The writers' workshops I've been eagerly anticipating have been cancelled. The token fee of $50 per day to 'rent' a meeting room in the Library and Archives building was raised without warning to $2157.75. This outrageous move - typical of actions by the present government - dealt a fatal blow to the aspirations of workshop leaders and participants alike. To be truthful, I really don't need either workshop, but I'll miss the collegiality and mutual stimulation we would all have provided, and I'll miss the networking and opportunities to widen my friendship and acquaintance horizons.
Instead, I will spend as much of the weekend as I can stand in solitary efforts to lick into shape my attempts to describe some of the transformative events of my life. I've said something about all of these events in posts on this blog, and there are descriptions of them all in successive drafts of my memoirs.
Wendy shared in making all the important decisions and I had hoped to find her views of them in her diaries. Unfortunately her diaries haven't helped as much as I'd hoped. Her diaries for 1957 and 1958 are missing, two stormy years of adjusting to each other, and years in which we made life-altering decisions. Perhaps in her 1958 diary she described our conversations about getting rich from fees I collected when people had the misfortune to be disabled by chronic debilitating diseases or serious injuries, and my growing realization that much as I loved being a family doctor I was increasingly attracted to a more scholarly life.
In several posts in January 2012 I described a moment of truth when a grieving mother thrust banknotes into my unwilling hands to pay for the fruitless house calls I made to see her son before he died of influenza during the Asian Flu pandemic of 1958; and the intellectual, philosophical decision to seek a more scholarly career than general practice.
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