Defining moments, defining events, defining situations

At the recent workshop on memoir-writing, our mentor Jon Peirce discussed defining moments. That is not the best way to classify several of the important turns my life has taken, although it does describe the most important event of all. I told the story publicly for the first time in a CBC Radio classical music request program on our 40th wedding anniversary, February 14, 1997. On the first sunny spring Sunday of 1955, I was off duty in the group medical practice in Adelaide where I was working at the time and on my way to play golf, when I stopped to pick up two young women hitch hikers. They were on the wrong road to reach their intended destination but I said I would take them to a junction where they could make their way to the road they needed. A few minutes conversation with one of these hitch hikers so impressed me with her spirit of social justice and her sense of fun, and her smile so entranced me, that I decided to abandon my plan to play golf that day, and said I would drive them myself: two defining moments a few minutes apart that changed the course of my life. 

In 1958, the Asian Influenza pandemic led to life-changing decisions following a moment of truth. I shared those decisions with one of those hitch hikers to whom by then I was married, and at that time we had an infant daughter. My partners and I in our group practice worked almost around the clock during that pandemic. Those who died included a young ambulance driver whom I knew socially. He was the sole support of his family, and about a month after he died, his mother came to see me and insisted on paying me for the fruitless visits I had made when her son was dying. That evening we had the monthly meeting at which our accountant presented the financial figures: we had never before made so much money in a single month. As my partners cheered, clapped and slapped each other on the back, I sat silently, seeing in my mind's eye the sad face of that woman as she thrust banknotes into my unwilling hands. It was a moment of truth, a moment in which I realized that I did not want to spend my life getting rich from the sickness, suffering and death of other people. That was one of several episodes that led to the decision Wendy and I made a little over a year later, to leave general practice and begin a new career in public health sciences. In a future post I will talk about other events that influenced this decision.