Entering my 90th year

Any honest old wrinkly will admit that despite the sense of accomplishment in surviving this long, its annoying limitations, disabilities, aches and pains, et cetera, make old age a mixed blessing. As I've said before and will doubtless say again - old people being by nature repetitious - being alive at 89 is infinitely preferable to being dead, no matter how tiresome the accompanying ailments of old age may be. I continue to get great pleasure from just being alive.  This year I've had an unusually large number of greetings and good wishes on this, my 89th birthday. I treasure them all. I was especially chuffed to receive greetings from my very good friend and colleague for 40 years, Rama Nair. As I said to him in a Facebook message,  I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in having brought him to Ottawa, recruited him to our medical school, and watched with approval as he and his lovely wife Sarala put down roots and established a dynasty here. They are a vibrant local symbol of the success of Canada's policy of multiculturalism, the mosaic of cultures that have joined forces here to form a beautiful pattern. There's a good deal of merging and mingling at the margins, but the mosaic is still a mosaic, a model to the rest of the world in how cultures can live together side by side in friendship and harmony. It's a better model and more durable too, than the American (and Australian) policy of assimilation - the melting pot, in which every immigrant becomes an American (or an Australian). When Wendy and I were weighing the pros and cons of staying in the USA or moving on to Scotland, the melting-pot metaphor was firmly in the 'con' column. Later, when we left Scotland and came to Canada, the metaphor of the mosaic was a powerful encouragement  to stay here and become part of the mosaic.