She had turned prematurely grey. A youthful, very pretty face framed by silky-straight hair that had turned from its light brown with auburn highlights to silver-grey. She hadn't bothered trying to cover it up. Why would she?  She looked, after all, extraordinarily attractive, different, quite lovely. She retained her youth figure and her youthful vigour.

Hers is the house at the very bottom of the street, her property running alongside the main street called, in French 'the pines'. Her house backs onto the ravine. A lovely forested scene to look out onto, perfectly located. When we first moved into our own home about midway up the street over two decades ago we used to see them, her and her husband, pushing a stroller, two toddlers walking alongside, an infant in the stroller. We would stop and talk briefly. Her smile was one of those reflecting a sunny disposition.

We didn't see one another often, but occasionally. Regularly when I stopped by during one of the door-to-door charitable canvasses I volunteered for. She would never turn away an appeal. And in this way I caught glimpses of her children as they grew. She was always herself personable, chatty, good-humoured. And her children modelled themselves after their mother.

I saw her soberly still only once, and that was many years later, when she informed me her oh-so-pleasant-but-distant husband had left her. He lived now with another woman. A young woman who was pregnant with his child. And whom, he told her earnestly, he loved. As he had once loved her. She stifled her despair as best she could. Her children, she said, on the cusp of adulthood, were angry with their father. She wouldn't encourage that.

She bought a puppy, a chunky, energetic, happy-go-lucky little husky-mix, and she adored the furry little ball. Before long, the reciprocal exchange was evident, though the little dog -- because it turned out little for its mixed-breed status -- seemed to love everyone that came by. A week ago she told me that her oldest daughter was expecting. Her first grandchild.

Her daughter had telephoned her unexpectedly in late March to say guess what, Mom, we're getting married! She had informed her mother a week earlier that she was pregnant. Now, it was: 'we decided to get married; could you do the wedding?' They had twenty-five guests, six weeks later, cooked all the food themselves, rented chairs, emptied the great room for the ceremony and following celebration.

She is relatively content.

A long-time neighbour and friend who made a dreadful hash of his personal life leaving him with regret and a large void in his life, now fills it by peripatetic travel.  Every few months he goes off on one travel tangent or another, and in the space of a decade he has visited just about every tourist destination on the face of this Earth, often enough several times. He has his clear favourites. India is not one of them.

This is a man of a disposition toward order, although disorder prevailed in his life because of his roving eye. He lives alone in a large house in which there is never a mote of dust to be seen resting on any surface, where everything has a place and is never moved from its place; he is meticulous, careful to ensure that all is to his satisfaction, in place and presentable to the most demanding eye; his own.

He is a charming man, ready and eager for conversation, and happy to indulge in light-hearted banter. And always prepared to speak at length about his impressions of his travels. Just having returned from a visit to India, he is scathing in his condemnation of the squalor in evidence everywhere and the hordes of children begging in the streets. His luxury accommodation at a highly recommended hotel was unequivocally excellent, from the attention to detail, cleanliness and food consumed in sumptuous dining rooms, to the crisp, attractive linen on the beds. That all had his approval. Not so the scene as soon as he left the hotel entrance, where the overwhelmingly foetid odours of poverty and human degradation assailed his nostrils, nor the unwelcome sight of depressing poverty everywhere he looked.

The Ganges, that holy waterway of Indian cultural tradition and religious sacredness represented a travesty of nature; filthily polluted, with ashes of the dead ceremoniously scattered over its water, while pious Hindus immersed themselves in its purifying filth, and the domestic acts of laundering took place at the edges, beside which wedding ceremonies were being carried out, while cattle waded through, leaving their bodily deposits to wash downstream. Faugh!

Indians would be distraught to know that they had disappointed the expectations of a visitor who anticipated its history and culture to be reflected in a passion for pristine cleanliness, an eye to hygiene in a country where the majority have no access to toilet facilities and evacuate publicly in the out of doors. They would immediately drop their concerns, those that care among that vast population of 1.2-billion people, about the issues of cultural gender-feticide and rape, the indigent poor, and abandoned widows, and cower in self-abnegation and blame over the 34,406 children gone missing and never recovered, from among the much larger number that have been abducted in the last year, and trained to beg in the streets, become prostitutes, work as slave labour on farms and mines, or had their internal organs harvested for tourism-transplant sale.

All those soul-defeating failures would immediately assume a lesser degree of concern, to the far greater one of appearance to the critical, demanding eye of foreign visitors who look with a huge measure of distaste upon a society, a culture and a scene so utterly lacking in measured order and self-respect.

So glad it's done and finished with. I do it so grudgingly, always have. Although I most certainly hope my demeanor is anything but when I'm out doing the canvassing. I try to appear bright and cheerful, though it's difficult to assume that attitude actually, when people who are manifestly well endowed with the wherewithal to live well, steadfastly refuse opportunities to give the merest pittance toward all manner of charitable causes, some of which they avail themselves of, as part of society.

It doesn't do to be judgemental when you're out and about canvassing for a charitable cause. It isn't entirely fair to stand in judgement of people, since we don't always know their circumstances. On the other hand, the price of a take-out sandwich or coffee that most people wouldn't think twice about spending would do well enough to proffer as a donation to any number of social causes worthy of supporting.

In any event, it's done again, for this year. And as in years past I assure myself this is the last year. I've done it for far too long; time for someone else to take up the tender flame of the social contract. True, I was far less stressed doing the door-to-door canvass on this street this year. I bypassed most of the doors that I know from long past experience I will be turned away from, mostly politely, sometimes not. There were a few that I did approach in hopes that minds would be changed, but not many. Instead I passed the threshhold of those who have given in the past, at the invitation to enter, chat, and donate.

Almost $400 donated this year on the street for the Canadian Cancer Society. I once surpassed that mark, and subsequent years have been close, but this was an exceptionally good response. Without my yet having added our own donation which will bring the total well over anything I'd previously collected. Some satisfaction in that.

As though the world needs to be reminded from time to time that among us lurk monsters of unscrupulous conscience, those whose characters are tinged with a psychopathic pathology so evil that they conspire deliberately or through inaction to compel misery and death upon others.

From the category of unmerciful tyrants who consign their populations to dire poverty, ill health and slaughter to the predators on the world scene who consider themselves aids to the Grim Reaper in the consecrated virtue of servicing religion through wholesale death and destruction, to those who are so consumed by greed that they prey upon the indigent who have little choice but to work for wages insufficient o provide them with the necessities of life, we are made aware of the fragile, transitory nature of human rights.

Those who have it in abundance, the assurances of their rights as a human being to live free and be enabled to live a decent life, one that provides a living wage for an honest day's work and protection under robust laws of equality and justice so families can grow and thrive and aspire, under a civil social contract give a thought now and again to those whom fortune has delivered to a vastly different kind of fate.

Bangladesh exists in the Indian subcontinent, once part of that vast geography that India represents, then part of breakaway Pakistan, and then through another human-devised social-religious cataclysmic rupture, become a nation in its own right. A nation whose ethnic and religious makeup mark it as different from its neighbours in part, but yet those differences are in fact slight; all human beings require the very same life assurances. The poverty-stricken in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan are held in triple thrall; to sectarian violence and strife, ethnic, tribal adversities, and the iniquitous ability of the social and financially advantaged to control and menace their already miserable lives.

Hundreds of impoverished factory workers, earning the pittance that stands between starvation and endurance, are still missing after the collapse of the building that housed numerous factories producing textile products for the advanced countries of the world in Savar, Bangladesh. The country's own safety and security authorities who ordered the obviously collapsing building to be vacated, hadn't bothered to see that their own orders to evacuate were followed. The building owner had connections where they counted.

Well over 300 hundred people are dead, their relatives in mourning, while others are maimed and suffering. Hundreds of people are still thought to be alive and in pain within the collapsed building complex. It defies any concept of humanity to think of people -- the building owner, the factory owners, the public authorities -- whose consciences have been so utterly compromised that they shrugged off the inevitability of the disaster that occurred.

Although I don't actually imagine her bulk to have been much decreased in the decades since I first became acquainted with her, I can recall that at one time she was able to toddle along on the street. This is something she has not done in years, not even to walk the few yards up the street we live on to retrieve her mail from the group mailbox. The only real discernible alteration in all those years is that once she had been accustomed to grooming herself carefully and now she looks slovenly in dress and personal hygiene.

After all, it must be horribly difficult to perform even the most mundane tasks of grooming and washing oneself if you are just over five feet tall and perfectly, spherically rotund. At a guess I would venture between 325 and 350 pounds, but who knows, she could weigh more. Her mother, as I recall, was grossly overweight but not quite as morbidly obese as my neighbour who lives directly across the street. Her brother whom I've never seen is afflicted with Asperger's and seldom ventures outside his rented accommodation.

I have met her sister who lives in Calgary, who up to about eight-ten years ago used to visit on occasion. That sister is overweight, but not obese, although by now, since she has mobility only with a wheelchair, she may have attained that weight status. This sister suffers from deeply afflicting arthritis, but there is also something else which I cannot recall, and which on occasion caused her to blank out. Despite which condition, she still drove, and while she was driving her little girl somewhere about ten years ago she just happened to lose consciousness. The resulting accident killed her only child, and caused her grievous brain injuries necessitating a number of operations, successful ones. It's hard to imagine how she rationalizes the death of her daughter and her own recovery.

My neighbour, when we first came to know one another, had a young boy of her own. Very tall and robust for his age, he was forever teased by his classmates. Yet, because he was a brute of a young boy who didn't know his own strength and how to discipline himself, he was feared by them. The result was a good degree of social alienation, few friends and outbursts of fury and confusion. But he prevailed and became a kind and gentle hulk of a man, closely attached to his mother for emotional support.

He and his step-father, the current husband of our hugely-proportioned neighbour did not get on well together. The young boy secured a fairly good relationship with his father, estranged from his mother, however. She is generous with him, to a fault, financing his purchase of a home of his own, and supporting him when he has been between jobs in the high-tech industry. Largely self-taught, but gifted, as so many young people are in that direction.

It's a puzzle to me that, living so long in such an obviously compromising condition of health, my neighbour, despite her enormous girth, has not suffered from chronic, disabling diseases, like diabetes, a heart condition. To my knowledge she takes medication only for depression. Truth to tell, she has much to be depressed about. This winter her husband whose own health is not wonderful, and who smokes only outside the house, on the porch, had a very serious bout with an illness that just slipped my memory, necessitating a long hospital stay. He picks up very remunerative government contracts in computer programming. And, before her retirement about fifteen years ago, she worked alongside him in government. They both left that employ at the same time to work with private industry, a giant software firm that does business globally.

It's likely that after her retirement she continued to gain weight and girth, although she was so utterly wrapped in fat when I first knew her that I could hardly recognize weight gain; she seems to me now as she was then, but obviously not. I cannot imagine her climbing the stairs to the second floor of her house, to reach her bedroom, returning the journey in the morning to have access to the first floor. A necessity since she owns, and dotes on, three cats.

Such are the lives of our friends and neighbours.

This just in! 

We have it on highest authority -- researchers from Kent State University in Ohio -- that the greater the agreement among parents in parenting style, the greater mental health ensues for both parents, father and mother. To posit that emotional comfort resulting from prospective and post-birth couples sharing values in how to raise their young contributes to a finer psychic state resulting in good health outcomes is really an astonishing breakthrough.

Who might have imagined this, that symmetrical values on raising children where the expectations of both father and mother match, leading to mutually-approved techniques and methodology would result in a relaxation of possible tensions?  And this, in turn, would lead to a successful team approach, one parent encouraging and supporting the other, and vice-versa. In turn leading to trust, commitment and satisfaction in teamwork? Whose final result is a well-balanced emotional relationship between the parents of the offspring.

This discovery of the ideal relationship relating to the most fundamental of human aspirations and outcomes will herald, surely, a revolution in the world of family generation. Future mothers and fathers will know that it is incumbent upon them to reach an agreement on the need and the practise of supportive child-rearing fundamentals. It cannot be too urgently emphasized, needless to say, how vital this parental contract is to future emotional understanding and health balance for everyone concerned.

In one fell swoop the societal conundrum of emotional and personality-idiosyncrancy balance between parents put to rest, enabling them to raise, confident, emotionally secure and intelligent children. The issue has been placed into the kind of common-sense perspective that produces one of those light-bulb !Aha! moments, ennobling humankind and producing an aspirational drive for the genders in their most intimate procreational ventures.

"Whereas men can compartmentalize, saying 'This is the parenting relationship and our spousal relationship is something separate', for women it seems to be about, 'How are we working together as a couple in all domains of our relationship? I also think it has a lot to do with changing gender attitudes within society, with the egalitarian notion of men and women contributing equally to the relationship being much more important for the mother than the father. The take-home message is communication", advised Kristin Mickelson one of the study's participants, an associate professor of sociology.

Whom Brian Don a doctoral student in social psychology, the lead author on the study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, doubtless owes a great debt of gratitude to. It seems that he and co-author Susanne Biehle have succeeded in brilliantly solving an ages-old conundrum whose results will henceforth enable society at its most private level, to finally solve one of humankind's most vexing relationships.

Clearly enough what I had once again committed myself to could not be put off any longer and since last evening presented itself as relatively mild with a beneficent breeze, luring me out to the street to at last begin the annual April door-to-door canvass for the Canadian Cancer Society, I'd finally procrastinated long enough. It's an annual ritual that I detest doing, but commit to anyway because someone has to do it, and there aren't hordes of people stepping forward.

It's been close to forty years since I first began doing this awkward and unlikeable bit of social pay-back, and long experience hasn't made it any easier. While it's true that most people are courteous and many do respond to the invitation to part with a few of their hard-earned dollars for a charitable cause that aids countless others within society and may even help them at some future time, those whose response is nothing but churlish tends to unevenly weigh the balance of my impression toward gloom.

I remain grateful to those of our neighbours who never fail to respond to the irritating knock on their door, to open it and find me there, on their doorstep, reminding them of the annual Cancer Society fund-raising campaign. I've known these people for over two decades and they never fail to embrace the request, even those who would decline, if others stood in my place. Whatever they donate, sparingly or generously, is appreciated; just the simple acknowledgement of our shared humanity that the act represents restores one's faith.

Two of the long chats that never fail to result from this springtime approach after not having seen people very often throughout the long, cold winter months stand out for their demonstrative need to continue the process of alerting people to the need to remember others.

At one of the houses up the street from our own live a couple, now on the cusp of retirement whose two children were infants when we moved to the street ourselves. The couple has bidden farewell to the dependence of their children; they are now awaiting their third grandchild. My friend, now in  her late 50s, suffered two bouts of breast cancer; as a nurse she knew what would be involved in battling it, and she persevered -- the incidents several years apart -- and courageously won her personal battle. She stopped nursing and became a pharmaceutical representative, constantly travelling, earning a hefty income which her husband's in comparison seemed only to supplement.

Now their house is up for sale. Yesterday they bought another house, still in the neighbourhood, and with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, similar to the one they've put on the market, but smaller, newer, more open and modern, they said. They also built a third story on a cottage they'd bought four years ago in Quebec, all to accommodate their growing little family. Theirs is a story of cancer's defeat.

At another house, where the occupants, a much younger couple who had moved in a decade ago now have two very young children, the story was different, but just as moving and telling of the need to be vigilant if at all possible, to give comfort to those afflicted. The young mother, a schoolteacher, had last week taken exam papers with her to a nearby cafe, to mark them in peace and quiet, without the nagging need to do domestic chores while her children were in daycare. She just happened to take a break to look at a local newspaper when she glanced at the obituaries and to her dismay, saw looking back at her the face of one of her early students. Dead, of lymphatic cancer at age 19.

On Sunday she attended his funeral, and surprised his mother into tears of gratefulness that she remembered. For herself it was a healing process to be among the mourners, many of whom were young people who had befriended her old student whom she remembered as a sweet-natured young boy enraptured by music, who played a cello beautifully.

She showed me a photograph of the young man whose cancer had been diagnosed a mere six months earlier, leading to his swift, precipitate death. His parents gave copies of the photographs as gifts to those who attended the funeral service.

The Toronto legal community is aghast and outraged that a fellow member of the Law Society of Upper Canada has revealed some rather unsavoury character traits about himself. They would far prefer that someone with his views not be permitted to practise a profession that they are all proud to be part of. It would remain at the discretion of the LSUC, needless to say, how they would deal with recent revelations about David Da Silva, a criminal lawyer practising with the eponymous firm Da Silva Law.

Mr. Da Silva, made aware of the impression he has made among his colleagues, and certainly among the members of the Toronto Police Association, is strenuously denying he even has a Twitter account. "I do not use Twitter", he insists, threatening "a civil action" against those claiming otherwise, and attributing to him such sentiments as "My favourite two words are: OFFICER DOWN".

Claiming through a series of tweets that "governments have historically been behind almost all such attacks", in reference to the Boston Marathon bombing, and responding to a woman who had recommended that "I hope you get an education" -- "sweet I hope u get cervical cancer". He named her a whore and wrote: "I really am praying that u get violently raped. May cancer be upon u!!!"

The Toronto Police Association has hired a lawyer "to make a complaint to the Law Society" on its behalf. Correction, on behalf of decency and facts, reality and sanity.

AP Photo/Xinhua, Liu YinghuaThis aerial photo released by China's Xinhua news agency shows 

destroyed houses after a powerful earthquake hit Taiping town of Lushan County in Ya'an City, 

southwest China's Sichuan Province, Saturday, April 20, 2013

"Everyone is on the streets now. We can't stay in our homes. Here it is relatively safe at least", said a 40-year-old woman whose house in Shengli, China's Sichuan province was destroyed. In Shengli, there is barely a building that has gone unscathed from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hit the area, once again Most of the two thousand residents now have nothing left of their homes but shattered memories. They have set up camp wherever they can. Everything they were familiar with has been reduced to rubble.

CHINA OUT AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images  Residents help carry injured people to the hospital 

after an earthquake hit Ya'an City in Lushan County, southwest China's Sichuan province on 

April 20, 2013

This quake, not as severe as the one in 2008 that destroyed 70,000 lives has seen its fortified four-floor school that suffered major damage in the earlier quake, now with a huge gaping hole, destroyed for a second time.  It is now known that 15,000 people have been injured. There have been innumerable aftershocks, sending people already traumatized and then re-traumatized into an existential shock.

"No food No water. Nobody has asked about us." reads a sign scrawled on cardboard along a country road that links these remote villages.

"The whole family ran outside. We thought we were all safe. But then we couldn't find him. We tried to rescue him but we couldn't get in through the door. When we finally dragged him out, he was dead", said a mother of her 16-year-old missing son, his body crushed under the weight of their home as it crumbled with the force of the earthquake.

CHINA OUT AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images   Chinese rescuers walk through wreckage to 

reach isolated Baoxing country after the earthquake in Ya'an, southwest China's Sichuan province 

on April 21, 2013

What a dreadful catastrophe of nature's casual devising; another force of nature destroying life and forcing people into a state of utter despair. The brief initial moments of an earthquake provoke a feeling of disbelief in those who experience it, then fear, and panic as people react with the certain knowledge that something beyond the power of humans to hope to cope with is overtaking them. It is a feeling and a realization that once experienced will never be forgotten.

CHINA OUT AFP PHOTOSTR/AFP/Getty Images   Survivors make their way along a damaged road 

after an earthquake hit Lushan County in Ya'an City, southwest China's Sichuan province on 

April 21, 2013

Afterward you may debate with yourself whether it was the rising racket of unknown origins 
like a freight train making its puzzlingly inexorable way toward you or the stark utter fear that 
grips when the world that you know suddenly becomes threateningly unfamiliar, as you lose 
your moorings with reality, while the very stability of everything you take for granted, moves 
beneath your feet.

Riley at age six, recovering from lipoma-removal surgery

Because of our concern over the lipomas that have plagued our little toy Poodle for years, we thought we would try changing his diet, and we did, rather dramatically. He was eating a presumably well-balanced and top-rated diet as it was, meant for little dogs in their elder years, and with glucosamine added to aid with joint problems. We'd had him on it for quite a few years. We were aware that the veterinarian who tends to little Riley advised us before we had that first surgery to remove a large lipoma under his left hip, that it isn't known why lipomas occur, but he was quite definite; it had nothing to do with diet.

That lipoma, surgically removed at quite a cost, would not return, the specializing surgeon informed us reassuringly, post-surgery. But it did, and more followed, and it seemed there was little we could do about it. We did note that some of them, after assuming prominent large size, seemed to become reabsorbed and only loose skin remained to show they'd once been there, remained. That surprised our veterinarian. And we were hoping that eventually they might all disappear, but that hasn't occurred.

The lipomas haven't up to now interfered with his locomotion or seemed to bother him. I've taken to spreading coconut oil over them lately. On one of them, the one that returned to his left hip, he has now lost all his hair where it swells, so we're trying to take additional care that when exposed to the sun, which he loves, that area is covered. Not that we don't think the sun has healing properties, but it wouldn't do to have him sunburned, either.

Yesterday morning I proceeded to put together his food for the next three weeks or more; that's how long a cooked batch of the recipe our daughter developed lasts. When it's done I just pack it into small freezer boxes with tight little lids, and extract one from the freezer each time I've finished with its predecessor, which lasts about five to six servings. The ingredients are wholesome, beginning with a small box of frozen spinach, a sweet potato, several cups of frozen broccoli, a cup of lentils, four cloves of chopped garlic. When the vegetables, to which I also added a cup of chopped cauliflower and a few small Bok Choy chopped, were well cooked, I mashed them roughly and added a package of fresh lean ground chicken, and returned the large pot to a low heat until everything was cooked through. At which point olive oil was added, about a quarter-cup, and a cup of ground flax seed, and a teaspoon of turmeric.

He is also given additional chicken to top that off, chicken thigh and leg cooked in a weekly chicken soup which we eat ourselves and leave over enough to give him as well a small bowl of with his twice-daily meals, because he doesn't tend to drink water other than on rare occasions. And he also gets an additional treat; a tiny bowl of cottage cheese, sometimes topped with plain yogurt. He hasn't gained weight on this diet he has been on for several months now, which is good, because he is not overweight, but thus far there have been no notable alterations in the lipomas.

Admittedly, it was not a very well-conceived strategy. True, the abundance of snow we've collected this winter is fast fading and roughly 50% of the trails in our wooded ravine are now free of snow and ice. But the remaining 50% remains covered in thick ice layers, still to melt, stubbornly holding on to winter. Just a few days earlier we had watched as we came across a ravine acquaintance slithering precariously over the ice, shorn of protective cleats. He laughed, we laughed and said we'd retain our boots-and-cleats combination for a while yet.

Yet yesterday was utterly unbelievable in its balmy presence, heat positively suffused the atmosphere, our backyard felt like a veritable little heat-box, and we revelled in the warmth. Our gardens in the back are completely free of snow and ice and crocuses are emerging. As we prepared for our daily ravine walk I ventured to suggest we use our hiking boots, and my husband was swift to agree; freed at last from the weight and awkwardness of winter boots and cleats on this fabulous spring day, complemented by sun and gentle breezes. Surely, under such circumstances, we reasoned, the ice remaining would be turned to slush -- as has happened often enough before.

Just before setting out my husband looked fruitlessly for a ski pole to take along to aid in balance in case it was needed, just as a kind of last-minute insurance-assurance, as it were. Forgetting that he had long since abandoned use of ski poles for that purpose, and had put them all downstairs in the basement. So, off we set, faces to the lovely breeze, certain that the ice would have turned rotten.

Except, it hadn't. And we were forced to re-arrange our usual round trip, avoiding some areas and trying out other combinations. Where we could manage to walk around the ice it was well and good, but there were so many areas, up and down hills that would not allow the wary to avoid the ice, tension and sliding exposed us to more challenges than we had reckoned with. Finally, on one of the ascents my husband slipped and fell. The shoulder that was just beginning to feel really good after an earlier fall that injured it a few months back, is re-injured.

We proceeded as far as we felt we safely could, before gingerly making our way back, exhausted and frustrated, me kicking myself metaphorically for a too-optimistic recommendation that turned out not so wonderful, after all.

Later, when I was at the supermarket doing the weekly shopping I happened to come across an acquaintance who informed me that she was just now getting out and about after having suffered a really disastrous ice-fall when she was getting into her car, one winter day. When she appeared at the emergency wing of a local hospital she was amazed to see the numbers of people who presented with ice-fall injuries. She had surgery done at the same hospital, with a metal plate inserted in her shoulder.

As innocents abroad, Chinese nationals have not fared too well of late. In Canada there was the horrific death of Chinese exchange student Jun Lin , murdered and dismembered ghoulishly by Luka Magnotta, who now faces first-degree murder charges in Montreal for the May 2012 atrocity. Jun Lin's family travelled from China to Montreal to attend the trial, hoping for justice and closure at the dreadful death of their son.
 

Daran Lin, father of murder victim Jun Lin, leaves the courtroom in Montreal on Tuesday, March 12, 2013. (Ryan Remiorz / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

The trial proceedings have given small comfort to the grieving father, who has broken down several times during court proceedings, and was escorted out with huge sympathy extended to the man, deprived so horribly of his son.

Now another exchange student, Lu Lingzi, 23, was among the three who were directly killed on the scene of the Boston Marathon, by terrorist bombs. A graduate student studying mathematics and statistics, who would graduate in 2015, she will never see her academic goal to completion, and her life progress as young people surely have a right to expect will occur for them. 

Lu Lingzi

Facebook

 

One of the friends she was with, also from Boston University underwent surgeries on Monday and Tuesday; yet another foreign Chinese student studying in the United States. Danling Zhou will survive the dreadful ordeal he was exposed to as an innocent bystander, Lu Lingzi was far less fortunate.

Chinese students are recognized for their academic zeal, their high degree of intelligent absorption in their studies, and their capacity for imbibing data at a high intellectual level. So many are scholarly paragons.

Chinese parents, anxious to have their highly motivated children succeed as scientists, professionals in a variety of high-achieving categories, and serene in the notion that their children will be safe studying in North America while gaining additional academic credentials, may now begin to think otherwise.

A neighbour who is roughly thirty years younger than I am informed me once that she experiences dreadful difficulty in holding on to objects, that she has inadvertently and unfortunately smashed more dishes than she cares to recall. Her problem is that she is afflicted with Arthritis and things just seem to slip out of her hands. It's a familiar phenomenon to me. But, of course, she has Arthritis.  I have no such excuse.

I appear to be congenitally afflicted with Klutzitis, and always have been. It could perhaps be attributed to the inescapable fact that I am always in a hurry, attempting to do too much within a confined period of time, always having multiple things on the go. Or, it could quite simply be that I am sloppy, don't take sufficient care with what I'm doing.

I have always, since I've had my own kitchen, broken friable objects like drinking glasses, cups, saucers, platters, casserole dishes, you name it. If it can be broken, I'm the one to do it. It is as though I deliberately go about challenging their right to be whole, and useful. Never inclined to utter profanities, I can be persuaded to do so when I've been unable to catch say, a pie dish, from slipping out of my hands and smashing onto the floor, inadequately held in my otherwise-capable hands.

Watching in helpless frustration as the object shatters and shards slide all over in an amazing spread of splintered rebuke.

My husband has long since become accustomed to the reverberating sound of a loud crash followed by an angry outcry, and silence. That's usually when he comes galloping over to tell me he'll look after the clean-up, even though I've already mustered the required resources.

Never a chastising word, though; he leaves that to me through the usual exercise of self-flagellation.

Life is full of surprises, of the onset of untoward events, of people oblivious to the potential occurrences that will turn their lives inside out, events that creep up silently behind them as they busy themselves in the fullness of life's celebrations, and then pull the rug of mortality out from under. In this case, out from under running feet at the Boston Marathon, where the elite among runners take part in a century-old ritual in that old city of America that has seen so much in its historical drama, and now has been victimized by man's inhumanity to man.

It is beyond impossible to envision minds so warped that the prospect of inflicting mortal pain, fear and suffering on others through deliberate acts of life-sabotage holds allure. The very act of preparing to do irreparable, irreversible harm to other living human beings irrespective of age, gender, culture, and innocence simply because of the hateful urge to inflict death, to maim, motivates minds ravaged by hatred.

A little boy who has been raised in an emotionally caring environment, cherished by his family, with an endearing and wonderful photograph of a wide, gap-toothed smile, holding a poster in his school classroom of grade three children that instructs toward compassion toward humanity. He is now a raw, painful memory to those who knew and loved him, his life precipitously taken in an explosion of raging, lunatic hate. Other children have lost their limbs and their innocence of life.

The deeply painful bruise that has settled further into the American psyche may have left a spirit unbowed to adversity and threat among a resilient people who forge ahead into the future, but it is a bruise that will never heal, the memory of another bloody atrocity resulting from deformed spirits whose life-force is one of malevolence toward others, determined to leave behind them the message that searing hatred governs the possibilities of peace, no matter how many hopeful pleas children emit in their innocence.

There's quite a way to go, yet. Snow and hard-packed ice are yet to melt on the balance of our front lawn, although the micro-climate in our backyard has succeeded in melting the snow there. And in the various little gardens I can see that the crocuses are ready to bloom yellow and purple, and the tulips are spearing their way through the warming soil; the grape hyacinths whose stubborn spears lay under winter snow are preparing to raise their flowerheads. Perhaps in another two weeks all of the bulbs will have clarified their intention to brighten the emerging spring gardens.

At the beginning of March I started once again the ritual of collecting and crushing eggshells so I would have the ammunition I need to sprinkle around the emerging plantain lilies of which I have so many, since they are one of my most favourite garden presences, the eggshells performing the commendable task of keeping snails off the vulnerable hosta leaves and munching them most unattractively.

And several weeks ago I began spraying the collected begonia bulbs in their wood crates stored overwinter in the basement to persuade them that it's time to awaken from their sleep and send out shoots so that when I take them out to the gardens for re-planting and potting in various clay garden pots in May they will have begun their ascent into brilliant flowering status.

Yesterday was a lovely sunny and mild day, perfect for removing the snow cones from atop the roses, releasing them to the direct warm encouragement of the sun in preparation for eventual June flowering. And several days earlier we had seen our first robins; no doubt they arrived even earlier and had had to cope with the effect of that April snowstorm on Friday which brought fierce winds and flying sleet and snow back to our spring-minded landscape.

Yesterday was a brilliant, mild and sunny day in Boston as well, absolutely perfect for their annual marathon. Which ended in so spectacularly a dreadful disaster.

It's a fact that many doctors lack beside manner, the protocol of empathy toward patients appears to have completely escaped their notice, we feel. They seem disinterested, disengaged in the human being before them, seeing them as mere cyphers whom they must see, study, diagnose and treat, if possible. There certainly are doctors who have little empathy for others, who act like technicians and whose medical treatment lacks the merest degree of sentiment.

Then there are those who do have the emotional attachment toward others and who know that they must school themselves to look at their patients objectively, indeed as feeling human beings, but making the disciplinary decision that they must hold their own emotions in check. They must view the patient as a patient, one of countless who come before them to take advantage of their medical expertise and their mediating potentials.

And then there are those whose own deep-seated humanity cannot be separated from the emotions of their patients, who go out of their way because there is no other way for them, to empathize completely with those whose compromised health takes such an incredibly heavy toll when they are informed that due to genetics, environment and just pure bad luck, their body now hosts a morbidly deadly disease.

The doctor's role is to scrutinize symptoms, order advanced technological medical tests to ascertain whether their initial diagnosis is correct, and then to tailor an intervention through a pharmaceutical or lifestyle alteration, or surgical treatment leading to additional protocols that will attempt to save the quality of the affected person's life - and in many instances, save that individual's life through prompt and appropriate treatment.

The responsibility that all of this entails, the sheer numbers of people affected and the close observation of the breakdown of the human body, witnessing the toll it takes on the helpless and their family members, weighs very heavily on those medical practitioners who are unable to separate their own sympathies from those of their patients' dilemmas.

I have seen the robust good health of a cardiologist who assigned himself the task of looking after my health as a heart specialist slowly become compromised over the space of just a few years. His sensitivity to my own situation was quickly apparent when he and his colleagues interpreted the symptoms that persuaded me to present at the emergency department of our local hospital.

And during that time of my admission and my stay at the heart institute the protocols that he established for me with the assistance of state-of-the-art electronic devices that aided his diagnosis and prognosis, has ensured that I now have the tools at my disposal to continue to live a long and healthy life whose quality will not be impaired by any additional deterioration.

This last visit to this good, concerned man whose own son is now on the precise and studious journey through academia to become a doctor himself, has demonstrated the stark reality of responsibility, concern and empathy weighing far too heavily on the shoulders of a skilled medical practitioner incapable of separating himself from the anxieties and fears of his patients.

I was alarmed to see the evidence of that weight this morning, in the nervous tic that has so swiftly descended upon him, as he studied my electronic records, as we discussed the results of the latest echogram, and as he pronounced satisfaction with the balanced state of my condition.

The pronounced subconscious shoulder shrug that repeated itself rapidly and repeatedly is a testament to his humanity and vulnerability. I will see him again next year. At that time I hope that I will see that he may have found some coping mechanism that will allow him to continue his practise without a continued deterioration of his own health in aiding others to cope with theirs.

As a child I was desperate for emotional attachment. As an emerging adult I longed for love. It was absent in my family home, and what took its place seemed an eternity of gloom, an ongoing storm of anger. Where children require emotional stability and the comfort of love, there seemed only to be a routine of hurtful accusations and loud misery. Symbols of love, caresses, hugs, verbal assurances were not part of the daily life that greeted me and my siblings.

Of course, I was aware of those constant verbal assaults my father withered under, and felt myself to be similarly bombarded, but gave little thought to the ongoing trials that my younger brothers and sister were also exposed to. It was only later, much later, that my sister, four years my junior, informed me what a hell their lives also had been, living with my mother. My mother was a good and decent human being, but a dreadful mother. Only in the sense of withholding supportive, loving emotions from her children. Otherwise, she was attentive to our material needs, and food was always there for us.

I was anxious to leave that toxic environment. And I did, when I was married at age 18. My husband's own home environment was discordantly dysfunctional and lacking in parental love and guidance. When we met at age fourteen our fate together was set. Fifty-eight years later, love continues to radiate between us. The continual warmth of his loving gaze, his reassuring smile has comforted me and given me the assurance in life I needed. His humour and intelligence have been a bulwark of sustainable respect and shared love.

Before my mother succumbed to the frontal-lobe dementia that finally succeeded in shutting down all her bodily functions leading her to death, she once said to me, over the telephone, that she loved all her children equally. The word love out of her mouth came as a surprise. The reality was that identifiable love was withheld equally from all her children. I assume that as she was raised so did she raise her children.

We did the opposite with our children; surrounding them with palpable and unrestrained love, evidenced physically, emotionally, emotively. We were determined to raise children unhampered by the emotional conflict of uncertainty that they were valued, cherished for what and who they were. My sister's reward is two children coping with life in bi-polar-afflicted challenges, and a grandchild as old now as my husband and I were when we first met, with deep-seated autism and related problems.

She muses now over how she feels about our mother in retrospect, wonders whether she was capable of loving her. She and the older of my two brothers looked after the welfare of our mother when she was institutionalized; to them fell the entire brunt of that duty of loving children. That particular brother is a social recluse, likely himself an undiagnosed Asperger-syndrome victim.

My sister is a chronic sufferer of sleep deprivation, little wonder she is always tired. She is legally blind, the result of a birth procedure where a forceps delivery impacted her so deleteriously in later life. She feels herself surrounded and engulfed with living evidence of human suffering. I am perhaps more emotionally resilient than she is, but then I also have not, since my liberation from the close confines of an emotionally-stifling childhood, suffered the endemic familial woes that she has been exposed to.

It is exactly one year ago this very day that the final catastrophe overtook our miniature poodle, Button. Our deep-seated sorrow in her absence has hardly abated. We shared over nineteen years of our lives together. Losing her, although it was inevitable, was a blow we have yet to recover from. We miss her presence in our lives.

We met her personal adversity in aging and the journey toward death with as much care and consideration as we could muster. To aid her in navigating space when she became progressively more blind. To have patience with her when she could no longer hear us. To entice her to eat by removing restrictions from her diet and allowing her to have whatever she wanted. To anticipate when she would have to evacuate because she no longer signalled us. To carry her to places where she desired to go, despite no longer having the ability to trot up stairs or leap onto places she had formerly favoured. To be mindful of her whereabouts and careful to aid her in negotiating spaces when we harnessed her to ensure she had daily exercise for walks she still enjoyed and where what was left of her sensory skills still gave her pleasure.

When she was young she was an inquisitive, sometimes boisterous, adventurous little dog on long, long legs. She was happy to challenge any other dog to a running contest and she won every one of them. She loved the water, and would retrieve stones that we would toss into lakes for her, diving determinedly to sniff them out and return them to us for yet another throw.

She was a determined little mountain-climbing dog, accompanying us on our summer holiday trips to mount as many mountain tops as we could throughout the period of intense outdoor activities that brought us as close to nature as was natural for dogs and humankind alike. The adventure of seeing new places and responding to new opportunities and challenges called to her as it did to us.

She loved the adventure of it all, from our daily ravine walks that took us to nearby forested areas sublimely coated in snow during our long winters, to strolls through those same trails, meeting the excitement of spring, the return of wildflowers and migrating birds, and the presence of raccoons, foxes, and partridge until encroaching housing drove them away.

On that dreadful day, everything seemed normal. Reflecting what had become normal for us, having her on a one-week antibiotic protocol monthly to ward off the dreadful infections she had become susceptible to, maintaining a disciplined schedule that suited her temperament, reflecting that she had lost all sense of ordinary routine and required gentle guidance. She had been asleep in her place on the sofa in the family room around ten that evening, when suddenly she was catapulted into the air as though electrified, and rapidly proceeded into a series of physical contortions, unaware of what was happening, a victim of some deranged cross-wiring in her brain.

We rushed her to one of the city's two veterinarian emergency hospitals that never close. And were there with her for hours, cradling her, comforting her, and ultimately bidding her adieu.

Whoops! The calender, it seems, has slipped its seasonal mooring. Here we are, under the impression that we're closing in on the middle of April, and December has nudged her aside, and re-entered the picture.

The scene of wild wind swirling snow about greeted our still-sleepy eyes, widening them in disbelief. This return to winter is not one we feel inclined to embrace. We thought that the shovelling routine was over for the winter season, and how wrong we were. Of course, unexpected as it is, this is still a reflection of the contrariness of the environment in the Ottawa Valley.

Two days earlier chickadees and a slate-back junco were disporting themselves through the branches of our ornamental trees in the backyard, and a brilliant scarlet cardinal settled a little further beyond to sweeten the spring air with its exquisite song of spring jubilation. This morning, while snow transformed the environment, a lone junco settled on the branches of a climbing rose, no doubt confused and mourning expectations lost.

When I was young I had become accustomed to hearing the weary phrase that weather conditions from northern Canada were disrupting the orderly weather patterns in the United States, bringing to them cold and misery. That appears to have changed; what's occurred with the atmospheric conditions to make it now more common that diverse disruptive weather conditions from the U.S. northwest blows into Canada, bringing us discomfort?

Little Riley, our toy poodle, was certainly discomfited; he had grown accustomed to the snow and ice having melted, revealing the green, the warming soil, and the newly empowered warmth of the sun. This change is disconcerting for us all, but, thankfully, episodic and fleeting. And a right royal pain in the arse, for as long as it lasts.

In their tenderness of age and sweet vulnerability, their adventurous curiosity on introduction to life and the world around them, the young of any species, but most particularly the warm-blooded mammals of the world are viscerally appealing. They capture our attention, and awaken in us our own memories of the mysteries of life unfolding before us. They arrest our notice in their exuberant tentativeness. And their raw immaturity presented as bundles of boundless energy and physical perfection in miniature form, endear them to us as few other sights can do.

From memories evoked of our grandchildren when they were young and dependent, yet spurning the confines and restraints placed upon their early years of adventure and curiosity to spare them from the potential harm their curiosity may provoke, leading them to misadventure, to raising small domestic animals of another species entirely, accustomed through millennia of close companionship with humankind, we live in communion with new life reminding us through our own approach to end-of-life how precious existence and awareness and the life of the mind is to us for the finite period we may enjoy it.

Lately, on our daily perambulations through our nearby forested ravine, we have seen increasing numbers of very young dogs accompanying people whose children have grown to maturity, and who have adapted to the presence of small creatures whom they plan to raise to maturity, for company, and for that almost universal need of people to have close to them a companion to share life with.

The latest was several Australian shepherds accompanying a middle-aged woman, the dogs shy and withdrawn, though curious and good-natured. One, both females, was six months of age, the other a mere nine weeks. Its minuscule presence was heart-rending in its inner conflict between the endless attraction of curiosity and fear of the unknown.

Observing those young creatures at the dawn of their life-span is a perpetual lesson in the fleeting yet pleasurable and priceless quality of life.

Driving along the Eastern Parkway is always pleasurable, the view of the Ottawa River, free of ice, with the occasional ice pan still floating downriver, and the banks and fields alongside slowly revealing what has lain under the blanket of snow all winter long, giving us promise of spring. Although spring seems elusive this year; the days boomerang between temptingly mild and lapses of return-to-winter temperatures. We have been informed by Environment Canada that Friday will be cold, and we can expect snow, more snow.

We were headed to Byward Market, to stroll about there a bit, because it was a relatively mild day with sun, little wind; close to perfect for the occasion. Riley was tucked into his little bag and carried over-the-shoulder as usual as we nipped into a few shops. Our trip was primarily about getting the latest issues of the arts and antiques magazines that my husband refers to and takes huge pleasure in perusing. And also to drop by his favourite cheese shop, where we shop for special-variety and imported cheeses, at very good prices.

Not many tourists to be seen on this day around Parliament Hill, its lawn still covered with snow, though the streets downtown are devoid of the snow that still remains hard-packed and stubborn in the areas where we live, outside the city core, in what is called the suburban area. Traffic was light and we moved swiftly along, admiring as we always do, the sights of the formal buildings of government.

The only vendors at the Byward Market to be seen on a still-wintry spring day were those selling maple syrup in a variety of containers, and costume jewellery hawkers with their displays spread out alluringly in their stalls, glinting in the sun. Because it was a week-day the market wasn't as crowded as it usually tends to be, with people sitting even in this weather, in the front courtyards of the various cafes.

We were fortunate to get one of those rare parking spaces fairly near the places we were interested in; parking is usually at a premium and one must walk relatively long distances to get to the heart of the market. We didn't stay long, as comfortable as the atmosphere was, it still isn't to the degree that one truly appreciates when setting out for an urban stroll.

On our return it was straight out to the ravine, where the snow and ice are rapidly melting into piles of slush, and the creek is full of dark water, running full flush. When forging our way uphill as we must by necessity, it feels like we're struggling through piles of deep, soft sand, with the forward-momentum footstep inevitably slipping back, and the back leg, attempting to firmly grasp the shifting morass underfoot to keep from sliding back down the hill.

The effort is fatiguing, but transitory; before long all will have melted, the soil will have thawed, and the forest floor will begin sprouting its early-spring flowers.

"It was surprising how fast they consumed the oil. In some locations, it took only one day for them to reduce a gallon of oil to a half-gallon. In others, the half-life for a given quantity of spilled oil was six days."
"It's a little bit surprising to some people that the Gulf is so clean given all of that oil that's going into the Gulf, and the other toxic chemicals from the Mississippi River."
"Petroleum degraders are found anywhere ... And that's logical because it (oil) is a natural product. Basically it's fossilized algae that have been compressed under extreme heat."
Terry Hazen, biologist, University of Tennessee

Scientific studies distilled from research after the 2010  Deepwater Horizon oil spill seems to conclude that nature' trumps human intervention always and forever. Airplanes that sprayed chemicals for the purpose of breaking up oil slicks succeeded in poisoning sea creatures, and caused the oil to remain longer than it would have had no intervention occurred.

Naturally-occurring bacteria may have mitigated much of the damage 

The Gulf and its environs have, under the biological influence of nature, self-cleaned to an amazing degree. Nature's microbes swiftly took over when the oil spill occurred. That seems to make sense to scientists who are aware that oil deposits existing beneath the ocean bottom release up to 1.4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf annually -- according to the U.S. National Research Council.

And nature's formula for balance sends out oil-dispatching bacteria in response. In deep water, bacteria are drawn to oil "like little oil-seeking missiles", in the words of Professor Hazen.

Oceans manage, with nature's benevolent guidance, to clean up oil spills in a manner exceedingly superior to what humans can devise. Fisheries and beaches contaminated when the tanker Amoco Cadiz split on Northern France's coastline in 1978 treated with chemicals took fifteen to twenty years to recover. Those areas that weren't treated recovered within five years.

Hello there: Is anyone listening?

Two armies clashing in conflict during the European Colonialist era, Britain and France coming to the final battle to establish which of them would be the colonial master of this North American colony later to become Canada. France, busy elsewhere in its studious and militant effort at imperialist outreach and hegemony, more or less surrendered the privilege to Britain. And Britain, in a magnanimous gesture, extended an olive branch of conciliation to the conquered French in Quebec.

But of course that storied battle of conquering bloodshed at the Plains of Abraham, led to the death of General James Wolfe in 1759.
Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770, oil on canvas, 152.6 x 214.5 cm
(National Gallery of Canada)

Who knows how many times as a boy in England, James Wolfe played out battlefield scenes with his boyhood friends, scamps revelling in the rumours and romance of fierce battles with muskets firing and cannons blasting the enemies of Britain to shreds. And perhaps in their lusty exuberance the childhood friends enthusiastically foisted some physical damage on one another. The young Wolfe had only to go to his mother and she would administer a healing potion.

Perhaps had he the foresight to travel with that marvellous healing potion, he might have survived the mortal wound that took his life. And perhaps, recalling having to swallow that evil-tasting fluid medicament that his mother, Henrietta, concocted for healing purposes, he would much rather have preferred not partaking of it since, as an adult he had the choice, whereas as a child that choice escaped him.

Not that the ingredients, being a typical mischievous, nature-struck youngster as most young boys are naturally inclined, would have offended him. Rather they would no doubt have appealed to him, perhaps if the resulting medication had been topically applied, and not swallowed to work its wonders internally. How would you feel about the urging of a mother to 'open wide' and 'swallow swiftly', if you were aware of these ingredients?

"Take a peck of garden snails, wash them in bear, put them in an oven, & let them stay till they have done Crying. Then with a knife & cloth pick ye green from them, & beat ye snails & all in a stone mortor. Then take a quart of green earthworms, slice them through ye middle, & strow them with salt. Then wash them & beat them, ye pott being first put into ye still, with two handfuls of angelica, a quart of rosemary flowers, then ye snails & worms, the Egrimony, red Dock roots, barberry bark, wood sorrel, Rue, Tumerick etc. Then power in 3 gallons of milk. Keep your still covered all night, this done stir it. Distill it with a moderate fire. Ye Patient must take two spoonfuls at a time.
"The butler advises gathering them 'as near as you can out of lavender or Rosemary & not in trees or grass'."

We mostly look for paintings, but we're interested as well in clocks, oriental porcelains, bronzes, all manner of decorative items that attract our attention because of their unique nature, their (mostly assumed) provenance, their beauty, all of which satisfy our sense of aesthetic and enhance our lives through providing a focus of interest around us.

We can certain live without all of these things, but they do make our lives even more pleasant than they already are. If it became a toss-up between books and bits and pieces of antique objects, I guess books would win the contest hand down; they, it would be difficult to live without. The ongoing and fairly casual search for beautiful objects, however, does grasp our interest. And yesterday after breakfast we hied ourselves over to the centre of town to do just that -- look about to see if there were any offerings that might fulfill our search to acquire yet another piece of the past.

It was the occasion of the semi-annual antique show that comes to this city in the spring and fall. They are now put on at the Fieldhouse of Carleton University. The show itself has gradually deteriorated from one where responsible antique dealers coming from Toronto and Montreal and all points between would bring what they had painstakingly collected through estate sales and auctions and serendipity, to present at these shows -- to one that largely now features jewellery, memorabilia and junk with the occasional real thing thrown in for contrast.

At the fall show we bought nothing, because nothing appealed as genuinely worthwhile. At this spring sale, there were even fewer dealers, though there were ample potential customers. The genuine antique dealers have discovered that Ottawa is not a useful venue for them. Although the purchasing power is there, the interest in arts and antiques seems tepid at best. So they now no longer bother going to the trouble of packing their desirable objects to haul them out to this city, then do the very same in reverse, hauling back most of what they had to offer.

For us personally it's a bit of a let-down, but in fact we hardly have need to augment what we have collected over the past 50 years of shared interests. As it happened we did come across a walnut-case bracket clock with a beautifully intact brass face. Just as we prepared to approach the vendor, another browser had him turn the clock around to view its interior works, find the pendulum and set it in place, but something appeared to go awry, the suspension had been fixed at some time in the past, and there was a tiny bit missing so the clock wasn't able to operate, and this turned the buyer away.

Which provided the opportunity for my husband to step forward, explain to the vendor that he knew what was wrong, and it made no difference to him, whereupon the vendor offered a very good reduction to the selling price, and the clock became ours. Later that evening, my husband finished working on the clock, restoring it to perfect operation, and it has now joined our clock collection.

Now there's an unexpected surprise. My obituary. Never did I imagine that I would read the regrets at my passing. As Samuel Clemens had quipped -- "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated"; certainly words to that effect are appropriate in my case. On the other hand, just in case any of my friends and acquaintances, few as they may be, may be startled should they chance to come across that notice, I hasten to remark: "Not dead yet", courtesy of Monty Python.

Amazing, in a sense, although not entirely unexpected that it is people with a warped sense of humour, a decidedly comic bent and lens through which to view the absurdity of life and the release of death that has people cursing life yet clinging desperately to it, unwilling to enter the peace of that long oblivion.

Well, of course, it was not I who died. It was another unfortunate soul who just happens to have shared my name - or I hers, to be a trifle more accurate. She inherited the name before I did. For she was my senior of over a dozen years. She did live to see age 90, and I am still hale and hearty at 76. She was born in January 1923, and I in December 1936. We share an ancestral ethnic heritage, that much is obvious, and both being female, there is the extent of our connection; scant indeed.

Still, it is not every day that one is so surprised by a reminder of that long journey that takes us from life to death. And, having been reminded, trips our determination to enjoy life while we may and make the most of whatever comes our way.

Isn't this absolutely WICKED!  I do not, needless to say, reference the thumb-sucking, grenade tossing baby Kim. He is pathetically dangerous -- or should that be dangerously pathetic? The mind boggles attempting to fix itself on that absurd persona which despite its lack of grey matter, tosses about dystopian-reflecting tantrums that make the grey matter of world leaders throb with pain.

Wicked, utterly and absolutely genius-level wicked is the witty caricatures that cartoonist-without-peer Gary Clement daily provides for the wry amusement of National Post readers.  The man is one of a kind. There clearly are some people whose intelligence has been sweetly warped toward viewing the world in a unique way that eludes most of us ordinary people.

There is nothing ordinary about the mind of this man, capable of capturing the essence of a situation flawlessly through his brain directing his capable fingers to produce these brief insights in the nature of that absurd creature known in the aggregate as humanity.

It all falls on those proverbial deaf ears. Public health authorities repeatedly inform us that we are eating ourselves to death. Obesity rates among the public -- including most alarmingly, children -- is a growing, seemingly unstoppable phenomenon. We are warned that our children, as a result, may not live as long and productive a life as their predecessors have done. And that effectively turns on its head normal expectations that each succeeding generation will live a better and longer and more productive life than the past ones.

Children, with growing obesity rates, are susceptible to life-damaging conditions that have traditionally been associated with aging; what was once called adult-onset diabetes afflicting sedentary, overweight middle-aged and older people is now raging among the young, their hormonal systems out of whack with what nature's convention intend. Diabetes ravages the bodies of those living with it, affecting eyesight, nerves, the heart and kidneys.

We know, because we are told, and we aren't completely stupid, that we are responsible to act as intelligent stewards of our bodies, to bring them gracefully into old age. That we can prevent or hold off the impacts of organ failure and general body degradation, through healthful living. And though it is true that the triumvirate of inheritance, environment and lifestyle all play a part in what we can ourselves achieve on our own behalf, and we can do little about genetics, be wary about environment factors, and truly take charge of lifestyle choices, few of us practise what is preached to us.

It is simply too easy, with the advent of convenience products masquerading as nutritious food, to simply succumb to the allure of ease of or no food preparation at all, and the substitution of whole foods to 'food products', taking in far more salt, sugar, fat and intrusive chemicals than any healthy living organism can cope with.

New data indicate that one of the most deadly of all cancers, the one that brought Christopher Hitchens to silence -- cancer of the esophagus - esophageal adenocarcinoma -- is steadily growing in incidence, as the population rapidly gains weight.  Esophageal adenocarcinoma forms in the part of the esophagus closest to the stomach and has doubled in Canada in the past 20 years.

Belly fat in particular seems to increase the incidence of gastroesophageal-reflux disease - chronic heartburn - that sends stomach acid up into the lower esophagus and represents a major risk factor in this type of morbidly deadly cancer. A study published in the Canadian Journal of Gastroenterology indicates that this type of cancer increased by about 4% a year for men and at the same rate for women from 1986 to 2006. That kind of cancer increase is dramatically unusual.

Esophageal cancer is increasing in incidence throughout the developed world, with one of the lowest survival rates of any types of cancer. The five-year survival rate ranges to 80% with early detection, but there's the rub; half of all new diagnoses fall into the most advanced stage, once the cancer has spread.

Abdominal fat is linked with higher circulating levels of substances causing inflammation. Chronic tissue inflammation, according to researchers, plays a role in the development of many types of cancer. Diets focusing on red meat and surfeit with saturated fats remain risk factors for both upper and lower types of esophageal cancer; diets heavy on fresh fruits and vegetables in contrast, have a protective effect.

Riley loves his comfort. And he particularly is fond of our bed. At night, regardless of the season, he insists that it is his right and his vital need to burrow down deep into the bed, beneath the feather comforter in winter, the lightly draped topsheets in summer. We wonder sometimes whether he can breathe freely, so closely ensconced in there, but obviously he has no problems with that close, stifling confinement. As regular as clockwork, at 6:15 am each morning he clears his way through, tunnelling out of the depths of the bedclothing to surface, and install himself instead outside and atop the comforter to continue his peaceful sleep there until such time as we arise.

Because of the work engaged in while applying a wall surface of very large tiles looking amazingly like stone, my husband has experienced restless nights lately. The effect of reaching up with one hand holding a hod heavy with mortar and then later grouting, the other smoothing it over, and then lifting the tiles into place. Shoulder, back and arm muscles have been stretched and tested beyond normal physical activities of a normally physically active man. A few days back we'd just fallen back to sleep after Riley had settled down again at 6:15, when the telephone rang, and when it was picked up, emitted that irritating sound of a fax machine.

But now, all the work has been completed. The tiles in place on the fireplace wall, and the grouting done. I'm grateful for that, it's been a bit of a nuisance having those ladders, and the two-story scaffolding set up for more than a week in our otherwise-spacious family room. I'd be sitting at the computer, busy composing something, feeling bits of mortar or grout falling about, hitting my head. Good thing my husband is so meticulous about cleaning up after himself. We managed comfortably enough, despite the localized chaos. And now it's all done, and looking quite excellent, much to his satisfaction and my admiration.

The scaffolding disassembled, placed back into the larger of our two garden sheds, the ladders taken back down to the basement, and the drop sheets shed of their detritus-burden, a bit of touch-up painting here and there, and now there is only the art pieces to be re-hung, the decorative items to be placed back on the fireplace mantle, little things like that which he will attend to. Yesterday, before the scaffolding was taken apart, we re-hung the painting my husband had done almost twenty years ago, featuring Button anxiously waiting for me and our youngest son to paddle our canoe back to shore at our camping spot at Algonquin Park.  My printer and its little storage unit will be replaced from its temporary banishment, and we're back in business.