Saturday, July 31, 2010
Thanks, everyone
I can't keep up with all the email good wishes, greetings, cards, flowers etc, that come our way - Wendy's way - and I don't have time to acknowledge and thank everyone individually, so this post is a collective "Thank you!" to family members in NZ and Australia, and to friends in Melbourne, Sydney, Fife, Edinburgh, Peebles, Victoria and Vancouver BC, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and... this sentence is getting too long. So thank you, everybody.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Our story
Several recent visitors have asked how Janet Wendy and I met, where we've been, what we've done over the years. I summed up a little of our story in a speech I made at our 50th wedding anniversary banquet, when this photo was taken. We think our story is a bit unusual and quite interesting, so here are the notes I made for what I said that evening:
On Sunday August 7 1955 I was off duty in the medical practice where I was the junior doctor and on my way to play golf, when I picked up two young women hitchhikers. They were on the wrong road for the place they wanted to go, so I should have dropped them ten minutes later at a corner where they could make their way to the road they needed. But before ten minutes had gone, I knew I wanted to see more of one of them, so I scrapped my plan to play golf. I was running late because I’d called at a hospital to see a mother and the new baby I’d delivered a few hours earlier and my usual partners would have started without me. It was a perfect spring day, sun shining, blossoms opening everywhere, birds singing. I offered to show them the dairy-farming and grape-growing country south of Adelaide. At the end of the day we exchanged addresses because the one who interested me, Jan (short for Janet) Wendelken, was heading home to New Zealand after several years in Britain. When she got there, we began writing to each other. Our letters became a courtship by correspondence. Jan, also known as Wendy, came back to Adelaide in June 1956. Our theoretical love affair became practical, hands-on, and much more fun. We got engaged on August 16 1956 and were married in the chapel of my old school, St Peter’s College, on February 14, Saint Valentine’s Day 1957, a searing hot 104 F but a cool change in late afternoon made the wedding reception very pleasant.
Our wedding anniversaries have been scattered about the world and many have been memorable: Our 7th was in Kingston Jamaica, when officers on the ship where I was the surgeon took us to a brothel; in Edinburgh we dined once at a very posh country inn with peacocks in the garden. Two venues for our celebrations no longer exist, a sandy beach resort in Sri Lanka that was swept away in the tsunami on Boxing Day 2004, and the restaurant on the top floor of the World Trade Center in New York that was wiped out on September 11, 2001; our 30th was at the best seafood restaurant in Sydney. On our 36th, a cold, wet day in Dunedin, New Zealand, we had an unforgettably awful meal. On our 40th anniversary, Wendy planned to surprise me with a hot air balloon ride over Ottawa but we never got off the ground because it began to rain as we were on our way to the field where the balloon was to be launched, and hot air balloons don’t fly in the rain. In the week before our 45th anniversary I performed in a colloquium at a think-tank on a cliff edge beside the Pacific Ocean north of San Francisco. I flew home anticipating an intimate dinner at a little French restaurant, to be greeted with the news that the day before, Wendy had slipped on the ice and broken her hip. Instead of our tête-à-tête dinner, I visited Wendy in the Ottawa General Hospital. On our 46th anniversary we had champagne at a resort in the Dominican Republic. I was in India working for the World Health Organization on one anniversary, but otherwise we’ve been together for all of them.
None of this was imaginable when we married. We expected to spend the rest of our lives in medical practice in Adelaide, where I greatly enjoyed my work as a family doctor, and, I think, was reasonably good at it. But less than two years after we married, when Rebecca was 11 months old and David was well on the way, I fell seriously ill with pneumonia. I (and my doctor) thought I was going to die, and during my slow recovery I began to think about our future in new ways.
I had an epiphany. Instead of dealing with sick people one at a time, it made more sense to find out why they got ill or injured in the first place, and try to stop it from happening. With Wendy’s backing, I gambled recklessly with our family’s future. I left the financial security of medical practice, and launched into a career in public health research, mainly in epidemiology. As Robert Frost put it, I took the road less traveled. It’s been a fascinating, exciting, fruitful road.
For 15 years we lived on the edge of poverty – research work doesn’t pay well – but we were very happy and life was full of interest. Looking back over it, I think we’ve had a richly rewarding life, we’ve had loads of fun and got around a lot. We’ve lived in Adelaide; Sydney; London; Sydney again where a mortgage company helped to buy our first home; Burlington, Vermont; Edinburgh, where another mortgage company bought most of our second home and our kids acquired lovely Scottish accents that sad to say, they’ve lost in Canada; we came to Ottawa in 1969, and bought our third home (with first and second mortgages); we had a sabbatical year in New York City in the late 1970s, and have lived in Ottawa ever since. In the 1980s my work often took me to Geneva or Stockholm, and after it was done we used rail passes to travel to many parts of Europe. Starting in 1987 I had meetings or work most years in or near Australia so we had a month or two away, half each in New Zealand and Australia. We’ve stayed put long enough to put down roots, get to know the cities we’ve lived in, and in each of them we’ve made good friends. As our family size and needs changed, we’ve moved six times so far in Ottawa. We hope our next move will be to the crematorium, but preferably not for a few years yet. I may have missed a few, but I can count 22 homes we’ve had in five countries; we’ve traveled half way across the world several times on passenger carrying freighters, and over large parts of it by air enough times to have lost count.
Between us, we have produced three children of whom we are immensely proud and whose progress through life we’ve watched with loving approval. Rebecca survived an armed robbery, has been executive director of a regional economic development program, the Canadian Cerebral Palsy Association, the Canadian Environment Industry Association, and now is a policy analyst in the government, a master gardener, and an accomplished public speaker. David appalled me by announcing when he was 13 that he intended to be a soldier, then demonstrated by his actions that what he really meant was that he wanted to be a peacekeeper and an expert in preventing violent armed conflict, which he has done with distinction in some of the world’s combat zones, and in high-level consultations with national, international and intergovernmental organizations. Now he teaches it at the Royal Military College of Canada. He works in another part of the same ‘prevention’ field as I do. Jonathan was born with very severe heart disease, surgically repaired when he was 7, and is carving out a career fixing and trouble-shooting computers, doing computer animations, designing exciting, innovative houses. Our three clever grandchildren all seem poised on the threshold of fascinating, worth-while careers.
Wendy has made possible everything good that has happened to us. Her talents include ability to dash off a vivid sketch and a commendable poem, paint pictures worth hanging on our walls, and to sew and mend clothes. She made what she’s wearing in many of the photos in our slide show, including her own wedding dress, and the gorgeous evening dress she’s wearing tonight, and the children’s clothes when they were young. She’s been a marvelous mother and a caring grandmother. She makes appetizing meals, manages my chaotic life, and devotes much of her time to less fortunate people, and to other good causes. Two of her most endearing qualities are her sense of fun and her spirit of adventure – the combination that plans hot air balloon rides for a pair of 70-year olds. And she has been my moral compass. I’ve dedicated my life and most of my books to her.
My love for her grows stronger every year. I think we’ve had a very happy union. For many years we kept quiet about the way we met – it was as unlikely as the improbability drive in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (and Wendy was hitchhiking on that August day in 1955). Now we boast about it. We’ve proved that time flies when you are having fun – it certainly doesn’t feel like fifty years! I know I’ve had a lot of fun and I’ve been happy, and I believe Wendy has been happy too. I’ve tried to react positively to her rare critical comments. I use mouth wash when she complains about my bad breath, apply scissors when she says my nose hairs are getting too obvious, don’t complain when she keeps me waiting, and try to stay calm when she criticizes my driving.
So please join me in a toast to the love of my life, Wendy.
(Dinner celebration was held in the banquet room at Beckta’s Restaurant, Ottawa, February 14, 2007)
Friday, July 23, 2010
Interventions and devices
Yesterday Wendy had the preoperative assessment to determine her fitness to undergo the minor surgical procedure involved in installing a PEG tube. It's a simple little operation done under local anesthetic with a small dose of intravenous tranqulizer to ensure that she stays calm and relaxed. It usually takes about 15-20 minutes. The assessment was carried out by Dennis Reid, a Scot from Aberdeen, a 1967 graduate, so he was a student there while I was at the University of Edinburgh. He is one of the senior, most experienced men on staff. He pronounced her fit, with the proviso that to be on the safe side she should have it done in the main operating suite rather than in the outpatient endoscopy unit -- hedging his bets a little bit. Meantime she continues on course. We have a fairly smooth routine now: I give her a small dose of the same tranquilizer she will have before the operation on August 3, except that I inject it subcutaneously rather than intravenously. We've figured out between us a quick and easy way to fit her face-mask, then we tuen on the bilevel ventilator, she drifts off to sleep and the ventilator helps her respiratory muscles do their work. In the same way, the PEG tube will help her by eliminating the uncertainty and occasional distress of swallowing 'the wrong way' and choking. I'm getting expert at doing Heimlich manouvres to help flush stuff out of her airway. She spends a good deal of her day sitting quietly, reading, and I got a neat little tilting table that is light enough for her to move easily into position to support the book or magazine she is reading. And so we go on day by day, small victories, minor setbacks, but much more often we are cheerful than misrerable.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
More of the sea and sea voyages
There's been a lot of notice taken lately of what is happening in the seas that cover about four fifths of the world's surface. The huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the mouth of the Mississippi has hardly been out of the headlines since April when it happened. Today there is worrying news about the work of another oil company, Chevron, in very deep water in the stormy North Atlantic, where the deepest oil well ever, more than 2 Km below the sea's surface, is being drilled. Years ago when I was writing my memoirs I wrote several pieces that eventually ended on the cutting-room floor. One of these was about the sea and my travels on and over it.
Sea Voyages
In the early 1950s, the word ‘overseas’ had real meaning. It was the only way to get into or out of Australia – intercontinental air travel was little used and very expensive. I am happy that I was able to go overseas as a young man. In those days it was literally that. I sailed over the seas that separated my birthplace from British and European culture.
MV Adelaide Star
In 1951, the ship that took me from my home in Adelaide steamed across the Great Australian Bight into the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, past the Straits of Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay, to the English Channel and the Thames Estuary, to Tilbury Docks. Our ports of call were Fremantle, Columbo, Aden, Port Said, and Algiers, a glamorous, exotic city of excitement and mystery. Three years later I left again from Tilbury Docks to go back to Australia, hitching a ride as ship's doctor on the Adelaide Star, a freighter that carried twelve passengers. We refuelled at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, then cruised nonstop around the bulge of West Africa, across the tropical doldrums, the oily calm steel-blue surface broken only by schools of flying-fish on the day I had no shadow at noon; on south around the Cape of Good Hope for the long haul with following seas and winds, across the southern fringes of the Indian Ocean all the way to Adelaide.
That voyage from Tenerife to Adelaide, one of the highlights of my life, took four weeks without a stop at any port, although we sailed across the mouth of Table Bay on a sunny August afternoon, close enough to see the cables of the funicular that went to the top of Table Mountain, the colours of the dresses the girls ashore were wearing. I was with a little band of professional sailors and a few passengers all sharing the same wanderlust and love of the sea. A long sea voyage in company like that is a splendid way to study human nature, and to get to know and understand the sea in all of its moods.
On voyages later with my wife and children, I went back and forth on passenger-carrying freighters between Australia and England. On the way to England in 1961 we stopped in Fremantle, Aden, Port Said, and disembarked in Liverpool. Going back to Australia in 1962, we joined our ship in Rotterdam, sailed to Antwerp, then Marseilles, Genoa, Livorno (with time to visit Pisa and Florence), through the narrow seas between Sicily and the toe of Italy, with spectacular views of the island volcano of Stromboli spewing red-hot molten lava, and then Iskanderun in the angle at the North-Eastern corner of the Mediterranean between Turkey and Lebanon, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle and Adelaide. In early 1964, all the family had a 7-week voyage across the Pacific Ocean from Australia through the Panama Canal into the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. We travelled on a refrigerator ship carrying about 20,000 tons of frozen meat. We unloaded several thousand tons each in Kingston, Jamaica; Vera Cruz, Mexico; Charleston, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I disembarked to fly to Burlington, Vermont; and Boston, Massachusetts where the rest of the family left the ship. We were moving from Australia to the USA where I had a new academic position at the University of Vermont, and that voyage early in 1964 was our last. After that, air travel replaced ships on all my own and the family's journeys across the world. Our only sea voyages since have been on ferries that took us and our car across the North Sea or the English Channel on European holidays when we lived in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1960s, and a couple of brief cruises in the Mediterranean. I look back fondly on those vanished days of sea travel. Comely freighters have been replaced by ungainly container ships that don't have wide decks for adults to walk and children to play, and from what I’ve seen of them at sea, they appear to pitch and roll much more than the old style freighters, so they’d be uncomfortable for many seafarers.
A great oak tree's branches must bend before the wind, or they would break. So too, a ship's timbers or steel frame must yield before the force of the sea, or the ship would break up and sink. Every vessel I was ever on: yachts, a Greek caique, an Arab dhow, fake Chinese junks in Hong Kong Harbour, large ocean liners, little coastal steamers around South Australia in my childhood, and all those wonderful passenger-carrying freighters, all moved in the water like living creatures. You can hear, sometimes feel, them seemingly breathing as they move with the sea. They are living, they are breathing. Is that why we call a ship ‘she?’
On all these ships I've been most aware of the movements of the ship's protective skin in my bunk before drifting off to sleep. Behind the never-ending heartbeats of the engines that drive the ship forward through the sea are other sounds, comforting sounds of the ship bending and stretching as she moves with the interplaying forces of the sea. Perhaps the sea is getting heavier, the gently swelling rhythm of the waves is evolving into a storm, the pitch and roll are increasing. With every wave the steel spine and ribs and the steel skin of the ship are moving, quietly at first then more, as the waves gather force. The creaking of the shifting plates and rivets gets louder until it becomes a complaining sound closer to a shriek than a creak, too loud to be pleasurable. There are other noises then, the crash of the waves against the deck that make the whole ship shiver - the old sailor's oath, ‘shiver my timbers’ means what it says. There is a rushing sound of water along the hull, the shuddering roar of the propellers biting at the air instead of the sea as the stern lifts momentarily while the bows dig deeply into the next wave. There is a bang from time to time as a hatch not properly fastened slams shut, or the sound of a glass breaking as it falls from where it had been carelessly stowed to shatter on the deck. At times like that I enjoy more the sight of the ship battling against the sea than the sounds I hear in my bunk.
From the safety of the shore, a storm at sea is a grand spectacle. It looks as if the waves are mounting a charge. The breaking waves are aptly named white horses with their foaming manes. Each is a warrior that will attack and destroy a little piece of the shoreline. Turner's seascapes capture the flavour. In the early 1940s when I was a schoolboy one such storm was so violent that even in the sheltered waters of the gulf where the city of Adelaide nestles, the jetties along the foreshore were destroyed, and a warship on patrol was driven ashore. Seaside homes and hotels were badly damaged, the wide sandy beach scoured away, leaving a rubble of rocks. Shorelines were not recognized for what they are - dynamic, negotiable territory that changes hands between land and sea. In their pride and boundless faith in their infallibility the elders of my childhood had built great sea walls to mark the boundary between land and sea. But the boundary moved. The sea proved to be stronger than they believed. Everybody who knows Cape Cod knows this. In 1973 I saw a reinforced concrete house tipped on its end near Provincetown because somebody had not learnt the lesson about building on shifting sands. By now, I dare say, what was once somebody's comfortable home has disappeared beneath the sea, not like Port Royal in Jamaica because of a violent earthquake, but because the sea and the sandy shore are forever moving about, and in the end the sea almost always wins.
Like the worthy captain of the Pinafore, I'm hardly ever sick at sea. Two or three times is all, and never in a really severe storm. The first time was in the Mediterranean out of Port Said. A hot dry wind off the Sahara, laden with dust and grit, whipped the waves into choppy breakers that hit us beam on so we rolled, a shorter sharper roll than we had become accustomed to in the Indian Ocean. All my shipmates looked as I felt, white-faced, sweating, nauseated. Too much beer the previous night into a youthful stomach might have had something to do with it. A couple of other times on other ships it was the same, an unfamiliar motion that the organs of balance weren't expecting and couldn't handle, combined with eating or drinking not wisely but too well.
A storm at sea is an exhilarating experience as observed from a sturdy freighter with a well balanced and securely stowed cargo. Crossing the southern fringes of the Indian Ocean in the Roaring Forties (forty degrees south latitude) we ran for days before gale force winds, and for two or three days, the wind strengthened to Force 10, a full gale (over 62 mph). The dining saloon on that ship was below the bridge, facing forward. It had sturdy armoured glass windows, not portholes. I shared a table with the first officer. We had the fiddles up, movable slats at the edge of the dining table to stop our plates sliding off as the ship pitched and rolled. We had to sit spreadeagled, legs braced wide to keep from sliding with our heavy, splay-legged chairs to the far side of the saloon, and the steward had to place our food carefully in front of us a little at a time. Soup was off the menu. I loved those mealtimes. I had a perfect view of the ship burying her bows in deep green seas, shaking herself free of each wave as it broke over the forepeak, surged back across the hatch covers and ventilators to slam into the superstructure of the bridge, sometimes high enough to cover our windows momentarily. One moment we are in a deep valley of the ocean, the approaching wave is a mountain higher than the cross-trees of the foremast, closing in to port and starboard; the next moment we struggle to the summit of the mountain, and for a few seconds we see beyond the next great wave to a whole mountain range of waves. All have white caps like snow. The spray is flying away from us - we have a following sea in the Roaring Forties, a gale blowing us towards Australia. Those waves really looked like snow-capped mountains. Many times since I have flown high over the Swiss Alps, the Rockies, other snow-clad mountains. They are mundane and boring compared to the close-up view of the mountains and valleys of a storm at sea. On one of those days in that gale in 1954, the ship's log recorded the greatest distance she had ever travelled in a single 24-hour period, thanks to that powerful following wind and sea.
Even in the strongest winds and wildest seas of that storm the albatross never left us. Two or three of them picked us up after we rounded the Cape of Good Hope and came with us all the way to Investigator Strait, the narrow sea between Kangaroo Island and the South Australian mainland, before deserting us to follow another ship. They could hover for hours at a time, hardly moving a muscle or a feather, poised in the slipstream above the stern, their beady eyes darting everywhere, alert for any titbit. When the slops from the galley were tossed overboard, they would bank steeply, glide down and snap a mouthful from the bubbling, boiling wake, then soar up again to resume their place as sentinels over the stern. They must be able to stay aloft for weeks at a time without sleep, because far from land and in stormy seas there is nowhere for them to rest. When I looked out over the stern late at night, they were still there, on guard, alert and wide awake.
Fifty years ago in the 1950s those southern seas were rich with life of all kinds. We saw huge jellyfish, great translucent brownish or green creatures up to two meters across, shaped like the smaller Portuguese man-of-war, the poisonous stinging jellyfish of tropical waters. We saw killer whales, sharks, hammerhead sharks, huge schools of tuna chasing smaller fish that leapt in panic and in vain above the waves trying to escape their fate but were gobbled up anyway. We saw not only the albatross who followed us all the way, but gannets, terns, mutton birds, sheerwaters, far from land – though we knew there were islands, and one day we saw land, shadows rising from the mist to what looked like a high volcanic peak in the distance. This was St Paul Island, confirming if we needed confirmation, that we were deep in the Roaring Forties about halfway across on the great circle route from the Cape of Good Hope towards landfall off Kangaroo Island, South Australia.
In 1964 crossing the Pacific from Brisbane to the Panama Canal we ran head-on into a powerful storm, almost a hurricane, and for three days battered our way into the teeth of fierce winds and huge seas. This was a much stronger storm than the one I had experienced in the Southern Ocean, enough to clear the dining saloon of all but three or four of us when it was at its height. The dining saloon faced aft on that ship; the best vantage point was the bridge, to which I had access as a member of the crew, the ship's doctor. I spent many hours on the bridge discretely out of the way aft of the wheel and the instruments that told us how this storm was slowing our way through the ocean, at times almost bringing us to a stop. It was fascinating to see huge waves breaking over the bows and surging back, with the wind helping them gather force before they crashed into the superstructure, making the ship, sometimes those watching too, tremble. The open decks were dangerous, and if I ventured out the spray hit my face with the force of shots from a gun. I felt then the full power of the sea when it is angry. The dining saloon for officers and passengers thinned out during those days, the table cloths were dampened to stop plates sliding about, the fiddles were raised and our heavy chairs firmly fixed to the deck.
When the storm passed and the sea was calm again, we could see the ocean all around us ablaze with ghostly light on moonless nights from myriads of tiny phosphorescent plants and animals. If you flush a ship's toilet in the dark at such a time, it’s a dramatic sight - ship's toilets use sea water so the luminescent little creatures can be seen there too as well as in the wake and all around the ship.
On that Pacific crossing, thousands of miles out from Panama, we also saw long rows of brightly coloured buoys stretching into the distance, sometimes over the horizon. They marked drift nets, and twice we saw the trawlers that had set these terrible traps for the indiscriminate capture of fish, dolphins and seabirds. Those trawlers flew no flag identifying their nation. One we saw close enough to focus on with binoculars had oriental letters on her stern – a port in Taiwan, perhaps, or Japan or Korea. The rape of the ocean was well under way in 1964.
Once in the late 1990s flying at night back to North America from Tokyo, far out over the Pacific I looked down through the blackest night to what looked like a large scattered settlement – it was the lights of a huge fleet of fishing trawlers, using lights to attract their prey. The pillage continued at night as well as by day. Soon there will be nothing left alive in the sea. Since 1965 my views of the seas and oceans of the world have mostly been from high above, from airplanes. I’ve seen calving icebergs breaking off the Greenland glaciers and scattering in what looked from 10,000 meters above to be calm blue sunny seas; I’ve seen breakers and spray on the rocky cliffs of the Western Isles of Scotland. I’ve seen the brilliant green of coral atolls and volcanic islands in the Pacific. I’ve seen the scattered remnants of rocks and islands which are all that remains of what was once a large island in the Eastern Mediterranean until a massive volcanic explosion blew it to pieces about 3500 years ago, destroying the Minoan civilization of Crete in the process. I’ve flown high above the Bosphorus (and seen it from sea level). On a bright sunny day the blue seas of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora are dark brown around the Bosphorus, as they are near outflows of all the rivers that empty into the Mediterranean. As well as being pillaged, the sea is being poisoned by raw sewage and industrial effluents. Where great rivers drain into the sea the runoff contains not only industrial toxics and raw sewage but large quantities of fertilizer that collectively disrupt marine ecosystems and ultimately create huge ‘dead zones’ devoid of all life except pallid jellyfish. I am glad to have seen so much of the seas of our blue planet before they had been so damaged by stupid humans that there is a real risk of irreparable harm.
Sea Voyages
In the early 1950s, the word ‘overseas’ had real meaning. It was the only way to get into or out of Australia – intercontinental air travel was little used and very expensive. I am happy that I was able to go overseas as a young man. In those days it was literally that. I sailed over the seas that separated my birthplace from British and European culture.
MV Adelaide Star
In 1951, the ship that took me from my home in Adelaide steamed across the Great Australian Bight into the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, past the Straits of Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay, to the English Channel and the Thames Estuary, to Tilbury Docks. Our ports of call were Fremantle, Columbo, Aden, Port Said, and Algiers, a glamorous, exotic city of excitement and mystery. Three years later I left again from Tilbury Docks to go back to Australia, hitching a ride as ship's doctor on the Adelaide Star, a freighter that carried twelve passengers. We refuelled at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, then cruised nonstop around the bulge of West Africa, across the tropical doldrums, the oily calm steel-blue surface broken only by schools of flying-fish on the day I had no shadow at noon; on south around the Cape of Good Hope for the long haul with following seas and winds, across the southern fringes of the Indian Ocean all the way to Adelaide.
That voyage from Tenerife to Adelaide, one of the highlights of my life, took four weeks without a stop at any port, although we sailed across the mouth of Table Bay on a sunny August afternoon, close enough to see the cables of the funicular that went to the top of Table Mountain, the colours of the dresses the girls ashore were wearing. I was with a little band of professional sailors and a few passengers all sharing the same wanderlust and love of the sea. A long sea voyage in company like that is a splendid way to study human nature, and to get to know and understand the sea in all of its moods.
On voyages later with my wife and children, I went back and forth on passenger-carrying freighters between Australia and England. On the way to England in 1961 we stopped in Fremantle, Aden, Port Said, and disembarked in Liverpool. Going back to Australia in 1962, we joined our ship in Rotterdam, sailed to Antwerp, then Marseilles, Genoa, Livorno (with time to visit Pisa and Florence), through the narrow seas between Sicily and the toe of Italy, with spectacular views of the island volcano of Stromboli spewing red-hot molten lava, and then Iskanderun in the angle at the North-Eastern corner of the Mediterranean between Turkey and Lebanon, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle and Adelaide. In early 1964, all the family had a 7-week voyage across the Pacific Ocean from Australia through the Panama Canal into the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. We travelled on a refrigerator ship carrying about 20,000 tons of frozen meat. We unloaded several thousand tons each in Kingston, Jamaica; Vera Cruz, Mexico; Charleston, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I disembarked to fly to Burlington, Vermont; and Boston, Massachusetts where the rest of the family left the ship. We were moving from Australia to the USA where I had a new academic position at the University of Vermont, and that voyage early in 1964 was our last. After that, air travel replaced ships on all my own and the family's journeys across the world. Our only sea voyages since have been on ferries that took us and our car across the North Sea or the English Channel on European holidays when we lived in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1960s, and a couple of brief cruises in the Mediterranean. I look back fondly on those vanished days of sea travel. Comely freighters have been replaced by ungainly container ships that don't have wide decks for adults to walk and children to play, and from what I’ve seen of them at sea, they appear to pitch and roll much more than the old style freighters, so they’d be uncomfortable for many seafarers.
A great oak tree's branches must bend before the wind, or they would break. So too, a ship's timbers or steel frame must yield before the force of the sea, or the ship would break up and sink. Every vessel I was ever on: yachts, a Greek caique, an Arab dhow, fake Chinese junks in Hong Kong Harbour, large ocean liners, little coastal steamers around South Australia in my childhood, and all those wonderful passenger-carrying freighters, all moved in the water like living creatures. You can hear, sometimes feel, them seemingly breathing as they move with the sea. They are living, they are breathing. Is that why we call a ship ‘she?’
On all these ships I've been most aware of the movements of the ship's protective skin in my bunk before drifting off to sleep. Behind the never-ending heartbeats of the engines that drive the ship forward through the sea are other sounds, comforting sounds of the ship bending and stretching as she moves with the interplaying forces of the sea. Perhaps the sea is getting heavier, the gently swelling rhythm of the waves is evolving into a storm, the pitch and roll are increasing. With every wave the steel spine and ribs and the steel skin of the ship are moving, quietly at first then more, as the waves gather force. The creaking of the shifting plates and rivets gets louder until it becomes a complaining sound closer to a shriek than a creak, too loud to be pleasurable. There are other noises then, the crash of the waves against the deck that make the whole ship shiver - the old sailor's oath, ‘shiver my timbers’ means what it says. There is a rushing sound of water along the hull, the shuddering roar of the propellers biting at the air instead of the sea as the stern lifts momentarily while the bows dig deeply into the next wave. There is a bang from time to time as a hatch not properly fastened slams shut, or the sound of a glass breaking as it falls from where it had been carelessly stowed to shatter on the deck. At times like that I enjoy more the sight of the ship battling against the sea than the sounds I hear in my bunk.
From the safety of the shore, a storm at sea is a grand spectacle. It looks as if the waves are mounting a charge. The breaking waves are aptly named white horses with their foaming manes. Each is a warrior that will attack and destroy a little piece of the shoreline. Turner's seascapes capture the flavour. In the early 1940s when I was a schoolboy one such storm was so violent that even in the sheltered waters of the gulf where the city of Adelaide nestles, the jetties along the foreshore were destroyed, and a warship on patrol was driven ashore. Seaside homes and hotels were badly damaged, the wide sandy beach scoured away, leaving a rubble of rocks. Shorelines were not recognized for what they are - dynamic, negotiable territory that changes hands between land and sea. In their pride and boundless faith in their infallibility the elders of my childhood had built great sea walls to mark the boundary between land and sea. But the boundary moved. The sea proved to be stronger than they believed. Everybody who knows Cape Cod knows this. In 1973 I saw a reinforced concrete house tipped on its end near Provincetown because somebody had not learnt the lesson about building on shifting sands. By now, I dare say, what was once somebody's comfortable home has disappeared beneath the sea, not like Port Royal in Jamaica because of a violent earthquake, but because the sea and the sandy shore are forever moving about, and in the end the sea almost always wins.
Like the worthy captain of the Pinafore, I'm hardly ever sick at sea. Two or three times is all, and never in a really severe storm. The first time was in the Mediterranean out of Port Said. A hot dry wind off the Sahara, laden with dust and grit, whipped the waves into choppy breakers that hit us beam on so we rolled, a shorter sharper roll than we had become accustomed to in the Indian Ocean. All my shipmates looked as I felt, white-faced, sweating, nauseated. Too much beer the previous night into a youthful stomach might have had something to do with it. A couple of other times on other ships it was the same, an unfamiliar motion that the organs of balance weren't expecting and couldn't handle, combined with eating or drinking not wisely but too well.
A storm at sea is an exhilarating experience as observed from a sturdy freighter with a well balanced and securely stowed cargo. Crossing the southern fringes of the Indian Ocean in the Roaring Forties (forty degrees south latitude) we ran for days before gale force winds, and for two or three days, the wind strengthened to Force 10, a full gale (over 62 mph). The dining saloon on that ship was below the bridge, facing forward. It had sturdy armoured glass windows, not portholes. I shared a table with the first officer. We had the fiddles up, movable slats at the edge of the dining table to stop our plates sliding off as the ship pitched and rolled. We had to sit spreadeagled, legs braced wide to keep from sliding with our heavy, splay-legged chairs to the far side of the saloon, and the steward had to place our food carefully in front of us a little at a time. Soup was off the menu. I loved those mealtimes. I had a perfect view of the ship burying her bows in deep green seas, shaking herself free of each wave as it broke over the forepeak, surged back across the hatch covers and ventilators to slam into the superstructure of the bridge, sometimes high enough to cover our windows momentarily. One moment we are in a deep valley of the ocean, the approaching wave is a mountain higher than the cross-trees of the foremast, closing in to port and starboard; the next moment we struggle to the summit of the mountain, and for a few seconds we see beyond the next great wave to a whole mountain range of waves. All have white caps like snow. The spray is flying away from us - we have a following sea in the Roaring Forties, a gale blowing us towards Australia. Those waves really looked like snow-capped mountains. Many times since I have flown high over the Swiss Alps, the Rockies, other snow-clad mountains. They are mundane and boring compared to the close-up view of the mountains and valleys of a storm at sea. On one of those days in that gale in 1954, the ship's log recorded the greatest distance she had ever travelled in a single 24-hour period, thanks to that powerful following wind and sea.
Even in the strongest winds and wildest seas of that storm the albatross never left us. Two or three of them picked us up after we rounded the Cape of Good Hope and came with us all the way to Investigator Strait, the narrow sea between Kangaroo Island and the South Australian mainland, before deserting us to follow another ship. They could hover for hours at a time, hardly moving a muscle or a feather, poised in the slipstream above the stern, their beady eyes darting everywhere, alert for any titbit. When the slops from the galley were tossed overboard, they would bank steeply, glide down and snap a mouthful from the bubbling, boiling wake, then soar up again to resume their place as sentinels over the stern. They must be able to stay aloft for weeks at a time without sleep, because far from land and in stormy seas there is nowhere for them to rest. When I looked out over the stern late at night, they were still there, on guard, alert and wide awake.
Fifty years ago in the 1950s those southern seas were rich with life of all kinds. We saw huge jellyfish, great translucent brownish or green creatures up to two meters across, shaped like the smaller Portuguese man-of-war, the poisonous stinging jellyfish of tropical waters. We saw killer whales, sharks, hammerhead sharks, huge schools of tuna chasing smaller fish that leapt in panic and in vain above the waves trying to escape their fate but were gobbled up anyway. We saw not only the albatross who followed us all the way, but gannets, terns, mutton birds, sheerwaters, far from land – though we knew there were islands, and one day we saw land, shadows rising from the mist to what looked like a high volcanic peak in the distance. This was St Paul Island, confirming if we needed confirmation, that we were deep in the Roaring Forties about halfway across on the great circle route from the Cape of Good Hope towards landfall off Kangaroo Island, South Australia.
In 1964 crossing the Pacific from Brisbane to the Panama Canal we ran head-on into a powerful storm, almost a hurricane, and for three days battered our way into the teeth of fierce winds and huge seas. This was a much stronger storm than the one I had experienced in the Southern Ocean, enough to clear the dining saloon of all but three or four of us when it was at its height. The dining saloon faced aft on that ship; the best vantage point was the bridge, to which I had access as a member of the crew, the ship's doctor. I spent many hours on the bridge discretely out of the way aft of the wheel and the instruments that told us how this storm was slowing our way through the ocean, at times almost bringing us to a stop. It was fascinating to see huge waves breaking over the bows and surging back, with the wind helping them gather force before they crashed into the superstructure, making the ship, sometimes those watching too, tremble. The open decks were dangerous, and if I ventured out the spray hit my face with the force of shots from a gun. I felt then the full power of the sea when it is angry. The dining saloon for officers and passengers thinned out during those days, the table cloths were dampened to stop plates sliding about, the fiddles were raised and our heavy chairs firmly fixed to the deck.
When the storm passed and the sea was calm again, we could see the ocean all around us ablaze with ghostly light on moonless nights from myriads of tiny phosphorescent plants and animals. If you flush a ship's toilet in the dark at such a time, it’s a dramatic sight - ship's toilets use sea water so the luminescent little creatures can be seen there too as well as in the wake and all around the ship.
On that Pacific crossing, thousands of miles out from Panama, we also saw long rows of brightly coloured buoys stretching into the distance, sometimes over the horizon. They marked drift nets, and twice we saw the trawlers that had set these terrible traps for the indiscriminate capture of fish, dolphins and seabirds. Those trawlers flew no flag identifying their nation. One we saw close enough to focus on with binoculars had oriental letters on her stern – a port in Taiwan, perhaps, or Japan or Korea. The rape of the ocean was well under way in 1964.
Once in the late 1990s flying at night back to North America from Tokyo, far out over the Pacific I looked down through the blackest night to what looked like a large scattered settlement – it was the lights of a huge fleet of fishing trawlers, using lights to attract their prey. The pillage continued at night as well as by day. Soon there will be nothing left alive in the sea. Since 1965 my views of the seas and oceans of the world have mostly been from high above, from airplanes. I’ve seen calving icebergs breaking off the Greenland glaciers and scattering in what looked from 10,000 meters above to be calm blue sunny seas; I’ve seen breakers and spray on the rocky cliffs of the Western Isles of Scotland. I’ve seen the brilliant green of coral atolls and volcanic islands in the Pacific. I’ve seen the scattered remnants of rocks and islands which are all that remains of what was once a large island in the Eastern Mediterranean until a massive volcanic explosion blew it to pieces about 3500 years ago, destroying the Minoan civilization of Crete in the process. I’ve flown high above the Bosphorus (and seen it from sea level). On a bright sunny day the blue seas of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora are dark brown around the Bosphorus, as they are near outflows of all the rivers that empty into the Mediterranean. As well as being pillaged, the sea is being poisoned by raw sewage and industrial effluents. Where great rivers drain into the sea the runoff contains not only industrial toxics and raw sewage but large quantities of fertilizer that collectively disrupt marine ecosystems and ultimately create huge ‘dead zones’ devoid of all life except pallid jellyfish. I am glad to have seen so much of the seas of our blue planet before they had been so damaged by stupid humans that there is a real risk of irreparable harm.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Memories of a seafaring man
My adventures as a ship's surgeon on passenger-carrying freighters plying the seas between Australia and Europe and later across the Pacific and through the Panama Canal into the Caribbean and on to the USA, have come up in recent conversations. At the risk of boring family members who've heard these before, I'll paste two stories here. These happened on a wonderful voyage in 1954, on the Adelaide Star, a Blue Star line freighter that carried 12 passengers and a crew made up mainly of junior ship's officers about my own age with whom I bonded better than I did with any of the passengers; after all, as the ship's surgeon, I was a member of the crew too.
This anecdote was published as a column-filler in British Medical Journal in 1993
Pushing teeth
In the 1940s when I was a medical student, I had a card with a long list of procedures to perform under supervision and get signed up by clinical tutors: reducing and plastering a Colles' fracture, performing a lumbar puncture, passing a catheter, and so on. At the end of the list was "extract two teeth." Why two? I never discovered the answer. But like some of my classmates, I extracted a great many more. The dentist who supervised us had a sensationally beautiful chairside assistant, and we went back again and again to gaze at her longingly and attempt to invite her to our parties (to no avail; she disdained sex-starved medical students suffering from arrested adolescence). But thanks to her, I soon excelled at extracting teeth. The dentist knew well why I was there, and ensured that my time wasn't entirely wasted.
The secret of dental extractions is not to pull the tooth, but to push it out: push the wedge shaped points of the dental forceps well down alongside the roots of the tooth so the wedge loosens the roots; extraction then is usually easy.
This skill came in handy a few years later. I was hitching a ride across the world as ship's doctor on a Blue Star freighter. Shortly after we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route from London to Adelaide, the chief engineer, a curmudgeonly tyrant, bit savagely into a bread roll and broke the cusp off a bicuspid. He was in agony. I had to deal expeditiously and well with this acute dental emergency or my life in this small, closed and highly critical community wouldn't have been worth living. The surgery on this ship was very well equipped; I could have done a craniotomy or a destructive operation on a foetus. And of course there was a full set of dental forceps.
First I premedicated the Chief with a tumbler of brandy. The hard part was injecting local anaesthetic; even semi-stupefied, the Chief didn't like this part at all. The heavy seas of the Roaring Forties were no help, nor was my choice of a dental chair without adequate support for his head and neck (I hadn't planned this part as thoughtfully as I ought to have done).
The rest was easy. I carefully positioned the dental forceps blades beside the broken tooth, and pushed down as hard as I could. The tooth popped up and out like a pea out of a pod. It was so simple I felt like clearing the rest of that side of his mouth while it was numb, but self-restraint prevailed. For the rest of the voyage across the Southern Ocean perhaps it's as well that my reputation for competence wasn't tested further. I've never again been called upon to extract teeth. Pity, really. I think I could have become a master of the art, thanks to those hours of unrequited lust and useful experience in the dental clinic behind our teaching hospital.
Fortunately the other memorable episode happened a few days after I took out the chief engineer’s tooth. I submitted this to Richardson’s Roundup on CBC Radio but if Bill Richardson ever played it, I didn’t hear it.
Catching an albatross
Few of life’s pleasures can beat a long ocean voyage. In 1954 I hitched a ride as ship’s surgeon on a freighter, a cheap way for young doctors to travel between England and Australia in those days. The voyage lasted nearly two months, including four weeks without a port – from a refuelling stop at Tenerife in the Canary Islands to Adelaide. We sailed past Cape Town without stopping, on a sparkling sunny day, so close we could see the colours of the dresses the girls ashore were wearing. It was nearing dusk as we rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and several albatross took station as escorts above our stern. For two weeks, until landfall off Kangaroo Island in South Australia, these great, graceful creatures glided effortlessly in our slipstream. It was the best journey in the world. It was a good time to read Apsley Cherry-Garrard's classic, The Worst Journey in the World.
Cherry-Garrard described how, before reaching Antarctica, he caught sea-birds, including an albatross, by trailing a weighted line in the wake of the ship (this was for scientific observations he was making). The weight bobs up and down on the surface, sustained there by the momentum of the fast-moving ship. To an albatross, it looks like a fish, a tasty morsel worth swooping to swallow; but because the albatross comes in from ahead and to one side, the weight causes the line to tangle about the bird's wings or feet, so it can be hauled aboard. Apsley Cherry-Garrard didn't say what happened after that.
It works. At the first cast, the largest of our escorts swooped down, and just as Cherry-Garrard described, the weighted line wrapped itself around the bird's legs, and we hauled it aboard, its wings flapping ineffectually.
An airborne albatross is one of the noblest sights one could ever wish to see. On the pitching and rolling deck of our ship on a blustery sea in the Roaring Forties, it was disconsolate, deeply embarrassed, very frightened, very angry – and very incontinent. At both ends. I can't recall all these years later which came first, the vomited-up half-digested fish, or the voided bowels; or whether both happened together. It covered most of the well-scrubbed deck with a stinking mess that had the consistency of fish glue and smelled unimaginably abominable.
There was another problem. Mindful of the Ancient Mariner's fate, we wanted to release our albatross, but it couldn't or wouldn't take off from the deck. It was unfortunate that the ship's captain, a descendent of Bligh of the Bounty I shouldn’t wonder, chose to make his daily inspection of the decks while we were wondering what to do. Observing him, I tried to be a detached clinician: Was I about to see a man actually having an apoplectic stroke? Gritting his teeth, he ordered us to get rid of the bird and clean up the mess. His demeanour made it clear that failure to comply, and quickly, would have dire consequences.
In the end one of the other officers launched the bird by running along the deck with it, like getting a kite aloft. Not before he'd slipped and slid on his bottom in the guano, however. We three miscreants who had started all this didn't escape so easily. We were on our hands and knees until after dusk, cleaning and scrubbing the deck to restore it to its pristine pre-albatross condition. Next day the pants I'd been wearing went over the side, stinking past all hope of ever being cleansed of the mess that covered them. Good pants too, my second-best pair.
In those days, the standard British Board of Trade rate of pay for ship’s surgeons who got a free passage across the world in this way was a shilling a month, plus keep. I should have received two shillings. When I collected my discharge certificate in Sydney at the end of what was, all things considered, a voyage that I still regard as one of the highlights of my life, I got only one shilling. I didn’t dare ask why.
This anecdote was published as a column-filler in British Medical Journal in 1993
Pushing teeth
In the 1940s when I was a medical student, I had a card with a long list of procedures to perform under supervision and get signed up by clinical tutors: reducing and plastering a Colles' fracture, performing a lumbar puncture, passing a catheter, and so on. At the end of the list was "extract two teeth." Why two? I never discovered the answer. But like some of my classmates, I extracted a great many more. The dentist who supervised us had a sensationally beautiful chairside assistant, and we went back again and again to gaze at her longingly and attempt to invite her to our parties (to no avail; she disdained sex-starved medical students suffering from arrested adolescence). But thanks to her, I soon excelled at extracting teeth. The dentist knew well why I was there, and ensured that my time wasn't entirely wasted.
The secret of dental extractions is not to pull the tooth, but to push it out: push the wedge shaped points of the dental forceps well down alongside the roots of the tooth so the wedge loosens the roots; extraction then is usually easy.
This skill came in handy a few years later. I was hitching a ride across the world as ship's doctor on a Blue Star freighter. Shortly after we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope en route from London to Adelaide, the chief engineer, a curmudgeonly tyrant, bit savagely into a bread roll and broke the cusp off a bicuspid. He was in agony. I had to deal expeditiously and well with this acute dental emergency or my life in this small, closed and highly critical community wouldn't have been worth living. The surgery on this ship was very well equipped; I could have done a craniotomy or a destructive operation on a foetus. And of course there was a full set of dental forceps.
First I premedicated the Chief with a tumbler of brandy. The hard part was injecting local anaesthetic; even semi-stupefied, the Chief didn't like this part at all. The heavy seas of the Roaring Forties were no help, nor was my choice of a dental chair without adequate support for his head and neck (I hadn't planned this part as thoughtfully as I ought to have done).
The rest was easy. I carefully positioned the dental forceps blades beside the broken tooth, and pushed down as hard as I could. The tooth popped up and out like a pea out of a pod. It was so simple I felt like clearing the rest of that side of his mouth while it was numb, but self-restraint prevailed. For the rest of the voyage across the Southern Ocean perhaps it's as well that my reputation for competence wasn't tested further. I've never again been called upon to extract teeth. Pity, really. I think I could have become a master of the art, thanks to those hours of unrequited lust and useful experience in the dental clinic behind our teaching hospital.
Fortunately the other memorable episode happened a few days after I took out the chief engineer’s tooth. I submitted this to Richardson’s Roundup on CBC Radio but if Bill Richardson ever played it, I didn’t hear it.
Catching an albatross
Few of life’s pleasures can beat a long ocean voyage. In 1954 I hitched a ride as ship’s surgeon on a freighter, a cheap way for young doctors to travel between England and Australia in those days. The voyage lasted nearly two months, including four weeks without a port – from a refuelling stop at Tenerife in the Canary Islands to Adelaide. We sailed past Cape Town without stopping, on a sparkling sunny day, so close we could see the colours of the dresses the girls ashore were wearing. It was nearing dusk as we rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and several albatross took station as escorts above our stern. For two weeks, until landfall off Kangaroo Island in South Australia, these great, graceful creatures glided effortlessly in our slipstream. It was the best journey in the world. It was a good time to read Apsley Cherry-Garrard's classic, The Worst Journey in the World.
Cherry-Garrard described how, before reaching Antarctica, he caught sea-birds, including an albatross, by trailing a weighted line in the wake of the ship (this was for scientific observations he was making). The weight bobs up and down on the surface, sustained there by the momentum of the fast-moving ship. To an albatross, it looks like a fish, a tasty morsel worth swooping to swallow; but because the albatross comes in from ahead and to one side, the weight causes the line to tangle about the bird's wings or feet, so it can be hauled aboard. Apsley Cherry-Garrard didn't say what happened after that.
It works. At the first cast, the largest of our escorts swooped down, and just as Cherry-Garrard described, the weighted line wrapped itself around the bird's legs, and we hauled it aboard, its wings flapping ineffectually.
An airborne albatross is one of the noblest sights one could ever wish to see. On the pitching and rolling deck of our ship on a blustery sea in the Roaring Forties, it was disconsolate, deeply embarrassed, very frightened, very angry – and very incontinent. At both ends. I can't recall all these years later which came first, the vomited-up half-digested fish, or the voided bowels; or whether both happened together. It covered most of the well-scrubbed deck with a stinking mess that had the consistency of fish glue and smelled unimaginably abominable.
There was another problem. Mindful of the Ancient Mariner's fate, we wanted to release our albatross, but it couldn't or wouldn't take off from the deck. It was unfortunate that the ship's captain, a descendent of Bligh of the Bounty I shouldn’t wonder, chose to make his daily inspection of the decks while we were wondering what to do. Observing him, I tried to be a detached clinician: Was I about to see a man actually having an apoplectic stroke? Gritting his teeth, he ordered us to get rid of the bird and clean up the mess. His demeanour made it clear that failure to comply, and quickly, would have dire consequences.
In the end one of the other officers launched the bird by running along the deck with it, like getting a kite aloft. Not before he'd slipped and slid on his bottom in the guano, however. We three miscreants who had started all this didn't escape so easily. We were on our hands and knees until after dusk, cleaning and scrubbing the deck to restore it to its pristine pre-albatross condition. Next day the pants I'd been wearing went over the side, stinking past all hope of ever being cleansed of the mess that covered them. Good pants too, my second-best pair.
In those days, the standard British Board of Trade rate of pay for ship’s surgeons who got a free passage across the world in this way was a shilling a month, plus keep. I should have received two shillings. When I collected my discharge certificate in Sydney at the end of what was, all things considered, a voyage that I still regard as one of the highlights of my life, I got only one shilling. I didn’t dare ask why.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Independence and self-sufficiency
Last weekend was very pleasant. David and Desre came up from Kingston, bringing John along with them; Rebecca and Richard, and Jonathan also came over, and Dorothyanne dropped in briefly on her way to the 60th wedding anniversary of her aunt and uncle. So all but our other two grandchildren, Christina and Peter, were gathered here at our apartment for a family party (Christina was working in Peterborough and Peter was in South-east Asia, in Vietnam we think). Jonathan took some photos but we haven't seen these yet. When we do I may add one or two to this post. The original plan had been for all of us to gather in Rebecca's garden beside her pond, but it was a steamy-hot and very windy day, would have been unpleasant there whereas here we sat in air conditioned comfort; an afternoon thunderstorm confirmed that we had made a wise choice. Since then, Janet Wendy has become more breathless, even a little distressed at times, and very willing to use the ventilator to assist her respiratory muscles. She's just skin and bone now, not much muscle left on her neck, back, and arms, but still does her best to be independent. As her legs remain quite strong, she uses the walker to get about and despite our pleas to let us do things for her that she doesn't need to do, she continues on her independent way. For example at meal times she gets up from the table, gets behind her walker, and goes to the kitchen to change the volume on the radio, instead of asking me, or Sharon, to do this simple little thing. She likes to be independent and self sufficient, but it bothers us who try to help her that she wastes her limited energy in this way, with the result that she doesn't have enough left over to breathe comfortably. No amount of gentle persuasion, nagging or -- her word -- bullying, seems capable of changing her lifetime habit of independence and self-sufficiency. It's inevitable I suppose that she should be like this, and we just have to accept it.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Illusion
This story won a prize in the City of Ottawa annual competition in 2007 for ‘novice writers’ (i.e. previously unpublished) aged 55 and over. She qualified with a quarter century to spare.
ILLUSION
Janet Wendy Last
Betty blinked in the glare at the threshold of her pension. It was already scorching hot with the light rippling on the Mediterranean below, and although she should have started earlier she did enjoy the leisurely breakfast. This was her first holiday in years, and after a week on the island she was beginning to relax and enjoy the slower pace. She wandered off along the cobbled street between whitewashed stone houses with bright window boxes. No wonder the people here seemed open and friendly with so much colour in their lives. Strangely though, the population seemed to consist mostly of old women dressed uniformly in black, with very few young people. Of course the children would all be up the hill in school at this time of day.
As she explored, she tried to keep on a horizontal tack, because she had no climbing muscles in her legs. After being flat on her back for so long what muscles she had were pretty flabby. The absence of cars, calmed her: since her traffic crash even the sound of wheels on pavement unnerved her.
Between the two-storied houses the path was shaded, making the air pleasantly cool, but the sun on the higher walls caused sunbeams to dance off the mullioned window panes opposite. Cats were on every window sill, doorstep or on walls by the houses. Several times one jumped up and run in front of her. Was it good or bad luck for a black cat to cross one's path? She wasn't sure but it didn't matter.
At intervals when paths crossed her way the sun flooded through and she got a glimpse of the bay below where the golden sand contrasted with the turquoise water which lazily rolled up the beach.
When one of the bigger roads up the hill intersected she had a view towards a cathedral on a large square and the corner nearest to her had an inviting striped awning and cafe tables where old men sat with their coffee playing dominoes. She decided to rest there.
The road down was steep and by the time she sank into a chair in the shade her knees were wobbly. She really had a long way to go to get back into shape. Who would have thought that these same legs could downhill ski for hours just a few months ago.
From her table she had a different view from the one at her pension which gave onto the east end of the bay where small fishing boats were moored behind the breakwater. She hadn’t seen the west end before and studied it as the sun lit up cliffs and fissures in the rock wall, enormous boulders cascading down as if some giant had thrown them.
She ordered a coffee and baklava and decided to stay under the shade for a while. Just then the cathedral doors opened and some women came down the steps into the square to linger by the fountain while three small children splashed each other with the water spewing from the cherubs' mouths. She felt a deep calm as she gazed at this peaceful scene.
When she could no longer prolong her coffee and the proprietor was bustling about polishing the tables and looking at his watch, she paid him, left a generous tip and wandered off on a side path. The fierce heat had gone out of the sun, and a breeze was whispering off the sea. She wanted to see what was on top of and beyond the cliff.
After about fifteen minutes the character of the streets changed. There were wooden barriers lying about haphazardly, sand was drifting against the walls, litter was blowing around and there were no colourful window boxes. The houses looked empty, shutters nailed up, weeds growing through cracks in the walls. She turned up the inclined path determined to see what was at the top and explore the ruins she had seen from the cathedral square. The ruins came into view as she climbed higher.
It was then that she heard a piano, children’s voices and laughter, so odd in this desolate place. She turned the corner to find a big door propped open, so she paused to look inside. The slanting sun was highlighting the dust motes through which she could dimly see a woman playing a piano. A game of musical chairs was nearly finished as only four chairs remained in the centre of the hall, where five children were racing and pushing to get a seat. About fifty others were grouped around the walls of the room, cheering on their favourite to win.
Betty moved closer to get a better look when a nun dressed in a grey habit came up to her, carrying a large tray covered with a heavy towel. “There you are,” she said in an unmistakable Irish accent, “I’m Sister Brigid. We've been waiting for you. Please take this to Kristos.. You'll need some one to show you the way. Nikos. Come here please!” A small black haired, barefoot kid, with a merry face and a broad grin ran up to the nun. She gave instructions to Nikos who beckoned to Betty and turned to go through the door and along the path to the top of the hill. The going was difficult because she couldn't see her feet below the tray and there were drifts of sand and lumps of rock strewn along the path. It didn't help that Nikos hopped about like a puppy, sometimes hiding and then jumping out at her. The first time that happened she nearly dropped the tray, while he whooped with laughter.
They climbed over a low stone wall into what had been a wonderful formal garden, but now overgrown with oleander and aloe cactus. The central path led to the house door, massive carved wood with a knocker beyond the reach of her small guide. He picked up a rock to hit the door several times, but there was no response. Nikos led the way around the house to the other side where a smaller door opened half way as they approached it. A little boy with a puppy stood there, and after an exchange of words, Nikos indicated that she should put the tray on a wobbly urn standing by the door. Carefully she balanced it, happy to be rid of the weight on her arms. Once more Nikos beckoned her around the house to the wall on the edge of the cliff. He disappeared, and in a panic, feeling responsible for him, she looked over the wall to a sheer drop to the rocks below, now covered by surf blown by the much stronger wind.
“Nikos” she called, and was answered by a shrill whistle carried on the wind. Looking over the wall again she saw a tousled dark head and a wide smile emerge from a small cave about two meters down the cliff. Using hand gestures she called out “Come up please,” but the head vanished again into the cave. Feeling tired, worried and impotent she stepped back from the wall to look around the garden. Her rational mind argued that there must be some secret passage to the cave, maybe a well, or a hole, but she could seen nothing nearby and because Nikos was as agile as a cat she figured he would be alright.
The afternoon shadows were lengthening, and having come this far she felt impelled to see over the crest of the hill to the country beyond. She followed the wall away from the cliff, and came to a steep set of stone steps leading to the top of a sand bank. With difficulty she climbed the narrow steps and started to walk on the sand which oozed away from under her feet and glissaded down the slope to the deep valley below. Caught by surprise she had the luck to fall on her hands and knees and hook her foot over the top of the stone step, thankful to be on solid ground.
She looked down on a large sandy basin, high walled on four sides, the country beyond not visible except on the south slope where the almost vertical sand wall finished at the coast. A hissing noise startled her, making her look landward. On the horizon of the far sand dune, a row of goats was silhouetted against the sky, and the sand they dislodged was cascading down to the floor of the valley, starting like a small waterfall and building to an avalanche. The goats disappeared over the other side. She shivered as the wind picked up, and she hastily climbed sailor wise, backwards down the steps.
The afternoon was nearly over and with no twilight and a strict dinner hour where she was staying she lost no time in retracing her steps to regain the town. At the end of Kristos’s garden she looked over the cliff and called ”Nikos” as loud as she could but there was silence, and no tousled head showed at the cave entrance. The wind on the water blew salt onto her face as she bent over the wall. She paused at the church hall which was empty, the piano and chairs tidied away and the door swinging to and fro on its one hinge.
Taking a lower route than before, she stumbled along the uneven path and was surprised to see the cathedral square open in front of her much sooner than she had expected. The cafe, now full of families having dinner was on her left, so she crossed in front of it and glad of the hand rail on the wall, climbed the steep hill to her main path leading to her pension.
As she entered she saw that the other guests were already being served, but she felt so dirty she had to wash and change before eating. By the time she sat at the table the others were finishing and her hostess seemed put out.
“You will have to hurry if you are going to see the start of St.Anthony's parade,” she said, “This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the great earthquake and they are dedicating a statue in the Square.”
“Who is the statue of?” asked Betty.
“The victims of the big earthquake on this afternoon fifty years ago. A huge wave washed over the cliff as it fell into the sea. The church at the top and many houses just dropped into oblivion. All the school children, their mothers and Sister Brigid were in the church hall celebrating St Anthony and nearly all perished. Only two children survived. Kristos, who had run home to see to his new puppy and Nikos who was found two days later wedged in a cleft of the crumbling cliff. Poor lad had been severely injured, was flown to the mainland for treatment and came back months later in a wheel chair, but he didn't thrive and died soon after. Many of the fathers who were fishermen also perished. A few bodies were washed up along the coast weeks later. The tsunami caused a huge build up of sand on the north shore of the island and that is where the dunes are. Very dangerous, with whispering, unstable sand which has engulfed many an animal and person who has ventured out on them. It is forbidden to go up there.”
“What happened to Kristos?” asked Betty.
“He was taken to Canada by his uncle, and this year he has sent money for a statue of Sister Brigid and the others. Tonight it will be unveiled. ”
Betty arrived late at the square after most of the villagers had left for home, so she could see Nikos clearly with his merry face and broad grin standing next to the nun she had seen earlier, but now they were part of a marble statue.
ILLUSION
Janet Wendy Last
Betty blinked in the glare at the threshold of her pension. It was already scorching hot with the light rippling on the Mediterranean below, and although she should have started earlier she did enjoy the leisurely breakfast. This was her first holiday in years, and after a week on the island she was beginning to relax and enjoy the slower pace. She wandered off along the cobbled street between whitewashed stone houses with bright window boxes. No wonder the people here seemed open and friendly with so much colour in their lives. Strangely though, the population seemed to consist mostly of old women dressed uniformly in black, with very few young people. Of course the children would all be up the hill in school at this time of day.
As she explored, she tried to keep on a horizontal tack, because she had no climbing muscles in her legs. After being flat on her back for so long what muscles she had were pretty flabby. The absence of cars, calmed her: since her traffic crash even the sound of wheels on pavement unnerved her.
Between the two-storied houses the path was shaded, making the air pleasantly cool, but the sun on the higher walls caused sunbeams to dance off the mullioned window panes opposite. Cats were on every window sill, doorstep or on walls by the houses. Several times one jumped up and run in front of her. Was it good or bad luck for a black cat to cross one's path? She wasn't sure but it didn't matter.
At intervals when paths crossed her way the sun flooded through and she got a glimpse of the bay below where the golden sand contrasted with the turquoise water which lazily rolled up the beach.
When one of the bigger roads up the hill intersected she had a view towards a cathedral on a large square and the corner nearest to her had an inviting striped awning and cafe tables where old men sat with their coffee playing dominoes. She decided to rest there.
The road down was steep and by the time she sank into a chair in the shade her knees were wobbly. She really had a long way to go to get back into shape. Who would have thought that these same legs could downhill ski for hours just a few months ago.
From her table she had a different view from the one at her pension which gave onto the east end of the bay where small fishing boats were moored behind the breakwater. She hadn’t seen the west end before and studied it as the sun lit up cliffs and fissures in the rock wall, enormous boulders cascading down as if some giant had thrown them.
She ordered a coffee and baklava and decided to stay under the shade for a while. Just then the cathedral doors opened and some women came down the steps into the square to linger by the fountain while three small children splashed each other with the water spewing from the cherubs' mouths. She felt a deep calm as she gazed at this peaceful scene.
When she could no longer prolong her coffee and the proprietor was bustling about polishing the tables and looking at his watch, she paid him, left a generous tip and wandered off on a side path. The fierce heat had gone out of the sun, and a breeze was whispering off the sea. She wanted to see what was on top of and beyond the cliff.
After about fifteen minutes the character of the streets changed. There were wooden barriers lying about haphazardly, sand was drifting against the walls, litter was blowing around and there were no colourful window boxes. The houses looked empty, shutters nailed up, weeds growing through cracks in the walls. She turned up the inclined path determined to see what was at the top and explore the ruins she had seen from the cathedral square. The ruins came into view as she climbed higher.
It was then that she heard a piano, children’s voices and laughter, so odd in this desolate place. She turned the corner to find a big door propped open, so she paused to look inside. The slanting sun was highlighting the dust motes through which she could dimly see a woman playing a piano. A game of musical chairs was nearly finished as only four chairs remained in the centre of the hall, where five children were racing and pushing to get a seat. About fifty others were grouped around the walls of the room, cheering on their favourite to win.
Betty moved closer to get a better look when a nun dressed in a grey habit came up to her, carrying a large tray covered with a heavy towel. “There you are,” she said in an unmistakable Irish accent, “I’m Sister Brigid. We've been waiting for you. Please take this to Kristos.. You'll need some one to show you the way. Nikos. Come here please!” A small black haired, barefoot kid, with a merry face and a broad grin ran up to the nun. She gave instructions to Nikos who beckoned to Betty and turned to go through the door and along the path to the top of the hill. The going was difficult because she couldn't see her feet below the tray and there were drifts of sand and lumps of rock strewn along the path. It didn't help that Nikos hopped about like a puppy, sometimes hiding and then jumping out at her. The first time that happened she nearly dropped the tray, while he whooped with laughter.
They climbed over a low stone wall into what had been a wonderful formal garden, but now overgrown with oleander and aloe cactus. The central path led to the house door, massive carved wood with a knocker beyond the reach of her small guide. He picked up a rock to hit the door several times, but there was no response. Nikos led the way around the house to the other side where a smaller door opened half way as they approached it. A little boy with a puppy stood there, and after an exchange of words, Nikos indicated that she should put the tray on a wobbly urn standing by the door. Carefully she balanced it, happy to be rid of the weight on her arms. Once more Nikos beckoned her around the house to the wall on the edge of the cliff. He disappeared, and in a panic, feeling responsible for him, she looked over the wall to a sheer drop to the rocks below, now covered by surf blown by the much stronger wind.
“Nikos” she called, and was answered by a shrill whistle carried on the wind. Looking over the wall again she saw a tousled dark head and a wide smile emerge from a small cave about two meters down the cliff. Using hand gestures she called out “Come up please,” but the head vanished again into the cave. Feeling tired, worried and impotent she stepped back from the wall to look around the garden. Her rational mind argued that there must be some secret passage to the cave, maybe a well, or a hole, but she could seen nothing nearby and because Nikos was as agile as a cat she figured he would be alright.
The afternoon shadows were lengthening, and having come this far she felt impelled to see over the crest of the hill to the country beyond. She followed the wall away from the cliff, and came to a steep set of stone steps leading to the top of a sand bank. With difficulty she climbed the narrow steps and started to walk on the sand which oozed away from under her feet and glissaded down the slope to the deep valley below. Caught by surprise she had the luck to fall on her hands and knees and hook her foot over the top of the stone step, thankful to be on solid ground.
She looked down on a large sandy basin, high walled on four sides, the country beyond not visible except on the south slope where the almost vertical sand wall finished at the coast. A hissing noise startled her, making her look landward. On the horizon of the far sand dune, a row of goats was silhouetted against the sky, and the sand they dislodged was cascading down to the floor of the valley, starting like a small waterfall and building to an avalanche. The goats disappeared over the other side. She shivered as the wind picked up, and she hastily climbed sailor wise, backwards down the steps.
The afternoon was nearly over and with no twilight and a strict dinner hour where she was staying she lost no time in retracing her steps to regain the town. At the end of Kristos’s garden she looked over the cliff and called ”Nikos” as loud as she could but there was silence, and no tousled head showed at the cave entrance. The wind on the water blew salt onto her face as she bent over the wall. She paused at the church hall which was empty, the piano and chairs tidied away and the door swinging to and fro on its one hinge.
Taking a lower route than before, she stumbled along the uneven path and was surprised to see the cathedral square open in front of her much sooner than she had expected. The cafe, now full of families having dinner was on her left, so she crossed in front of it and glad of the hand rail on the wall, climbed the steep hill to her main path leading to her pension.
As she entered she saw that the other guests were already being served, but she felt so dirty she had to wash and change before eating. By the time she sat at the table the others were finishing and her hostess seemed put out.
“You will have to hurry if you are going to see the start of St.Anthony's parade,” she said, “This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the great earthquake and they are dedicating a statue in the Square.”
“Who is the statue of?” asked Betty.
“The victims of the big earthquake on this afternoon fifty years ago. A huge wave washed over the cliff as it fell into the sea. The church at the top and many houses just dropped into oblivion. All the school children, their mothers and Sister Brigid were in the church hall celebrating St Anthony and nearly all perished. Only two children survived. Kristos, who had run home to see to his new puppy and Nikos who was found two days later wedged in a cleft of the crumbling cliff. Poor lad had been severely injured, was flown to the mainland for treatment and came back months later in a wheel chair, but he didn't thrive and died soon after. Many of the fathers who were fishermen also perished. A few bodies were washed up along the coast weeks later. The tsunami caused a huge build up of sand on the north shore of the island and that is where the dunes are. Very dangerous, with whispering, unstable sand which has engulfed many an animal and person who has ventured out on them. It is forbidden to go up there.”
“What happened to Kristos?” asked Betty.
“He was taken to Canada by his uncle, and this year he has sent money for a statue of Sister Brigid and the others. Tonight it will be unveiled. ”
Betty arrived late at the square after most of the villagers had left for home, so she could see Nikos clearly with his merry face and broad grin standing next to the nun she had seen earlier, but now they were part of a marble statue.
That oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico
On April 20, soon after it first began, I made a few remarks in this blog about the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana near the Mississippi delta. Today for the first time it seems possible that the unending flow into the formerly rich seas of the Gulf of Mexico has been stopped. It has done horrendous damage, from which the local and regional ecosystems will take decades, perhaps centuries, to recover. The blow-out occurred at a depth of about 1.5 Km below the sea surface, so deep that only robot miniature submarines can operate and the water temperature is zero C or even below zero. The sea remains liquid only because of the immense pressure. But human stupidity and greed are even deeper, indeed bottomless: this ecological catastrophe has not daunted the oil companies that intend to go ahead with undersea oil drilling at even greater depths in the far stormier north Atlantic ocean on the edge of the continental shelf off the coast of Newfoundland; and plans are well advanced to drill in the Beaufort sea off the north coast of Alaska and the frozen tundra of far northern Canada. Will this insanity never end?
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Next steps
Yesterday we saw the gastroenterologist, Dr Sylvie Gregoire. She agreed that Janet Wendy is fit enough to undergo the minor surgical procedure of inserting a PEG tube. Because it is summer holiday season the earliest date that this can be done as an elective procedure is August 3; the consensus is that she will be OK until then without this intervention, but if her difficulty with swallowing gets any worse we can always reconsider and do it as an emergency procedure, or pass a conventional stomach tube to provide enough nourishment to keep her going. She is certainly getting painfully thin, so a few days ago I got a case of high-energy liquid compound to give her to try to build her up a bit, or at any rate to ensure that she doesn't lose any more weight. It's also getting harder to understand her speech. Sometimes, especially when we have visitors, she seems to make an extra effort, but when she and I are alone she may get more relaxed, less 'on her best behaviour' and sometimes she becomes unintelligible, has to rely on sign language and gestures. There are many ways we can deal with this problem and we are already using a few low-tech methods. Maybe we will augment these with some high-tech devices like a very fancy electronic touch-screen device that Margot Butler, the speech language pathologist at the ALS Clinic, demonstrated to us last week. But despite all, we can still find things to laugh and joke about, so our remaining time together is mainly fun, not at all a doom laden gloomy period of our lives.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Janet Wendy's status and what's being done about it
Last week we had two sessions at the ALS Clinic, where we saw the neurologist, the respiratory team, the speech language pathologist and the nutritionist. Wendy and I are well aware that she is weaker now than she was last month; she is more breathless and her speech is sometimes hard to understand, and she is having more difficulty swallowing. The challenge of swallowing worries her most and has led her to reconsider her earlier decision not to have a peg tube (stoma or stomach tube) to bypass her throat, so the main agenda item last week was to assess her fitness for the relatively minor surgical procedure involved in providing an artificial opening into her stomach. The consensus of the experts about her fitness is that she qualifies for the surgical procedure -- just. As our palliative care specialist said, they don't like it when patients die on the operating table, or when they have to go to the intensive care unit instead of home after the minor operation to bypass her throat. The gastro-enterologist who does this procedure has just returned from holiday and Wendy will see her tomorrow. Meantime, a community based specialist in ways to deal with difficulty swallowing came to see her today, reiterating the advice and suggestions we've already had from the staff at the ALS Clinic. At the drug store I picked up a whole case of high-protein, high-energy drink that she can swallow very easily. She has lost a lot of weight, is beginning to look quite frail, but she remains in good spirits, and we can still find things to laugh about. So stay tuned for another bulletin after she sees the G-E surgeon.
The Wedding of Desre Kramer and David Last
July 11 has taken on a special new significance. It is the date of David's wedding to Desre. All went smoothly, none of our anxieties about missed flights or other mishaps proved justifiable. Desre and David flew to Los Angeles on July 8, and the two of David's kids who are in North America at present, Christina and John, flew to L.A. on Friday, July 9; we had worried about them arriving too late at Toronto's Pearson airport to catch the early morning flight, but our worries were misplaced: everything went smoothly and according to plan. David phoned to confirm their safe arrival, and phoned again today to report that the wedding ceremony went off without any glitches. There were many photos, and David told us on the phone just now that two laptops were aimed at the celebrants to beam the entire event direct to Desre's family members in South Africa and Seattle by Skype phone. David sounded rather regretful that he hadn't taken his laptop to California too, but said that had he done so there would have been too many people aiming laptops in the right direction and not enough to take part in the service, which was conducted mainly in Hebrew; David had to learn a few words to make appropriate responses but he's a very good linguist so picking up a few words and phrases of Hebrew would not have been a challenge. Christina and John are flying back to Toronto today, and Desre and David will follow tomorrow. They will have a honeymoon in Paris and a walking tour in Brittany and Normandy in August. I'll attach a picture or two to this post:
The lower picture is a scene during the ceremony, showing the bride and groom exchanging vows; Christina and John are standing beside David. The upper picture shows the bride and groom in all their glory.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Green going
Years ago I was among those who lamented the medical school's move from the main downtown campus of the University of Ottawa to the suburban setting of the developing health sciences campus about 6 Km from the city centre. One of the factors I weighed when considering whether to accept the invitation to leave Edinburgh and come to Ottawa was the location of the university in the heart of downtown Ottawa, just a few hundred meters from Parliament hill. Like the ancient University of Edinburgh, and like my own university in Adelaide, South Australia, Ottawa University is intimately entangled with the city, town and gown are entwined. The sylvan setting, the vista of green lawns and trees visible from the picture windows of the staff lounge helped me to get over the pangs of separation. But over the years since then, as the health science centre expanded and budded off satellite buildings, those lawns and trees have disappeared. There was a pleasant little view of trees through the windows of the walkways linking the health science centre to the Ottawa General Hospital on one side, and the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario on the other side, at any rate for a while. The trees and lawns on the CHEO side went years ago, but those on the OGH side survived at least in part despite the orgy of building and the new paved parking lots for the cars of those who work in these new buildings ... until this summer. Lately as I've strolled along the walkway to the OGH, the floor has shuddered to the rhythm of heavy earth moving equipment, some of the glass is covered over with opaque plastic and where a window remains translucent the view is dismal: the green has gone, the ground is scarred by a deepening hole, the future basement of yet another new building. I suppose eventually all that will survive of the green spaces will be a few shrubs in tubs. We must adjust and adapt to new realities. Ottawa is a big city these days, the health science centre, the hospitals, the other buildings for research centres and so forth, must expand to keep pace. But I'll miss all that greenery.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
We're having a heat wave
It's sometimes called an ear-worm, that irritating problem of a jingle or a tune that keeps on returning again and again no matter how hard you try to think of something else. Today I've been afflicted with a tune from the musical Kiss me Kate, that I've put above as the title of this post. It really is a tropical heat wave, with temperatures in the mid-30s and very high humidity that makes it feel like the mid-40s or high 40s, like Delhi or Bangkok just before the monsoon. If it were not for air conditioning, our apartment with its huge west and north facing picture windows that get the full force of the sun from noon until sunset, would be uninhabitable. Our well being hangs by a delicate thread. There was a power failure in Toronto yesterday; another like it here in Ottawa would be a real challenge to our stamina; and we will be very fortunate if we escape even just one power failure during this heat wave, which is forecast to continue all week and into the weekend. I've considered what we could do if we are hit by a power failure. Retreat to the basement, to the swimming pool, would be one option I suppose. Outside all day and greatly accentuated this afternoon, the air was thick and smog-laden too, as well as heavily humid, the combination of environmental conditions that are quite dangerous for the very young, the very old, and all whose health is precarious because of breathing problems. It's the combination we both have, each in our different ways. All we can do is hope our electric grid holds together...
Friday, July 2, 2010
Altruism
In the book our kids and I compiled of Selected Works of Janet Wendy Last, I stole a few pages to say something about her selfless altruism and other lovely qualities that make her such a unique and wonderful person. As the saying puts it, What Goes Around Comes Around. Our little family, our friends, and our neighbours in the condominium apartment building who have become our friends too, have been demonstrating in innumerable selfless acts of kindness that they too can come to the aid of others in need, bestowing on Wendy the same devoted concern and care for her that she has demonstrated for others throughout her lifetime. We have been provided with splendid, tasty and abundant meals, our apartment is always full of flowers, and almost every day since she fell ill there have been cards, phone calls, emails from near and far, and of course a constant stream of visitors - family, friends, acquaintances - all of whom are sensitive to her need to conserve her energy and don't outstay their welcome. It sustains me and comforts her to know that there are so many good people in the world.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Canada Day
My birthplace homeland and my adopted homeland both have national days that carry the nation's name. I've lived about half my life in each and therefore claim both as my homeland. Australia Day, January 26, commemorates the day in 1788 on which the 'First Fleet,' a small flotilla of sailing ships, arrived to establish a permanent British colony. Canada Day, July 1, commemorates the day in 1867 on which all the territories, colonies and dominions comprising Canada as it then was met in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and agreed to form a confederation. It was an untidy affair because Newfoundland, technically the oldest (albeit non-permanent) European settlement, established in the late 15th century, remained a separate British dominion until 1949. There had been a few non-permanent European settlements, mainly whaling seafarers, in Australia too, before 1788. The European colonists in both Canada and Australia did not acknowledge that the lands they were colonizing had been inhabited for many thousands of years by indigenous people who had their own traditions, cultures and languages. The indigenous peoples were decimated by imported diseases, their traditions were scorned, their cultures largely destroyed. Genocidal actions included fabricated wars, deliberate infection of family groups with smallpox, and segregation of survivors on reservations, usually in remote places with harsh environments. We who are descended from European colonists look back now, apologize for what our ancestors did to their ancestors, grudgingly admit that the indigenous peoples deserve reparation, are our equals, not our inferiors. Not much if any of these aspects of history get mentioned on Canada Day (or Australia Day). It is a national holiday for celebration, festivities, fireworks after sunset, speech-making by leaders and heads of state, performances by popular entertainers. This year the queen is here and our own head of state, the Haitian-born vivacious governor general Michaelle Jean, is away on an official visit to China. Over a million Canadians in the total of 35 million, are ethnic Chinese; about another million have roots in the Indian Subcontinent and close to another million can trace their ancestry to Africa. Increasing numbers have been coming also from Middle-Eastern nations. Canada is truly a rainbow nation. One of the things I like best about Canada is that it is in large part 'colour-blind.' School children, university students, shop and office workers, sports teams and their supporters and spectators, are a multi-coloured free and easy mixture. The 'assortative mating' that I used to observe among medical student classes quite often takes little or no account of ethnic differences. There are rare isolated outbreaks of the kind of mindless and vicious hatred that once led white mobs to lynch black youths in the southern states of the USA, but such outbreaks are extremely rare in Canada, even more rarely violent and lethal. There are also some ethnic gangs, mainly in Vancouver, engaged in gang warfare to gain control of the illegal drug trade, prostitution, protection rackets etc, but these don't seem to threaten the national or even local body politic. At the other end of the spectrum, on Canada Day especially, are displays and celebrations of ethnicity, traditional Ukrainian, Portuguese, Hindu dance and dress, delicious meals of traditional ethnic dishes, recognition that Canada truly is a multicultural nation in which we all get along pretty well together. I hope it will always remain so!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)