Dad explained that with the hard plastic mat under his new office chair, he could not stand up from it because the chair moved chaotically around beneath him on its coasters, and he invited me to remove the mat.  This was fortunate for me since my mat was cracked and broken.  A week later Dad remarked that without the hard plastic mat under his new office chair, he could not move the chair at all because its coasters sank into the shag and refused to roll, and he is stuck, too far (three feet) from his walker.  He asked me to return the mat.  I had since thrown my broken mat away, so now my chair is stuck in the shag.  As I carried the mat downstairs in the early morning, Mom walked past the door of her dark room dressed in her long white night dress.  She joked with me later that I must have thought I had seen a ghost.  I rejoined about having seen an angel with white hair in flowing white robes.  She laughed.  Bringing Dad home from the doctor at the end of the day, I prepared to build momentum to roll him up the long ramp.  (I am amazed at the gravitational difficulty one single foot of elevation makes behind a loaded wheelchair.)  “Where’s my javelina?” he interrupted.  “We just passed it,” I replied, not about to stop our progress mid-ramp to point out the pig.  I position the pig at the foot of the ramp, a warning to would-be ramp walkers (trippers), but moved it to make way for him and his wheelchair.  “Well, make sure not to leave him out in the rain and snow where he will rust too much,” Dad instructed.  You may recall that this particular javelina was plasma cut from a sheet of pre-corroded sheet steel, intended to mature with age and element, to continue rusting out of doors, the surface corrosion adding to the sculpture’s rustic charm but not damaging the structure.  I admit to returning the javelina to its guard post after depositing Dad inside.  But he was pleasant all evening, he praised my dinner of spicy chicken-and-sausage dirty rice, and this morning, when Cecilia asked cheerily, “How are you?” he responded with his trademark, “Marvelously well, thank you,” and moved on to his life’s great physical challenge: the journey to the shower.