Labour Day weekend

For more than 40 years the Labour Day weekend has been the most significant punctuation in my life, marking the steady progression of the seasons. It's usually excellent weather, late summer fullness of foliage, blowsiness almost, as fruit has ripened, local produce is plentiful, a feeling that life is worth living and there is abundant tangible evidence of this. it's a time of transition in the academic year, when teachers buff up their material, parents prepare their offspring for the new school year. For me, it's been the weekend when I take stock of what I've accomplished in the past 12 months and prepare myself to face the next 12 months, usually with a formidable list of things I have to do. During my active academic life I prepared a list of essential tasks, arranged if possible in some sort of priority with dates by which each task had to be completed: teaching assignments, research grant proposals, committee meetings, reports, papers, book chapters, lectures and seminars I had to get ready by specified dates - an intimidating list that always filled the whole of a long sheet of paper pinned to the bulletin board above my desk. For more than the first 30 years of that 40 year period, some time during the weekend, I wrote a sort of stock-taking letter to my family in Adelaide. This year instead of mailing it, I'll post it on my blog.

The list of 'Things to do' is shorter now, only a handful of assignments. I've been invited to reflect on the paper I still regard as my very best - "The Iceberg; Completing the Clinical Picture in General Practice"- which was published in Lancet in July 1963, fifty years ago next year. It is very gratifying that the concept I described and discussed in this paper has become part of the culture of epidemiology, and is still cited fifty years later. I can take a little credit for this, but the idea originated with my mentor Jerry Morris, and the title of the paper, the metaphor of the iceberg, was suggested by the eminent Lancet editor, Sir Theodore ("Robbie") Fox. His hand-written letter to me, accepting the paper with just one modification, making "The Iceberg" the title and my title a subtitle, is in the National Archives of Canada. I am in debt to Jerry Morris and Robbie Fox. The "Iceberg" established my reputation in epidemiology. I'm happy to have an opportunity to reflect on its significance fifty years after it was first published, happy to acknowledge again my two sources of inspiration, Jerry Morris and Robbie Fox, and happy that my reflections will be published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

That's the first item on my list of "Things to do," followed in second place by a few lectures and seminars. The fire in my belly nowadays has subsided to glowing embers, but to judge from feedback at Waterloo 2 weeks ago, I can still catch and hold the attention of a room full of 80 or more master's students in this year's MPH class. I hope I can perform as well here in Ottawa later this month.

The third item on my "To do" list has been there for well over a year.  2012-2013 is the year I mean to lick my memoirs into shape and finally publish them, or rather distribute electronic copies to family members and friends.  Over the past 12 months or thereabouts I have posted excerpts on this blog, mostly abridged but otherwise unedited excerpts and free-standing "Traveller's Tales" describing places, people, and some of the experiences of my long, interesting, and thoroughly enjoyable life. Sometimes I've been able to illustrate these with my own photographs. Almost all the excerpts posted on my blog are rough and raw, need editing.  I began to write a first draft of memoirs about 25 years ago when my first grand-child Chris was about a year old and my daughter-in-law Dorothyanne gave Wendy and me a scrapbook, My Grandparents' Recollections  with spaces for photos and some very good questions for us to answer about our parents, grandparents, siblings, what life had been like when we were children, etc. Answering those questions prompted me to enlarge on what I wrote in the scrapbook.  The original plan had been for Wendy and me to wrote our collective memoirs, and a great sadness in my life is that she fell ill and died before that joint enterprise got off the ground. She had such a lovely, lively writing style that would have made our joint memoirs entertaining and irresistibly readable. The slabs of bad prose I've written without her input are too much like a textbook or a learned  article in a scientific journal, not enough like the story of a wonderful and thoroughly enjoyable life.  Be that as it may, the third item on my "To do" list - to bring these memoirs to closure - is highest priority.  I am beginning my final push on it this very weekend.