And the melancholy seems more than melancholy. When I consider her recent confinement to a wheelchair, her blood maladies, and other things, I know I’d be deeply despondent if not depressed.

Not even a wheel around Russell Drive and an adjoining park perked her up. In fact, she finally told me half way through the tour, that going over the cracks in the sidewalks was hurting her. No Pro Comp suspension system on that chair. So we took to the pavement…smoother, but with traffic hazards…joked about her signalling as she was the one with free hands. We got back safely and convalesced in her room.

Mom napped in her chair. While watching her head fall, I was thinking she’s just very weary of notching off the days. And that’s what it feels like to her right now. And sometimes the chipper Bentleyites, those able to hold on to the "retirement community" dressing (there are more than a few) and who take to the place like it’s an extended camp-out with privileges (gotta love’m for it) are just so much pepper in the wound. Mom said that my dad would never have warmed to the place.

Most of all It pains my mother to be a burden more than it pains her to be in pain. She told me, in one of our snatches of conversation, in her masterful way of euphemistic equivocation, that she was "ready for anything that happened."

At another time, while trying to engage her at an emotional level, I asked again about her youth, the farm, and dad–open ended questions were left unopened. I also asked her about her miscarriage, something I’ve always wanted to ask her about, since I was the subsequent one. Had she picked out a name? No, she didn’t think so. How did she feel, what was it like? "It was a bit disappointing," she owned. She didn’t have the emotional strength to revisit–and that for me was the most disheartening thing.

She has cycles of better and worse, wakefulness and flat-lining, but the latter is showing up more than the former. For those of us with parents in this place, well, it’s just hard to watch a mother or father fade. Where along the last-lap of aging does mercy lie? I watch for it, but it escapes my view.

For us in the press of mid-life, mercy lies in hopefully having a few more laps left. The thing about visiting the Bentley is that every time, after initialling the ledger, and walking out the doors, I felt much younger—a feeling that lasted a few hours. Oh, but it was even more than a few hours the day I parked mom’s wheelchair at the dinner table and while walking away overheard one of the ladies mom shares a dinner table with say, "What a nice young man." My 50-plus-years are hanging on to that little nugget.

Good friends, humour and vacations are worth their weight in gold, as are calming herbs and vitamins, acupuncture, massage, psychotherapy and energy healing modes of all kinds. Every dollar and every hour invested in reducing stress is an investment in the future of both our own health and that of our overburdened system of public health.

Connie Howard and this week’s Well, Well, Well.

Slouching in her chair picking lint and frizzy bits of hair off of her navy blue sweater vest, she scans me and my proof of existence. Her name tag says Henry.

Where you going? LA. Why? Business. What kind of business? I’m going to meet with our consultants. What do you do? I raise money for a social agency, Hope Mission. Where are you staying? Fuller Seminary’s Guest Centre.

Are you carrying any fruit, alcohol, or tobacco? I have a cigar in my shoulder bag. Can I see it? Yes.

I pull it out and hand it to her. She studies it through the sealed baggy I had stuck it in last night, and reads its red collar. Is it Cuban? Yes it’s Cuban. Are you sure? Yes. It’s a Romeo y Juliet, Churchill. You’re sure? Yes I’m sure. Okay, follow me.

She takes my passport and ticket and the cigar, stands up, and asks me to follow her. She is much taller than I thought. I follow her sizable frame, and her leather belt with holster, down a short hallway. We stop, she moves a red card from one wall hanger to another. We enter a bright florescent-lit room and she instructs me to place my bags against a wall and the shows me into a holding room. The room has vinyl covered benches at its perimeter. On each wall are posters warning of firearm and contraband smuggling.

I look through one of the openings into the lit room. She has placed the cigar and my papers on a counter. Behind the counter a young bald man types notes into a computer screen.

In my anteroom, I wait with an Arab couple. They are sitting against the back wall. Nearby is a dark-skinned man wearing a red shirt, and his blond girlfriend. In a moment a young Moslem woman wearing a light brown hijab is shown in. She sits at the entrance without concealing her frustration.

I look at the clock, assess my position in turn and think about how I’m going to explain missing the plane to LA and our two days of  meetings  to my boss and our consultants.

In ten minutes, we are all still there glancing at each other and out the openings. Then I hear my name. An agent with a gray brush-cut asks me for my drivers license–if I have one. I move toward the door, but he sticks his hand through the centre opening and and I retreat and pass it through. Is this your current address? Yes, it’s my current address. In a minute he calls me to the counter.

A form with my name and address and an ink stamp I can’t read is partly under the cigar and my papers. I’m asked my phone number and asked to sign the paper. I do and he stamps my passport. Admit: Homeland Security and Border Protection.

The agent in dark blue uniform and gray brush-cut tells me they aren’t going to penalize me. I resist asking what the penalty would be. Instead they’ll be confiscating my cigar, because, as I might know, the USA has an embargo against Cuba. The Obama overtures to Cuba run through my mind but I stay silent.

He volunteers that they’ll be taking my cigar, Fedex-ing it to Chicago, where it will be destroyed. I apologize for the trouble. He says, no problem and that I can follow him. I get my bags and we go back down the short hallway. He takes my red card and moves it back and ushers me out toward the baggage conveyor.

I fly to LA.

Still, not wanting to speak ill of the dead–although of course Carlin had no problem speaking ill-of, living or dead–but when George Carlin traded in comedy for caustic commentary, even though few could cut better, I dropped out.

His biting satire of all things may have gained him a new audience, but for me, he became just too much of a projectile. He showed no mercy. Well, admittedly, that’s his right, and as he saw it, his job as a comedian. As David Hinkley’s obit in the NY Daily relayed, “he always said his often-cynical satire simply reflected his real-life disdain for mankind’s greed, stupidity and inconsideration.”

But the comedy became wincing. For example, to wring a laugh out of the beheading of an Oklahoma corporate executive was satire that defeated itself. It was a sideways attack on greed perhaps, but Carlin was wilfully blind, or just blind, to his own special kind of inconsideration.

With age, he became unfunny. Caustic satire, yes, fair game in context, but a steady stream without so much as an inward glance not only loses appeal, it gets boring. Carlin seemed to just have one track. When things got boring he just upped the outrageous-ante. I guess I still appreciate a self-deprecating comic. One who draws me in by pointing out her own mania and then with a few great lines implicates the lot of us. I think Carlin used to do this. But over the last number of years he just sounded angry and miserable.

The tributes are coming in, he’s being lauded for telling us the “harsh truth,” and I guess he did that. Although harsh truth about humanity is hardly revelatory. I suppose it’s my problem, but I never got the sense that he interrogated himself anywhere as close as he did his targets, and admittedly, not all of his targets were straw-men…he wasn’t a fool. It’s just that I’m left wondering how his comedy and voice may have evolved had he developed, along with his annihilating ability at piercing pretensions, an accompanying self-questioning stance.

Seems to me that’s the kind of broad quizzical standpoint Al Sleet, the Hippy-Dippy Weatherman would have taken. He had the insight to see an encompassing view. As he said in his final and definitive broadcast, “The weather will continue to change on and off for a long, long time.”

When the rain falls and the temp dips and you inexplicably slip into 1973, the first thing you’ll want to do is robe yourself with a button-up horse blanket. After all, you deserve comfort, and comfort comes in bolts of pucker-free, wrinkle-free, and fray-free fifty-weight nylon-satin-poly blend, yardered together using packing needles and worsted yarn.

Mind you, there’s a reason why none of our models are sitting down (well, almost, the one wearing the brush-fire has been rammed into position). A small oversight in the comfort department–Sears promises that the 74 model will include flex-tube at the places where people bend.

In the mean time, should you desire to lounge, just get someone to push you over; then, while your lying down, you’ll be able to surreptitiously observe everyone in the room without them knowing…because they’ll think you’re the couch.

The second memory is seeing my tricycle roll slowly into the dugout, and me chasing after it. I had left it on its own for just a few moments and it betrayed me. I see its red frame and white-spoked wheels submerged and sinking and just before I head in after it my brother pulls me back to safety. I have a parallel memory to this one that has an older brother nudge it down the fine gravel slope to its watery decent. I have no idea why I have this memory. But this second memory lines up with another memory of my brothers teasing me by holding me over the well beside the dugout. But I’m not sure how accurate this memory is. It’s possible that a jest, a teasing threat (I do know that my brothers would do me no harm) has transformed itself into the vividness of an actuality. Which means of course, that threats of harm can be as effectual as an actual misdeed.

But of course I wasn’t dropped into the dark column of water and I was stopped from slipping under the surface of the dugout and my tricycle was fished out before it sank to an irretrievable depth. Had these things not happened my fears would no doubt be compounded, more complex than a simple fear of water–a fear I now manage with relative ease.

Thing is, memories possess an elasticity. They aren’t so much in the past as they are ahead of us, divining our paths and directing our actions. For years I had a powerful desire to become a detective. Perhaps the intrigues I saw while sitting on my tricycle in the farm yard was the seed for this urge. This is a light and somewhat amusing example. On the other end, memories can at times protect us from a reality and at other times compel us to move in and deal with reality. In other words, memories can be unwelcome gifts.

But Kandahar was once famous for its steakhouse. I remember because The Kandahar Steak House always got mentioned 70 miles east, down the Yellowhead, at Yorkton’s CKOS. At that distance I knew it had to be special. Those were the juicy tender years. An earlier time when I didn’t know businesses had to pay for getting mentioned on the television. I thought that places just had to be good to get advertising.

I remember the Sunday my parents went for a drive with their friends with the express purpose of going to for a steak. They may have gone more than once but I remember that day, because I was instantly envious and vowed that one day I would do the same. And I did…one weekend, some ten years later, while driving back from Saskatoon where I was enrolled in an Agriculture diploma program at the University.

It was early evening when I drove up the gravel drive to the steakhouse. I stepped through a paint blistered door into a red-carpeted room. There was no one else in the restaurant. I found a table and sat down.

A thin, wrinkled, Chinese man came and asked me what I’d like. I asked for a menu and he obliged. Was he annoyed or surprised? My steak was tough, quite tough. A mistake perhaps? Perhaps not. Perhaps they had been tough for some time. I ate in dim silence. Years of anticipation spattered and burned off like bits of marbled fat. It was a gristly, uncomfortable and ultimately lonely meal. In less than a year, after my only visit, the windows would be boarded up and eventually, I suppose, the building pushed in and hauled away. There isn’t a trace of the place today.

Today, even though I suspect that some of its 15 houses are occupied, Kandahar, Saskatchewan couldn’t feel much more desolate or unfortunate. And naturally, one wonders about that name, a name–bestowed upon the settlement by C.P.R. at the turn of the century–meant to honour the British victory in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the 1880s.

Still, I can hear the engaging voice of Linus Westburg on CKOS, and see the large sign atop the burgundy restaurant at the entrance of town, and then the presentation of red place-mat, silver steak knife, and the black-brown cross-grilled T-bone on a white plate. A meat-eater’s Shangri-la.

Oh, delightful, a cartoon for me and Rene. Check it out here. Thanks Len.