adoptions within gay marriage followed a similar trajectory, with gays making the claim that children raised and nurtured by two loving same-sex partners, whether they termed themselves husband and wife, wife and wife or husband and husband, were far better off than within traditional, dysfunctional families. A rather broad smear, but one that worked to their advantage.

Human intimacy and emotions, human interaction between people are unpredictable and forever hopeful. There are some cultural-social issues that have stood the test of time and proven themselves sufficiently reliable as to be inviolable to change, despite social activism and progressive thought.

The issues of "marriage", "identity", "rights", "equality" and the opportunity to twist and manipulate public guilt to accede to unreasonable demands leaves much to be desired in the sphere of social justice and equality rights.

It's a short drive from Kaye's house on Wildflower Drive to ours. She had spoken with me yesterday to say she would be out on some errands today, would it be convenient for her to drop by in the morning, would it suit our schedule, around eleven?  She had parked in the driveway and gingerly made her way up the walkway which still had some rotting snow and ice on a portion of it leading to the porch. She was wearing good stout winter boots with rubber soles and heels, but at her age it's always best to exert caution. She's almost ten years older than me. She thinks this will be the last year she will volunteer for the Canadian Cancer Society's door-to-door canvass. She has been my area captain for the last decade; before her there had been others, but none as dedicated as she has been.

She always says she's in a bit of a hurry, so she prefers to stand on the porch, where I join her, before she moves on. She's never in a hurry to depart, just feels more comfortable, it seems, standing on the porch, talking. And by this time of year the protected area of the porch with the sun making its presence known, is very comfortable. Her older daughter, she tells me, the one who is a geriatric nurse, has reached retirement age. She plans to indulge herself in her favourite activity; photography. Kay has in the past gifted me with a packet of her daughter's hand-made greeting cards, beautifully shot photos, nicely assembled cards which I very much appreciated. They were her kind gesture in return for the bagsful of detective and crime novels that we have passed on to her after having been read by my husband. They are meant for the reading habit of her son-in-law, and after he reads them they're often put out in a little library maintained by a nearby nursing home.

I have accepted the door-to-door canvass kit from her. I have, this year, turned down requests from The March of Dimes, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, The Kidney Foundation, to canvass. I have determined that I need a break from canvassing, I'm thoroughly sick of doing something I detest, but know is of benefit to the greater society. I have decided to continue with just one of the medical charities, The Canadian Cancer Society. I hate going door-to-door appealing for charitable donations; for any reason, actually. Sometimes the receptions are positive, often they're decidedly not, and I find it difficult to separate my personal sensibilities from the neutrality of representing a charity.

Besides which, the street which I now confine those activities to, the one we live one, the one where I am familiar with most of its residents, has changed so much in the last few years. The original home owners have gradually dissipated, gone elsewhere because of marriage failures and family dispersals due to children maturing and leaving home, or home owners deciding to down-size, or to move to the country, or because they've grown too old and infirm to maintain a house. I now more frequently encounter new residents. Where formerly I was greeted with some degree of courtesy, on occasion I meet with suspicion and hostility, and that pains me.

This isn't an urban street of long standing. It was only created 25 years ago. And it is slowly undergoing a transformation as original owners move and new families take their place. Some of the new families are very young, some without children, some with children; some planning to fill their home with children, others not. Everyone is busy, no one likes to be disturbed by requests such as mine, to surrender a modest donation to a charitable cause, despite that it benefits a large segment of society. I know the feeling.

Kay feels that this year may be her last as a volunteer. She is truly amazing, in her determination to keep busy, maintain a useful life, and remain an integral part of the community. Perhaps in defiance of the limitations that age has placed upon her energies. She too sees the slow and steady decline of people willing to be involved. When she loses a volunteer it is difficult to find a replacement. She feels that when she does leave, there will be a gap, that no one will want to do what she has been doing for so long.

It's odd how, from time to time, we tend to do things, say things, commit to things that are complementary to what the other does, without having any intention to do so. One can suppose, in some instances, that long habituated to one another's thoughts and activities we sometimes simply adapt them to our own, without noticing that to have occurred.

It's a reasonable enough explanation in some instances, but in others the unintended collusion as it were, isn't quite as explicable. Although when we started out together our values were similar and remained intact throughout the years, our political awareness was canted in a polarizing way. Since then, we've moved slightly closer to one another's positions, but despite that, the original beliefs we have held remain to a good degree, making for some fairly interesting conversations between us. We each seem to hold our own on that front.

When we were just kids of 14, 15 and so on it was a time of fundamental discovery. Not only about the world that surrounded us, which we began to discover in a tandem, but about one another. Not only do people find it difficult to know themselves sometimes, but it is also difficult to intimately become acquainted with the perspectives that drive conclusions of another person. And, just as we tend to take ourselves and some of our emotions and reactions for granted, we tend to do the same with the individual who is closest to us in the world, in every sense, through our long experience, perception and knowledge to whatever depth it has plunged, of that person.

Our thoughts, however, are our own. We share them, or we do not. There are some thoughts that are not meant to be shared, those that might be perceived as critical without due justification, although that being the case they shouldn't be there at all. If the justification is our concern for the well-being of the other, then to voice it is to profess a lack of confidence at worst, or an overweening worry that might result in a lack of confidence evinced by the other, forestalling them from carrying on in the manner they wish to do; interfering; in effect doing harm.

On a lighter note, when we were young we used to see occasionally that couples would affect the conceit of wearing matching clothing. I always thought how attractive that was, as a statement. He always felt repelled by this outer manifestation of collaborative cuteness. So it strikes me from time to time as quite amusing when, without deliberation, each of us selects an item of clothing from our separate wardrobes which, when we are dressed, just happens to match what the other is wearing.

When it happens, it becomes a brief topic of shared amusement. As occurred this morning when he pulled on a brighter-than-aubergine shade of purple, and so, as it happened, did I, independently of his choice. He tends not to notice when this occurs, and I tend to always bring it to his attention.

This kind of incident recalled, reflects the amount of trivia of which our normal daily lives are comprised.

"Silently, with no lights on, cars kept coming, one after the other, full to bursting with baggage and furniture, prams and birdcages, packing cases and baskets of clothes, each with a mattress tied firmly to the roof. They looked like mountains of fragile scaffolding and they seemed to move without the aid of a motor, propelled by their own weight down the sloping streets to the town square. Cars filled all the roads into the square. People were jammed together like fish caught in a net, and one good tug on that net would have picked them all up and thrown them down on to some terrifying river bank."

"They look so tired, so hot!" everyone kept saying, but not one of them thought to open their doors, to invite one of these wretches inside, to welcome them into the shady bits of heaven that the refugees could glimpse behind the houses, where wooden benches nestled in arbours amid currant bushes and roses. There were just to many of them, too many weary, pale faces, dripping with sweat, too many wailing children, too many trembling lips asking "D you know where we could get a room? A bed?"... "Would you tell us where we could find a restaurant, please Madame?" It prevented the townspeople from being charitable. There was nothing human left in this miserable mob; they were like a herd of frightened animals. Their crumpled clothes, crazed faces, hoarse voices, everything bout them made them look peculiarly alike, so you couldn't tell them apart. They all made the same gestures, said the same words."

"They hadn't yet been shelled. When it happened, they didn't know what was going on at first. They heard the sound of an explosion, then another, then shouting: "Run for it! Get down! Get down on the ground!" They immediately threw themselves face down."

"The people arriving off trains would ask, "Is it an air raid?" and be told, "No, it's over", only for the faint bell to be heard again five minutes later. There was laughter. Shops were open, little girls played hopscotch on the pavement and dogs ran through the dust near the old cathedral. The Italian and German planes were ignored as they glided calmly overhead. People were used to them. Suddenly, one broke loose and swooped down at the crowd. He's going to crash, no he's going to fire, he's firing, we're finished.. The bombs had fallen on the train station and, a bit further along, on the railway tracks. The glass roof shattered and exploded outwards, wounding and killing the people in the square. Panic-stricken, some of the women threw down their babies as if they were cumbersome packages and ran. Others grabbed their children and held them so tightly they seemed to want to force them back into the womb, as if that were the only truly safe place."
Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise

Jewish refugees board the SS Mouzinho for the voyage to the United States. Among these refugees is a group of Jewish children recently rescued from internment camps in France. Lisbon, Portugal, ca. June 10, 1941.

An old manuscript, never published, was unearthed, its contents digested by a relative, then finally published seventy years after it was written painstakingly by hand, under a dire and constant threat, during the Second World War by an emigrant whose Jewish family from Ukraine had sought haven in France during the Russian Revolution, but whom the Nazi juggernaut caught up with, when the writer was deported to Auschwitz, where she died in 1942.

Irene Nemirovsky, a Sorbonne graduate, had attained some measure of fame as a novelist with her succession of novels in France. The world knows her now as the author of Suite Francaise, a moving account of the panic and fear that enveloped the French when they were forced to understand that the impossible had occurred; their defending French military had been defeated by the advance of the Axis military.

She described the suffering of ordinary civilians fleeing their fears of occupation and death, and meeting it when German and Italian warplanes flew over congested highways packed with terrified migrants, bombing and strafing, or awaiting the arrival of trains to take them further into the countryside and imagined safety, only to have them bombed, and they within the rail stations.

Reading her novelistic account of the history of the time during the Nazi invasion of France, turns the reader's mind to the dreadful suffering of the Syrian people at the present time, caught between an armed insurrection comprised of rebel forces contesting the legitimacy of the Alawite Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad whose war machine answers the challenge of those they describe as "terrorists" by aiming their deadly artillery at their own civilian populations.

That there are indeed within the forces of the rebels, jihadists whose deadly pursuit of extreme violence to be committed against all those whose brand of Islam does not match their own, and who victimize people indiscriminately for the sheer love of vicious bloodshed in the commission of their fanaticism to uphold the vision of pure Islam, is undeniable.

Humanitarian aid agencies and United Nations observers give testimony to the plight of fleeing men, women, children and the elderly and the injured from the deliberate fog of war. One million estimated to be internally displaced, and two million become refugees in bordering countries themselves fearing the overlap of hostilities that might succeed in sucking them into the vortex of war through tribal antipathies and sectarian reactions.

Syrian refugees arrive at the Turkish town of Yayladagi, where two camps have been set up   Picture: David Rose

Apart from all the other things he does, he has been engaging himself in a protocol of weight-lifting regularly for the past several years. He installed a few items downstairs in the basement area, a large room that he finished in this house about fifteen years ago, that we call his studio. It is there also that he does oil painting, although not as much of that in the last years as formerly, when he retired from the paid workforce.

This is the fourth house we have owned and lived in over our 58 years of marriage. The first was a modest little semi-attached bungalow where our three children were born. After that, when the oldest was ten we moved directly into north Toronto from Richmond Hill to a newly-built house whose design we really enjoyed, a two-story house attached through the garage to its neighbour. An employment move took us to Ottawa only two years later, when we moved into a single, detached two-story house. Each of these houses were given my husband's indelible and very individualistic signature. Soon after moving into each he finished the basements to extend them into additional living spaces for our family, and each was vastly different from the last.

In this, our last house where we have lived for the past 22 years, though our children are all long-ago out on their own and fully independent of us, since the oldest is now 52, the youngest approaching 50
we are living in the largest of our four houses. This has been a house constantly undergoing alteration from the original which itself was a design that utterly captivated us for its presence and its potential. In it we have placed a half-century-worth of collecting objects of beauty that have given us great pleasure over the years.

And in it my husband has given free vent to his carpentry, wood-working, stained-glass, ceramic/marble/strip-flooring capabilities and decorative passions, both inside and out, making this house an ongoing exercise in imaginative decor. Apart, of course, from the constant physical upkeep required for any house as it grows older, settles, and parts and areas require ameliorative attention.

He has created and he has retro-fitted and he has transformed this home of ours into a reflection of the type of interior and exterior that is classic, and that he most admires. And we have been immensely privileged to be able to do all of these things. How much longer, at his age, he will be able to continue his transformative efforts at interior decor is another story altogether.

Though halfway to 77 years of age he has once again assembled the two industrial-grade steel-and-wood scaffolds that he had the foresight to buy when we first took possession of this house with its two-story-height rooms. They sit now, one atop the other to enable him to indulge in yet another bit of fanciful work that he has undertaken. He had seen very large rectangular ceramic tiles made in Spain and entirely resembling narrow multi-layered and multi-hued bricks. And decided to apply them to the fireplace wall in our family room.

We develop our odd little habits; usually when I exit our car and collect the plastic bins in which I carry the foods we buy at the supermarket over to the car, my husband hands me a quarter. This supermarket requires a quarter of a dollar deposit for the use of their shopping carts, as a way to convince people not to walk off with the carts. It's a nuisance for shoppers who have no intention of using the carts other than what they were intended for. Yesterday we both forgot the quarter and as I entered the foyer of the store, I made to fumble about in my change purse for a quarter. I heard someone speak behind me, then the voice spoke again.

It was an elderly gentleman who had returned his cart, but instead of fitting it into the slot to have his quarter returned, he was offering the cart to me. I thanked him, placed my plastic bins into the cart, and he turned away, while I admonished him to wait a moment and I would look for a quarter. He turned back to me, smiled, said someone had given him the cart and he was simply doing the same with me; he hadn't invested a quarter and had no intention of accepting one back. Again, I thanked him and resumed my intention to begin shopping.

Before me, as always, was an abundance of shelves holding all any household might ever wish to have available in fresh foodstuffs -- colourful, appealing, fresh and affordable. Canadians pay far less for nutritious foods than people living in most other countries of the world. I bought bananas, asparagus, mandarin oranges, yellow, red, orange bell peppers, romaine lettuce, grape and cocktail tomatoes, grapes, blueberries, sweet basil, sweet potato and bok choy, mushrooms, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, and onions.

Moving away from the produce section I added cream cheese, margarine, coffee cream, old cheddar cheese, eggs, cake and pastry flour, tinned salmon, olive oil, grapefruit juice, cornstarch, tomato paste, and a host of other cooking ingredients to the growing pile collected in the shopping cart. Into it also went a bagful of chicken thighs and drumsticks to be used for chicken soup, and a large, long, narrow cut of eye of round roast, at a very modest price. A woman looking at them beside me, mentioned their size. I informed her how easily one slices such roasts into smaller pieces to be separately frozen so that for two people one of those roasts would provide for at least five separate meals, the entire roast costing $10.00.

At the check-out counter, I handed the cashier a plastic shopping bag full of cans of baked beans, boxes of macaroni and cheese, packets of dehydrated soup, tins of chunk tuna and tins of chicken, asking her to return them to the bag when they had gone through the cash register. All of the cashiers are now familiar with this request and they are more than willing to oblige me. On my way out of the supermarket, that bag of groceries is deposited into the large wired receptacle that sits on the floor with a sign reading "Ottawa Food Bank".

When we offloaded our three full plastic containers of all the food we were bringing home with us, my husband took the shopping buggy over to the outside shopping cart collection point, while I took my seat in the car with our little dog Riley to await his return. At that point, he came across an elderly infirm woman experiencing difficulty in properly placing her cart to enable her to retrieve the quarter she had earlier deposited for the use of the cart. He had aided her, and then she engaged him in conversation, as people are wont to do, so he was tardy in returning.

As we began this little regular shopping expedition, so did we end it.

It is almost a year since we lost the faithful and active companionship of our little black poodle. Even when she was blind, and losing her other faculties, she was always game to go on. With gentle guidance she was able to clamber up geological surfaces that as we ourselves grew older, gave us reason to pause to regain our breath, challenged by the physical energy expended in pursuing a lifelong love of hiking adventures.

When she was young and energetic and full of curiosity and bounce nothing could hold her back. She lived for the adventures that our constant search for absorbing new environments privileged us with. By the time she was fifteen her hearing began to go, and two years later her eyes, but her heart was strong and so was her determination. When she finally left us approaching her 20th year we felt inconsolable at her loss. The mere space of a year hasn't given us much solace, just distance.

And now that our other little companion has reached his thirteenth year, his slow-down is far more noticeable than hers ever was at the same age. He lacks the enthusiasm she had for the love of the outdoors. His preoccupation is that of, when possible, luxuriating in the rays of the sun. He doesn't welcome physical challenges, would far more prefer to simply loll about. It becomes an effort to convince him daily that a good vigorous walk in the ravine enriches all of our lives.

The theory of the unchanging brain decreed that people who were born with brain or mental limitations, or who sustained brain damage, would be limited or damaged for life. Scientists who wondered if the healthy brain might be improved or preserved through activity or mental exercise were told not to waste their time. A neurological nihilism -- a sense that treatment for many brain problems was ineffective or even unwarranted -- had taken hold, and it spread through our culture, even stunting our overall view of human nature. Since the brain could not change, human nature, which emerges from it, seemed necessarily fixed and unalterable as well.
Neuro is for "neuron", the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for "changeable, malleable, modifiable". At first many of the scientists didn't dare use the word "neuroplasticity" in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notion. Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging brain. They showed that children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often substitute; that if brain cells die, they can at times be replaced; that many "circuits and even basic reflexes that we think are hardwired are not. One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behaviour -- surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.
Norman Doidge, M.D. - The Brain that changes Itself (Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science)

At Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton, Alberta, neurosurgeons examined eight-year-old Bella Arcand's brain. They had operated on the child, cutting her brain into two; the right hemisphere cut off from its complex matrix of blood vessels and rendered inoperable, useless. They did this hoping to cure her of the rare neurological disease that had afflicted the little girl since she was diagnosed in 2011 with Rasmussen's encephalitis.

That condition made her life an absolute misery, causing epileptic seizures, cognitive deficits. Little Bella was experiencing seizures up to 50 to 60 times each day following that diagnosis, and the treatment she was receiving that proved incapable of any substantial help in controlling the effects of the condition. The medication she was taking seemed useless.  So it was decided to undertake what is called a hemispherectomy.

This radical surgical procedure on the brain was first conducted by American neurosurgeon Walter Dandy in 1923 in the treatment of an aggressive malignant brain tumour. Hemispherectomies conducted on children was initiated in the 1980s by neurosurgeon Ben Carson at The Johns Hopkins Hospital located in Baltimore, Maryland.

Bella Arcand. Photo from Facebook.

 

Experience had demonstrated that the brains of the young are extremely 'plastic' with an ability to rewire themselves, more easily than adults.  Children emerge from such surgery with intact personalities, going on typically to live normal lives, post rehabilitation.  Occupational therapy and regular rehabilitation is aiding little Bella to regain movement on the left side of her body; her brain has proven capable of taking over the responsibilities once delegated to the right hemisphere.

The "functional hemispherectomy" which she had undergone left the disabled portion of her brain remaining within her skull. As opposed to an "anatomical hemispherectomy" where the affected portion of the brain is removed, and fluids would fill up the resulting empty space. "That's been the most amazing part of all this, is learning what our brains are capable of. Particularly hers", her mother, Bev Lafond from Saskatoon, said.

"I was scared of personality change, I was scared of blood loss, I was scared of infections afterwards. I was scared of death. When you're dealing with everyday seizures and trying to do anything, I wasn't able to see very far past our day-to-day. I was scared to look at surgery."  After surgery Bella's first words to her mother -- "mom, ow".

The single mother of two young girls has been informed by the doctors that she should have no concerns respecting long-term health effects. Her child is being weaned off the medication, and behaviour that seems out of character - impulsivity - will vanish, with the drugs withdrawn. Ms Lafond believes her daughter will be able to walk 5 metres by May 5, when she hopes to return with her to their home in Saskatoon.

Damage Control

Now there's a surprise. Hard on the heels, so to speak, of a Canadian national newspaper's front-page spread of the inside story behind cancer research, trials, tribulations and hopes, aligned with the sad and sorry fact that not all that much actual progress has been made in the 'battle' against cancer, comes another story in another newspaper, part of the same chain as the first, that has the look of a paid advertisement, but doesn't state it to be that.

It is an obvious attempt at even-handedness; the first, more exhaustive story one of dashing the hopes of those afflicted with cancer and the myriads more fearing cancer within any society, calling into question the charitable and government-sourced funding of cancer research, given the less than inspiring results. Through the story that has followed -- telling another story, from the perspective of researchers, lab technicians and the continued aspiration toward discoveries that will, in the final analysis, spark the difference between holding our own against the dread disease and discovering protocols that are less invasive to the human body -- offering far more balm to the human spirit.

"It generally takes four or five laboratory technicians, students and post docs to generate a significant discovery in a two to three year time frame. Each one requires approximately $25,000 per year for supplies needed for their part of the project - so that roughly adds up to a range of $600,000 to $2- million over a two to three year period", advises Dr. David Stojdl, a scientist at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute.

"On average, the budget required to operate a research lab varies between $200,000 to half a million dollars per year. This covers staffing and lab equipment; then you need to add the cost of the cancer cells samples -- and those are about $400 for each experiment."
"We often work together in multidisciplinary teams. The unfortunate part is that many projects may not produce the results we need, especially if you're trying hard to make a major discovery. A $1-2-million investment won't necessarily guarantee success -- just a critical shot at success."

The reading public that pays attention to the results of medical-scientific discoveries - as indeed most scientific discoveries, also has an idea from factual accounts that breakthroughs are often the result of sheer serendipity -- not the results of deliberate laboratory experiments designed to find breakthrough discoveries. Not that sheer dogged persistence does not result from time to time in meaningful realizations of new techniques and protocols that will be useful in delivering new medical treatments.

The brunt of the argument is that hypotheses must be tested, and those tests are costly. It cannot be denied that research findings and the occasional true milestone like that reached through the 1920s experiments of Banting and Best and the discovery of insulin leading to the preservation and prolongation of life for people with insulin-dependent diabetes whose condition was once a certain death-sentence, has proven the efficacy of research.

Despite everything, the unstated failures, the delays in bringing the results of new discoveries to practise, the expectations dashed because of premature announcements falsely raising hope, there is a definite need to continue funding scientific medical research.

• microscopes - $15,000 to over $100,000
• sophisticated, 3-dimensional microscopes - $500,000
• centrifuges, $40,000; specialized ultra-cold freezers $10,000
• one lab technician for one year $50,000
• enough cancer cells for one experiment, inclusive of shipping, $300 to $500
• enzymes, necessary for modern molecular biology, $100 to $300
• single test tube, dime or nickel
• clinical trials or epidemiological studies, millions

Now that is a genuine horror story, one to rival the warped imagination of the most sensation-driven writer hoping to make a name for himself in a novelistic portrayal of the potential pitfalls of modern surgical medical techniques, attempting to provide hope, security and quality of life to the needy, medical-condition afflicted.

We went through the dreadful after-effects of people with haemophilia and others requiring blood transfusions, discovering themselves to be infected with HIV, with Hepatitis C and B, and a host of other infections, including human cell lymphotropic viruses. Government commissioned public medical enquiries led to the conclusion that insufficient care was taken in lab screening tests through nucleic and antibody tests, to ensure that blood commonly used for transfusions for a variety of reasons was reasonably free from the potential transmission of viruses, parasites and bacteria.

Now comes news of an infected organ donation which resulted in four transplant recipients being placed in the dreadful position of potential infection of rabies. One of the transplant recipients and the organ donor were discovered to have raccoon rabies embedded in their brain tissue; that recipient of an infected donor kidney has since died.

Florida doctors involved in the transplantation of the donor's heart, liver and kidneys had failed to test whether the 20-year-old donor was infected with anything that would prove conducive to transmission of a deadly virus. Unknown to the donor and to the doctors, was his infection with the raccoon rabies virus, discovered to be lodged in his brain tissue.

The three recipients of the young man's heart, liver and other kidney are now receiving anti-rabies vaccinations, and none has so far exhibited untoward symptoms of the rabies virus having established itself in their donated organs or elsewhere within their bodies.

"The researchers are always announcing fantastic progress and breakthroughs -- and the patients are still getting sick and dying. The people who are announcing cancer breakthroughs, I'd like them to walk through the cancer ward ... you see all these thin and kind of desperate patients."
Michael Pollak, oncologist, treatment researcher, McGill University

 Battle for the cure. Four small words and just about anyone can guess what the phrase refers to.

We know that medical scientists around the world are working on any number of experiments and research projects, hopeful that someone, some day, will discover some truly ground-breaking formulas or experience an amazing epiphany that will lead to the cure of cancer. Not that simple; cancer is what we call that mad cell-division process but it takes many different forms, attacking many parts of the body.

We live with our tightly clasped illusions, even when we permit them to delude us. Because in them lies hope. That there will be a momentous discovery that will change countless lives and allow people to live to graceful old age without suffering the scourge of cancer, that dread word that transfixes people, making them incapable -- when the word is used as a diagnosis, more like a death sentence -- of hearing, of assimilating anything else the diagnosing physician may have to say.

In research there will be a cure. More people give to cancer research than likely any other medical condition. In the U.S. the National Cancer Institute has given out close to $100-billion dollars for research funding in the 40 years of its existence. Cancer-research spending in Canada in 2009 alone was $545-million, according to the Canadian Cancer Research Alliance. Compare that to spending on cardiovascular disease, the next heart-stopping diagnosis, at $100-million.

The statistics on cancer are not warmly received anywhere. An estimated 186,000 Canadians were diagnosed in 2012, and there were 75,000 deaths in that year alone in the country from cancer. The rate of new cases per capita has risen to 456 per 100,000. Deaths stand at 50% higher than they were two decades earlier. But the mortality rate per capita has dropped to 184 per 100,000, from 243.

Attributable mostly to lifestyle change. The most significant of which is smoking cessation. Causing far fewer deadly lung cancers. "I think the most important cancer research of the 20th Century by far was the discovery of the smoking association. It wiped out one-third of cancers", said Jack Siemiaty6cki, cancer epidemiologist, University of Montreal. "It's been a very, very chaotic process of looking for cancer cures, and it's not been tremendously successful. There have been successes, but it's a modest success story."

For some patients, with some cancers, the prognosis appears far better now than four decades earlier. Childhood leukemia, once a death sentence now sees an 80% survival rate, while Hodgkin's disease is practically curable. Some major adult cancers, like breast and prostate can be treated successfully now, when caught in their early stages.

Pharmaceutical companies are driven to find treatments that will reduce malignancy and prolong life. Certainly not because they have a wish to deliver humankind from the dreadful consequences of ill fortune in having cancer to complicate one's life, but to gain further wealth from the medical misfortunes of a large proportion of any population, presenting with an assured, ongoing demographic that will require these 'miracle' drugs.

A group of oncologists at New York's Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center refused to prescribe Zaltrap for late-stage colorectal cancer because its $11,000 monthly pricetag was twice that of the older drug Avastin. And neither could claim huge success, extending survival of the afflicted by 2.4 months on average.

Friday's balmy bright weather was not sustained; by Saturday the temperature had once again plunged and the atmosphere was cruelly winter-obsessed at a time when we are all longing for further manifestations of spring on our very near horizon. We were barely able to muster any enthusiasm to get out and give our little Riley a much-needed hour or two of exercise, but we did end up finally going out for our daily ravine walk.

There are always some pleasurable moments to be grasped there, even when the ramble is undertaken grudgingly and with some discomfort. A young couple was enjoying the crisply icy out-of-doors ravine environment with a whippet, a young dog we've seen before being walked by an older woman. This time, in an acknowledgement of the bitterness of the cold, the string-lean dog was wearing a wrap-around coat to shield her from the cold. She is a frantic mass of moving muscle-and-sinew, tirelessly romping through the woods, here and there and everywhere.

Little did we imagine that later on in the course of our circuit - depositing peanuts as we proceeded as usual in the various cache-places well known to the squirrels and chipmunks (the latter whom we rarely see other than in spring and fall) and even the crows flying overhead this day - that a macabre tableau was straight ahead on the path we were pursuing.

As we approached yet another familiar point of our circuit we could see straight ahead the form of something on the path, and as we drew nearer could make out the presence of a grey squirrel. The ravine's squirrels often await us, confront us, wait for us to offer them peanuts. But not at this time of year. In the summer months, in the fall, they do this, accustomed to recognizing our purpose. In the winter months they are far less often seen, and far more skittish, not given to approaching us. So this appeared at first glance to be a delightful change.

Until finally we came abreast of the stiffly immovable little creature. Stiff and immovable because it was fast frozen to the trail. Its body erectly expectant, bushy tail curled at the tip and held high above its body. It stood there, incredibly, silent witness to its own end, for its head had been neatly removed. Death had obviously been instant, and its pose had been fast-frozen to the spot.

Had it been a winged raptor it would have been swept away through the air somewhere where its killer could horde it and consume it at its leisure. We haven't seen nor heard any owls in the ravine this winter, unlike the past five winters. The hawks that return each spring have not yet, to our knowledge, returned. The coyotes that had been known to make their winter home in the ravine the past few years don't appear to have done so this winter, though who knows?

From our own experience, many decades ago when my husband kept pigeons in a small shed in the backyard of our first house, surrounded by a mesh-wire enclosure, and the gruesome discoveries we made on several occasions of pigeons whose heads had been pulled through the wire's holes, leaving the bodies still erect on their perches, we thought it likely to have been a raccoon.

The deadly scene illustrative of nature's survivalist ethos did not endear us to her stratagems on this occasion.

I decided to bake a raspberry pie yesterday morning for evening dessert, using a package of frozen whole raspberries, thawed, and partially cooked to a thick mass with sugar and a little cornstarch before filling the pie crust. I added brandy flavouring to the raspberries as the mass cooled, then prepared the pie crust. And since I had decided to make a lattice crust, I decided also to sprinkle the interstices atop the revealed raspberries with chopped pecans for a little crunch.  It baked in my little counter-top convection oven to a crust-crisp brown, with a wonderful fragrance. After dinner my husband used whipped cream to top his portion, while I preferred it unadorned and delicious.

After the pie had baked we went out for a ravine walk, delighted that the morning's snow had sifted a white layer over the trees, covering up as well the detritus now being revealed on the melting snowpack. The creek was running full and muddy with the run-off, and crows were mobbing overhead, cawing wildly. The temperature, which had been forecasted to be almost as cold as the day before, was nothing of the kind; it turned out to be a springlike, relatively mild and beautiful day with the sky clearing occasionally to allow the sun to warm things up further.

We chanced to come across a young man who lives on the street behind ours, whom we've been acquainted with since he was about eight years old, a friend of a neighbour who lives at the top of our own street. We'd seen him through a succession of three dogs over the period of our acquaintanceship, usually his mother out walking them in their turn, and occasionally he whooping it up with his friend, running through the ravine trails -- with the dog in ecstatic freedom before them.

They now have a small and overweight little Jack Russell, the third of the succession. The young man was out walking with his girlfriend, a sweetly lovely young blonde woman accompanied by her own little dog. And that dog, dustmite-sized, was busy leaping around our feet, eager to be greeted, full of life and joy, completely captivating in its diminutive charm.  It wore a little jacquard-grey woolen sweater against the snow and the cold, its tiny hood flopping about as it leaped at our feet.

A teacup-sized Yorkie; when I lifted it briefly before it insisted on being allowed to regain its own four feet firmly on terra firma, it weighed next-to-nothing. And when, as we spoke, we saw another dog coming toward us - a very large boxer-hound mix with brindled coat, the tiny Yorkie leaped in delight toward the giant that loomed over it, unafraid, curious, delighted to greet another dog.

This two-year-old Yorkie came into the young woman's life when her 18-year-old Jack Russell whom she had loved since she was herself five years of age, finally left her.

This photograph was taken five years ago, when our little black miniature poodle was still able to get along on her own, even though by then her hearing and her vision were becoming impaired. She was then just over fourteen years old. Her physical decline and her mental confusion were yet to evidence themselves as real problems.

Our two little dogs were able to get about on their own without much in the way of supervision from us. They simply followed us as they were accustomed to doing, from their puppyhood on toward adult canine life, when they shared with us all the adventures that we set out upon, enjoying natural surroundings and appreciating the geological anomalies of nature.

Like much else in life we were unable to visualize a time when her life cycle had completed itself. Imagining life without her as a companion was simply never an issue. Human beings don't tend to dwell on the endings of things, particularly life-endings. If we did we would be completely incapacitated, incapable of going through life as normal, well-adjusted human beings. Our thoughts would take us constantly to what we imagine to be annihilation of being, of thought, of presence, of everything.

Life, brief though it is, is precious and to be appreciated day by day. And we did our utmost to ensure that we did appreciate what life offered us. Regardless of the season there was always a reason to celebrate life, to share it with loved ones, to take advantage of all opportunities to live life to the fullest. Our little Button was a dauntless explorer, curious about everything, unlike her little male toy poodle companion, who recognized adversity everywhere and had to summon up the courage to proceed; she simply forged ahead, independent and determined, though with sufficient perspicacity to foresee and avoid danger.

We speak of her often now, of the times of her life when she was bold and intrepid and always alert to occurrences that excited her interest. She had her habits and we had ours. One of which was to depend on always seeing her around, a little black, restless and fleet-footed female dog who had become a constant companion.

And then, suddenly, she was no longer there. We feel her presence at times but she is gone. Time is said to heal all wounds, it has yet to heal that wide gap left raw in our lives. We miss her dreadfully.

Michelle Obama presents the Oscar for Best Picture.(Photo: Pete Souza, White House)

That glitteringly elite and unprecedented presentation out of the White House does give the film Argo the aura of official authenticity in its portrayal of an historical event seen through the narrow prism of American superiority. But the truth is that Americans, just as much as any other nation, and perhaps more than many, is proud of exhibiting its heroes to the national stage. And, in exporting its famous cinema culture, beyond. And if outsiders find fault with that, it's their problem.

Mind, even former U.S. president Jimmy Carter during whose presidency the distinguishing episode of shameful violence against the diplomatic immunity of another country, in denial of the internationally recognized and respected Vienna convention in diplomatic relations held the film's content to be wildly inaccurate.

To quote the venerable Mr. Carter: "Ninety percent of the contributions to the ideas and the consummation of the plan was Canadian", while the film "gives almost full credit to the American CIA."

And even New Zealand felt ill-done-by through the movie's depictions of events as they occurred in 1979 when Iranian revolutionary students - cheered on by the new Islamic Revolution that came to Iran with the downfall of the Pahlevi dynasty and the arrival from exile in Paris of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini - violently attacked the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, holding 52 American mission staffers hostage for 444 days.

Canadian primary involvement in the episode by shielding six of the embassy's diplomatic staff and colluding with the Americans to give them eventual safe passage out of the country is barely acknowledged. Canada indulged in a few plaintive "but...but"s, and then did that metaphorical shrug acknowledging Hollywood as the personification of entertainment with a penchant for American glorification. As art takes its cues from what most pleases its audience, so does Hollywood too aim its content toward the bias of remunerative emollient of the box office returns. 

But Iran is having none of this. Huffing in indignation over damage done to its image -- presuming such a thing is even remotely possibly, given the strenuous efforts of the Shia theocracy itself in that direction -- Tehran is threatening to sue. The regime has retained French "anti-Zionist" lawyer Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, famous for defending the notorious Venezuelan Carlos the Jackal, for that purpose.

"We will be able to block distributors of the movie, force them to apologize and challenge them to confess that the movie is nothing but a sheer lie", courageously asserted Ms. Coutant-Peyre to the Iranian news agency Mehr. Which should amuse the international stage, and among them Iranians who have managed to smuggle into the country 'unauthorized' versions of the film on bootleg DVDs.

Strictly coincidental, the selection of two books to be read one after the other, so different on the surface in what they relate, but in both there resounds a recurring theme, an undercurrent of human emotion and human suffering, and in both, one a novel, the other a memoir, the bleak image of a child struggling within an adult psyche to overcome a father's influence. The influence of a father - actually a number of fathers within both books, whose early deaths, or casual misunderstanding of a child's emotional needs, shaped the adult that child would become, and not in positive ways.

First, there was a Governor General's award-winning novel, The Underpainter published in 1997 by Jane Urquhart, a Canadian novelist, a period piece exploring the character of an artist whose life has been impressed by his American father's turn-of-the-century mining plans for a small Ontario town, and whose travels take him repeatedly back to small towns adjacent the shores of Lakes Ontario and Superior. And how the issues and sacrifices surrounding the First World War impacted the lives of Canadians with whom he interacts, sent overseas to serve in France, returning as fragile and incapacitated human beings.

The other, the reminiscences of a still-young man who is an American war correspondent. His book, published a decade later titled Dispatches From the Edge describes a happy early childhood overlaid with the most supreme of tragedies, the death of his father when he was ten years of age, and the subsequent shattering of his world, complicated by the death by suicide of his mentally troubled older brother years afterward, these accounts interlacing his travels to document foreign conflicts and natural disasters. Anderson Cooper dedicates his book: "To my mom and dad, and the spark of recognition that brought them together."

In both the novel and the memoir, the protagonist and the author respectively have closed themselves off to any further incursions by human emotion and deep intimate contact that stirred tamped-down memories of their early lives. In the novel the story's aloof and manipulative narrator admits his selfish iciness and unwillingness to love a woman whom he has exploited for too many years to satisfy both his own personal and painterly needs, leaving us with the distaste we feel recoiling from his final cruel abandonment of her needs.

In the memoir, Anderson Cooper interlaces his personal search for equilibrium and life-assurances with the inner struggle that haunts him of having failed his brother in his need for emotional strength and reassurance, the inner vacuum he experiences and his consuming need to place himself in personally dangerous exposure to death in his pursuit of human interest stories to convey to his wide public, eager to consume stories of far-off disasters. He searches for his own 'spark of recognition', but never overtly.

In the background of both the novel and the memoir, the destructive influences of war on survivors and combatants and observers is meticulously recounted in the dysfunctionality of those who were involved, and the recounting of how they attempt to make sense of their lives and find fulfillment - where failure stalks them relentlessly along with the spectre of death - the all-too-human story of human fallibility is present.

From the racket emanating from the area beside the garden shed where the composters stand, it was immediately apparent through the darkness of the night that something was awry. It was almost one in the morning, my husband had taken our little dog out last thing before coming up to bed, when he was alerted to a sound volume he immediately identified as possibly a raccoon in trouble.

He took the snow-cleared path over to the composters where the banging-about sounds were coming from and saw, through the light from the small flashlight he always carries in his winter jacket at night, that the composter lid had fallen tightly into the interior. And obviously, below it, was a desperate little animal, trying to make its way to safety with no results whatever for all its vigorous attempts to free itself.

My husband tried to flip the lid, but it wouldn't budge. Finally, he reached over and grasped it firmly by the top ridge, and it surrendered to his pull, coming away from the interior walls of the composter. And before he could blink, the single-minded raccoon, sure to be the juvenile we had seen last week one night on our porch, had erupted in a sudden blast of determined energy out of the confines of the composter, up to the fence beside it, and swiftly away to the security of the nearby ravine.

We've no idea how long the creature had been imprisoned there, how furiously it had continued to battle with the inanimate object that had it captive in its maw. Despite the attraction of all the composter held in kitchen scraps, the raccoon had no wish to remain there in perpetuity; it craved liberty to go and come when it decided it would do so.

We feel badly about its misadventure.  Somehow, its clever mind and opposable thumbs had managed to betray its confidence, and perhaps that will be a lesson learned. Henceforth, however, my husband decided he would tilt the composter cover slightly, leaving it partially open with the hope that the top caving in on a foraging creature would not be repeated.

We had left much too early. My husband is always a stickler for that; being on time or preferably, early for an appointment. So we were up far earlier than usual, began our early morning routine earlier than usual, left the house to compete with Monday-morning traffic, only to discover the rush hour wasn't a crowded rush of vehicles monopolizing the highways, after all. We'd forgotten Spring Break.

The roads were relatively bare, the weather conditions were good, and we moved swiftly along to our destination. By the time we arrived, we were three-quarters of an hour too early.

When he finally moved briskly into the examination room, the cardiologist looked wan and worn. In part understandable; he, like the rest of us has lost an hour out of his normal day, since two nights before the clock had officially skipped forward an hour. If he looks like this at 9:30 a.m., I wondered, what'll he be like by afternoon? I remarked to him that he looked frazzled. He smiled warmly, said he was trying to make up for lost time, all the while knowing it would be impossible. He was already significantly behind schedule. Some days, he said, sighing, were just like that. And this was one of those days.

The woman who had giggled loudly, nervously and released a torrent of confusing words at me as I had earlier settled into the waiting room, taking off my coat, pulling my book out of my bag, I soon surmised, was the source of his problem. Such meetings and subsequent examinations, he explained, took a lot out of him. It was difficult to extract from most patients, using an interpreter, what their symptoms were, what they were experiencing, when and how.

With this woman - who had mastered a degree of English, but not the skills to put the words together meaningfully, and simply relapsed to giggles and shrugs and pointing to objects, competing with worried frowns and (to her) obvious problems relating to her health condition - her inchoate expressions even related through the medium of the interpreter made little sense.

I felt badly for him. But he is the consummate professional, and soon - immediately - fixed his attention on my file, recalling precisely the symptoms he had originally dealt with on my admission almost three years earlier to the Heart Institute. Questioning me closely whether any of those symptoms had reappeared. Satisfying himself that it was a chain of consequences that had erupted with the daily use of baby aspirin.

But, with that leaky valve, intent on discovering whether there had been any change there. The electrocardiogram taken this morning satisfied some of his queries, but not all, and he said he wanted me to take another in two weeks' time, and then he would meet with me again.

When I was a child 70 years ago the primary grades were readily accessible to me at the elementary school almost directly across the street from where I lived with my parents in a rented flat. When our three children first began attending school fifty years later, our modest little house was also across the street from the elementary school they attended. Fast forward almost three decades and our grandchild for whom we were the week-day caregivers from 6 months of age to nine years, was daily bused to her elementary school, about a brisk fifteen-minute walk from where we live.

For all of that time, when she first attended pre-school, graduated to junior kindergarten, then senior kindergarten, and on to the primary grades, she was never allowed to walk on her own. One of her grandparents walked her down the street to the school bus pick-up, and met her when the bus returned after the school day. In fact when she was in junior and then senior kindergarten the bus driver would not permit her to disembark even at the end of our driveway unless one of us was out there, to greet her and take possession of that precious cargo.

Who is it who allows a child attending kindergarten to make their own way across busy intersections in the heart of a city? On Friday, a garbage-truck driver in Toronto accidentally drove his truck into a small group of young children crossing the street en route to their homes after school. Three of four of the group were hit; a five-year old boy and a 12-year-old girl, suffering minor injuries. The third child, a five-year old kindergartner was killed outright.

The father is quoted as saying the loss of his 'baby girl' has devastated him. "She meant everything to me". And he questions the safety issues surrounding young children exiting the confines of the school. "There should be a crosswalk or a crossing guard around here. This could have been prevented." And yes, it could have been, and there should have been a crossing guard. And where is parental responsibility for their young and vulnerable children in all of this?

A week earlier a 25-year-old mother of a 9-month old girl, and her two siblings, 2 and 3 years of age, had been left to their own devices without adult oversight, locked in their home for a full day before neighbours were alerted by the sound of children wailing in fear and distress. That young woman, already in possession of a police record for minor unlawful activities, has been charged with child abandonment, her three little girls taken into protective custody by the Ottawa Children's Aid Society.

In Toronto, yet another unfortunate incident of lack of parental concern and due diligence in the care of their young has resulted in the loss of a very young child to death. That father is right; the dreadful event could have been prevented. But somewhere in the equation between societal responsibility to the young, school administration awareness and public volunteerism there also exists parental responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of their own very precious charges.