On the issue of 'family' helping, Quebec has a fairly new unique way of doing that. If the family is functional, and an adult child has no job, that person, be they 18 to 50, must return and live with the family. Here, they just get welfare and health care. The same goes for their seniors, if they can be cared for at home, one of the children must take them, and the others pay some of the cost.

If there are issues with needing a home nurse or whatever, the province provides that assistance in the home.

They look at each situation. If you don't want the kid back, you pay within your means and the government then tops that up. But you have to have a really good reason.

In my family, I am really only 1 generation from the farm. And all the seniors stayed at the farm until they passed away. I can see my Great Aunts sitting in a rocker, covered with a blanket, knarled hands holding a paring knife, working on vegetables. The 3 of them, all on 100 acre farms about 2 miles apart, all of them kin of their father who came with his father from Scotland, McDonalds of the Isles. All that generation lived to be over 95.

As for myself, I have just finished the 'apartment' for my parents. They are both 83. The have a nice condo. Paid for by my father's surrogate mother. But my mother is having trouble walking, and my Dad can no longer cope well. I was there all afternoon, helping clean, do laundry and my wife dusted.

We don't see eye to eye on religion, my eye is more cast on your dollar bill, and theirs on an altar.

For me family comes first. My mother remembered that when I was 17 we had a group, my girlfriend on a 12 string, me on the piano, and an elderly concert violinist from Switzerland who's husband was a swiss watchmaker. Julie and I sang Old Rugged Cross at a 'fireside', and my Mom wants me to remake it into a video for her funeral. You don't say no to my Mom. I've almost got it down, but I end up emotional, not over the words or the religious part, but because she wants to hear it, and she says then she will just go to heaven...

On the other hand she's losing it and you have to be careful not to take her where people don't understand, because she can come out with ANYTHING. I mean ANYTHING. It just comes out and she grins and says, I'm a bad woman!

Et alors.

John Conley
Musica est vita