A talented family

Last weekend I was honoured and privileged to be invited to attend a family reunion.  I think I was one of only two from outside the family who was there. Wendy and I always used to look forward to these occasions with this family when once or twice a year they invited us to join them. They folded us into their family, made us feel at home, as if we truly belonged. They are a lovely family, talented, handsome, multilingual. I first met them in the early 1980s when three members of the rising generation were my students in the medical school. I supervised their longterm overseas elective experiences and helped to arrange placements with colleagues in Britain, Israel, India, Sri Lanka and Australia. These young men have become lifelong friends since their medical school days. They are nearly two meters tall, so standing next to them I feel like a wrinkled little dwarf. When one of them hugs me I almost disappear. Fortunately their Colombian mother is my height so hugging her is more egalitarian. In conversation they switch easily and naturally from English to Spanish, and this being bilingual Ottawa with one son married to a French-Canadian wife, they are as comfortable in French. My protege, Rob, married a Dutch girl who is obliged to live close to her widowed mother. So Rob settled just outside Rotterdam where he is a huisarts - a family doctor. His working language and his children's first language is Dutch. The multilingual chattering of the little children is musical. This reunion celebrated Rob's return to his family home in Ottawa for summer holidays.

I looked upon this large and happy family approvingly, noticing some of the young children absorbed in reading printouts of my children's story. Observing them all, I reflected on my frequent lament in posts on this blog and elsewhere about our overpopulated, dangerously stressed planet. Yes, I still believe planet Earth is over-populated, probably by as much as an order of magnitude. There is no contradiction between my conviction that the earth is afflicted with a surfeit of humans, and my whole-hearted approval of the fecundity of this talented family. We are the better for their presence among us. We need more like them.