Some ways we were fortunate

This morning the CBC's Sunday Edition is broadcasting a feature on separation and divorce of couples who have been married for many years -- 40 or more years in almost all cases. I realize that's another way in which Wendy and I were so fortunate. Looking back on our marriage I can see that it fell into several fairly well defined phases. Our first two years of married life were stormy. There were many times when I doubted that our marriage would survive. Then it got better. We were 30 when we married, rather set in our ways, and we had quite a hard time adjusting to sharing our life with someone else who in many ways was a stranger. It got better because we learnt to share, because each of us had a problem, a crisis, that required a team effort by the pair of us to surmount the crisis. Wendy's crisis was the condition often called postpartum depression, I think, but it was more complex than a psychiatric condition.  It involved me and my evolving conviction that I had to leave family practice where I was so comfortable, and my difficulty confiding my doubts about my career choice to Wendy.  Once I'd made that choice, decided to leave family practice and embark on a scholarly career, Wendy and I grew closer together. We shared and enjoyed the great adventure of exploring the nooks and crannies of my new career in epidemiology, medical sociology, and their application in elementary and higher education. Those years of travel, exploring new horizons, mixing and mingling with the top people in the world in my new specialty, were one of the pinnacles of our lives, perhaps the highest.

We couldn't advance my new career in the backwater that Adelaide was in the early and middle 1960s so another feature of my career change was that it forced us to travel. To call it 'forced' puts it in a bad light: Wendy and I eagerly embraced the need to travel and although encumbered by two little toddlers, then two young children and a delicate baby with a very severe congenital heart defect, we enjoyed it enormously. Jonathan's heart defect and its successful surgical treatment was another crisis that drew Wendy and me closer together. Our migration to Canada was another crisis, another adventure in which we shared equally. At first we looked upon our move from Edinburgh to Ottawa as a stage: Ottawa was a stepping stone on our eventual return to Australia (or to New Zealand). But Wendy and I both flourished, we both had successful and enjoyable lives and careers in Canada. After about five, then ten years in Ottawa - mutually supportive years - we imperceptibly became Canadian, shed enough of our Antipodean roots to feel that we belonged in Canada. That's another way we were fortunate: if one of us had embraced the fact of becoming Canadian and the other hadn't, our family life would have been stormy and almost certainly not sustainable.

Finally, in our 80s, we continued to grow closer together. At our 50th wedding anniversary banquet Wendy read a poem she'd written for the occasion. I heard it for the first time that evening. Here are the final lines:

... humour and sympathy
For each other's shortcomings,
Love and admiration
For fine qualities developed 
In advancing years,
Add up to fifty years
Of a good marriage.

             Janet Wendy Last February 14 2007

(I could replace 'good' in the last line of this poem with other, multisyllabic adjectives that convey more accurately and completely what our marriage meant to Wendy and me, but they wouldn't scan).

Reaching out a helping hand

I've been reading again the nice things my friends wrote in the festschrift collection. John McKinlay, who was a graduate student in Wellington, New Zealand at the time he refers to, says that I received two letters asking for my help and career advice; one was from him, the other was from Vicente Navarro, a young neurosurgeon, who wrote from Barcelona. I was at the University of Edinburgh at the time and somehow I'd acquired a reputation as the "go-to" chap for advice on education in epidemiology and community medicine. I'd been doing research for the Royal Commission on Medical Education, and something I'd said about epidemiology as the essential basic science for a wide range of careers in medicine had been picked up by the medical newspaper, Medical Post. John McKinlay got the facts slightly squint. I'd received his cry for help and Vicente Navarro's on the same day, several weeks after the Medical Post interview. Altogether I probably had more than 20 requests, inquiries, etc, about half of them phone calls from UK-based docs, the rest, letters from all over the planet. I was able to offer helpful suggestions about necessary steps to advance career aspirations for about half of them, including a few whom I steered towards our graduate programs in Edinburgh. If I'd stayed in Edinburgh, I'd have followed up this small cohort, but not long after I left for Ottawa. My life is littered with unfulfilled opportunities to assess and evaluate all sorts of 'educational' initiatives. I'm sure the same could be said about many other academic staff members. 

Good Riddance

2016, the year in which I had my 90th birthday, was a good year for me, but it was a bad year for the planet and for humanity, for tolerance, and for amity among groups of people.

Conspicuous examples of the evaporation of amity include the referendum in which a small majority of the British people voted to leave the European Union; and the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States. Analysis of reasons why the British people voted the way they did revealed that a prominent reason for voting to leave the EU was unease about the erosion of domestic control over the influx of non-British people into the UK. Xenophobia, in short, was a powerful motive for voting to turn away from the EU.  Londoners, the Scots, the Northern Irish and the Welsh, the well educated and the young, were much less afflicted with the malaise of Xenophobia than the poorly educated "lumpen proletariat" working class who dominated the "no" votes of the midlands and the north of England. They -- the least educated, the least endowed with powers of critical thinking -- outnumbered the rest by a sufficient margin to "win" the referendum, albeit quite narrowly. It was a striking example of why a referendum is the worst possible way for a nation to decide important policy. The referendum was unnecessary and the campaign was badly mismanaged by one of the most incompetent prime ministers the Brits have ever had. A far sighted, more competent, more politically astute prime minister would have shrugged, ignored the result of the referendum -- or better still, wouldn't have called the referendum in the first place. The election of Trump came about for more complex reasons, but his campaign, based as it was on xenophobia, intolerance and anti-establishment sentiments, appealed to enough "middle Americans" to carry the votes of a majority of the weird, undemocratic electoral college that ultimately decides who will be the president of the USA.  Hillary Clinton actually got close to 3 million more votes than Donald Trump, but, as in many states, gerrymandering ensured a resounding Republican victory. I wonder how long it will be before the American people revolt against the undemocratic nature of their presidential elections? Since the Republicans win consistently under the status quo, it's likely to be long time, if ever, before the system will be made more equitable.  

Sad to say, I feel gloomy about the future. Politically, the English-speaking nations, the USA and the British Commonwealth, are led almost entirely by people who lack vision.  France is similarly afflicted, as are Italy and Spain. Only Germany seems to have a wise and far-sighted leader, and her future is questionable.  The Scandinavian nations are in better shape politically and environmentally but they carry little weight on the world stage. Politics and the economy are only part of the problem. Far more important and far more serious,  few leaders, and few of the people they lead, or aspire to lead, have any understanding of the grave situation of planetary life-support systems. Here in Canada, Justin Trudeau seems better acquainted with the realities, with the interdependence of all living creatures upon one another, than many other national leaders.  But he hasn't been severely tested yet.  When he is, I hope he will prove to have the vision, the toughness, and the political savvy that will be required.  I'm OK, my life is drawing to a close. But I am deeply concerned for my children and grandchildren and for the generations coming after them.

And with these brief, superficial thoughts, I bid you all a happy future.