Go For It

My strip of foam stretches out beneath the table. My friend has found a massage table in the hall closet and by lowering the legs as far as they will go, makes her bed against the bookcase that sits perpendicular to my foam. We are visiting our friend, Barbara. We have only the two days together so to optimize our time together, we decided to bunk with her in her small apartment.

We met through our Rosen Method bodywork so we continue with the same kind of activities we began then. We talk about old friends, eat great meals and drink strong coffee. We consult our horoscopes and read Tarot cards. We laugh a lot and discuss our soul work and where we are in our lives. And we cavort in thrift shops.

This is the first time I have seen Barbara since she moved from her childhood home in this same town, with its extensive rose garden to this Leisure Home. Barbara is 90 and remarkably between such visits we manage to keep in touch by internet mostly. Barbara's email handle is Go For It. She says she didn't understand about email addresses when she settled on it--didn't know she would be saddled with it-- but we think it is incredibly appropriate. Her favorite admonisions to us are a) Listen to what the universe is telling you and b) Go For It. Usually in that order. At one of our Rosen workshops during a tour of the local thrift shops, we found a board game appropriately named Go For It and brought it home for her.

Our forays into thrift shops are mainly for the purpose of searching for synchronicity, in as much as one can not really look for synchronicity but stumble upon it. To do this we notice what in the thrift shop (read universe) attacts us and reflect on what lesson it holds.

As Barbara says these days, "When your reach for the glass, the glass comes towards you".

She is currently reading Chilton Peace's The Death of Religion and the Birth of Spirit, along with a large pile of similar books. Years ago he wrote The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and it seems Chilton-Peace has ventured even further afield since then.

On this trip up and down the aisles, my friends locate a picture on glass of an owl. To me it looks like a make-work project as the frame is damaged and will need to be removed to be fixed but they are thrilled with it.

"Owls, says Barbara, "are about wisdom and letting go."

The exquisite Sterling Silver brooch I find of a hare in chase, in the same thrift shop, shines up with a bit of rubbing and I realize I have a real find for am amazing $2.25.

"Rabbit," I note outloud, "better not mean fertility at my age."

"Maybe fertility of ideas," says Barbara, "and clarity of eye and transformation."

It is amazing what our serenidipity approach uncovers.

Barbara is adamant enroute home that we take the car through the car wash. Well, the car is a tad dirty after the drive down to Seattle. She acknowledges later in a light-hearted way, that it was important for her to go thru the car wash. For her, as well as for us, somehow washing all the dirt and grim off prepares us to shine, indeed to trail clouds of glory. It is wonderful and reassuring to be surrounded with such a perception of the world.

Later when I acquire the lovely children's storybook of Pele the Lamplighter, with its exquisite drawings and enchanting story, Barbara reflects how it is an invocation to continue to light lamps as we go. Nothing escapes her eagle eye. We are learning not only about going with the flow from Barbara but to Go For It !

Photos: Barbara with Go For It Game

In Between Time

After a busy but brief six weeks at home, I am off again for ten weeks to Uganda and Pakistan. I have had a chance to reconnect with a group of friends, relatives and community here on the Pacific West Coast where I am still a bit of a newcomer. My batteries have been recharged and I feel reinvigorated. I am struck by how well I am supported in my work by my friends and community. The two groups are only somewhat connected at present. Few of my friends of longer duration are part of my local community, a situation I share with many in today’s world, but the two spheres are beginning to intersect more. Both groups are important to me.

A coterie of local friends water my plants, check my mail box, look after my basement suite, keep my car battery charged, arrange for my house to be rented, drop me and my baggage off at the ferry, donate materials for the projects, collect baseball hats, search for puppets and offer encouragement for my work. Most importantly, they manage to slot me seamlessly into activities when I am back. Books we will discuss at book clubs are shared, church members inquire about my travels, invitations are extended, a small group of us attend the West Coast aboriginal version of the Magic Flute opera and friends visit from Belize and Vancouver. It is a busy time with Xmas to be celebrated in the Okanagan, games of Scrabble, cribbage and Boggle played, visits made to friend’s art displays and annual Tarot readings for the New Year arranged.

Although I have had to withdraw from several of my ongoing activities, such as Toastmasters and Sweet Adelines, because I have been away so much this past year, I am welcomed to drop by and encouraged to participate. All of this social networking feeds and sustain my soul. I have missed some people and some opportunities but overall the peripatetic life style is working out wonderfully. I even experienced a brief exposure to the storms that have swept erratically down the west coast this year with such ferocity, shifting global warming front and center even into political consciousness. The latter I am glad to witness.

My visits home have an underlying pattern, a weave of simultaneously activities to be undertaken. First my social networks are revitalized. Almost as soon as I come back I am acutely awaream stuck by an overwhelming need to simplify, to lighten up and unclutter my life. The contrast between how most of the world lives and my luxury in Canada unsettles me. As a friend puts it, we need to live more simply, simply that others may live. I make a start by sorting through boxes of clothes and clobber this time, finding things I had forgotten I had and moving them on. As the piles build, so does my enthusiasm for this activity.

Maintenance is also needed on the house - roof replacement arranged, an outdoor bench stripped and fixtures replaced. A young millwright from the local pulp and paper mill is settled in as the new occupant of the basement suite. Finally preparation for upcoming Pakistan and Uganda visits involves preparing training sessions for the STD workshop for physicians, collection of support material for several development activities, communication with possible partners, coordination of visas, air tickets and visits for myself and others. I am running behind on the STD training. Although most of the material needed has been collected, I have only completed two of the needed 10 sessions in writing and then it is time to return.

Photos: View from porch, chalk sign says Never Forget Me, Papyrus hat, Side of truck

The Vagaries of Fame

A moving tribute to my friend and mentor, Don Hillman, appeared in a national newspaper recently covering his colourful life dedicated to international health. A short part of the story I wrote in my blog Remembering Don is quoted.

Dr. Borneo Breezes*, "a former colleague at Newfoundland's Janeway Hospital, described how Dr. Hillman helped her deal with a case of child abuse in Davis Inlet. The community had expected the child's parents to be arrested but instead they continued to be at large. He "heard me out and asked a few pertinent questions. He seemed to appreciate what a miscarriage of justice this would be and how devastating [it would be] in this small community. Then he asked, 'What can I do?' I was so taken aback, I was, for a short minute, speechless. I had been hearing so many versions of, 'It really isn't my problem' that I was totally unprepared for someone who cared."

I was pleased to have the journalist use my story, chuffed even. Central to the story, however, was the fact that there was no child abuse happening. We managed, through Dr. Hillman's high level intervention, to put a stop to having parents who did not abuse their child, hauled out of a remote community and charged with doing it. And we managed to avert this horrid outcome before anyone in the community got wind of it.

* Actually they used my real name, but my anonymity has only ever been skin deep on this blog so I am going to continue as if they hadn't.

What do you think, was I that unclear about what happened?

Singing for the Angels

Preparing a winterized cottage retreat for sale involves painting trim, staining walkways, cleaning windows, replacing fixtures, washing the siding, vacuuming the inside and clearing brush from the lot. When friends offer to help, I am ecstatic.

At the end of the first day it looks better. At least the cobwebs have been removed from both the inside and outside now. Some of the brush has been burned in the pit at the back and the garbage has been lugged out to the Nuisiance Grounds. Those who have read Margaret Lawrence will know that garbage dumps in Manitoba have been known as Nuisance Grounds for ages and even in these days of EcoCenter recycling, some still are.

I comment that the place would look a lot better if the trim were painted.

My friend Doug says confidently, “Well if you want it done, we could probably finish the outside trim in a day. At most, maybe a day and a half.”
I am quick to take him up on the offer. Our next day starts late because we don’t get to the cottage until 3 pm. Doug’s partner, Melody, arrives a couple of hours later to cook supper for us but even she is put to work with priming. Even so, we only manage to complete three windows and prime four more before dark.


It is true, that what we have managed to paint, looks great. But there are still about 20 more windows to complete, some of which haven’t been primed and four of them can only be reached on full extension of the two-story ladder.

This is not looking good. Even another full day isn’t going to make a dint in painting the trim. On top of which, neither of us wants to go up to the very top on the extension ladder. I don’t even like washing first floor windows from a sloping roof. We have planned to stay overnight at the cottage. Over dinner, we talk about everything except about painting the window trim. All three of us avoid the fact that this is a five day job at the rate we are going. None of us wants to acknowledge that this task is way beyond our skills. We busy ourselves reading sections of the Saturday Globe and Mail newspaper and making a foray to the local store for ice-cream. We slice fresh peaches over the ice cream and speculate on whether melted chocolate drizzled over the top would augment or detract from the flavour. We talk about everything and anything rather than think about the job in front of us.

I dream that night about houses built into hills with no windows at all and whole tribes of gypsies washing and polishing their caravans. It is pretty clear my unconscious would like an easy way out. I try to glean the gold from these dream messages. Should I become a cave dweller? Who are the gypsies in my life? Is the solution to this a motorized home? But although confusing, my dreams do not distress me. I feel optimistic about spending a golden fall day with friends close beside the river painting the trim on a favourite haunt.

This residence has housed whole weekend meetings of book clubs complete with kids. Paths have been created for cross country skis and snowshoes in the Crown Land behind. Friends have been married, fishing trips launched and Xmas celebrated. From 400 year old white oak trees, which sprang from the acorns that early voyageurs carried with them for food from southern Ontario as they explored western Canada, the site of this tiny community has been established as an important portage or river crossing site. White oak is indigenous in southern Ontario and Quebec where the voyageurs originated but not here at the edge of the boreal forest.

Today the house sits only 1000 meters from a float plane base which ferries hunters and fishers north to exclusive private lodges. Five kilometers east on the other side lies the site of a still-functioning winter road, created each year across the river as soon as the ice thickens. Winter roads are used to move supplies into northern communities that are inaccessible by regular roads.

My dreams and memories of the place have lulled me into going with the flow today and seeing how far we get. I am aware that there aren’t many facts that would support such an attitude. One part of me is fully aware that this is a dicey situation for someone who hopes to have the house on the market and head back to the coast within a couple of days.

We resume painting early the next morning. Neither Doug nor I want to actually put into words that this isn’t looking all that hopeful at this point. Or that the house might actually look even worse if only half of the window trim is painted. We focus ourselves with the ongoing business of painting the trim, window by window.

With the extension ladder poised beside one of the high front windows, Doug is about three-quarters of the way up, swaying slightly, not looking very comfortable. I decide I better hold the ladder at the bottom for him. It takes him a long time to prime the window trim. Just as he is finishing, my neighbour, Stan, drives by in his platinum grey sports car. He reverses and jumps out in his leather jacket. I have been away for more than a year, so we have some catching up to do. I introduce him to Doug who is clinging to the ladder, looking as if he is afraid to go up and afraid to go down.

Stan doesn’t ask obvious questions, but I feel embarrassed to be caught in such a disastrous situation and proceed to explain that we seem to have bitten off more than we can chew. I try to make light of such a blatant display of abysmal judgment.

He looks around, taking in the whole scene, and asks, “Do you need some help?”

“Oh,” I sputter, “Is it possible? Are you serious? Would you help us?” Stan is a professional painter and has helped out in the past when my nephew and I couldn’t figure out how to reach the ceiling over the stairs behind the fireplace. Cathedral ceilings pose some interesting challenges.

“Sure, he says, “I’ll just get on my paint clothes and be right back.”

“If you could do the high windows, that would be wonderful”, I say. “I would be eternally grateful.”

He laughs, “Sure, no problem.”

I go into the house to collect more cans and brushes. The house, almost devoid of furniture, has an open floor plan, loft, central granite fireplace and cantilevered walls in the right loft and back wall. It is an exotic design for here in Cottage Country, which I may have cause to regret, since I am told buyers want bedrooms and bathrooms. But I am holding on tight to the belief that I only need one buyer and it is going to be an artist, writer, or weaver with no kids and a love for open spaces and the outdoors.

As I enter, the entire house reverberates with harmonious chanting. It is as if a whole choir of angels is performing. Not just any choir but the Cambridge Boy Choir with Charlotte Church and Anthony Way as soloists. As Eckists, Melody and Doug often sing the HU, so I think at first Melody must be using a tape recorder or IPod recording of the HU. I glance into the loft and see her all alone singing. HU is the Eckankar Song to God that can be chanted as long as 20 minutes at a time. The quality of the HU chant is similar to that created by throat singing, when the deep chest voice resonates throughout the whole body.

At the Rainforest Musical Festival in Sarawak this past year, a group of Mongolian throat singers performed for us. Several of the men in the group were able to produce two different musical notes simultaneously. The audience, many of whom would never have heard throat singing before, was mesmerized. They received a standing ovation. The sound that they created was eerie and profound at the same time. And it was utterly bone tingling.

Melody, whose speaking voice is quiet, has seemingly produced a HU that resonates throughout the empty house. After listening in silence for five minutes, I stumble back outside, having forgotten why I went in originally. By this time Doug is on the ground priming the front windows. Stan has returned in his painting clothes and is setting up his ladder under the eaves. I stare at them in bewilderment until I recall that we are painting the house trim and Stan has come to assist.

“Melody must have brought you here by singing the HU,” I blurt out.

Stan and Doug continue painting.

I endeavour to explain. “Melody is chanting a HU all by herself in the loft. It resonates through the whole house. It’s magnificent, like the song of the angels. That must be what drew you here to help us,” I tell Stan, who is now high up the wall.
“It’s like the Sirens in Ulysses. Even if you aren’t aware that you hear them, you are inexorably drawn to them. Melody’s singing must have brought you to us.”

Doug sees that I am serious. At least he knows what the HU song is, so he goes to the door to listen.

He comes back, shaking his head in disbelief, saying, “It’s true. It’s amazing. What a magnificent sound.”

Stan doesn’t know what we are talking about. I inform him that the HU is a love song to God for people, like Doug and Melody, who follow the Eckankar religion. I tell him about Mongolian and Inuit throat singing. I explain how Buddhists monks chant OM to achieve a heightened awareness. I speculate on how the empty house appears to provide additional resonance as if it were an instrument itself.

While Stan is not as captivated by the experience as Doug and I, he appreciates that for us, his assistance with the painting has been miraculous, even God-sent. We view his showing up to paint as nothing less than divine intervention. He just laughs and keeps painting.
After finishing the primer on the five highest, least accessible windows, he heads home to deal with a skunk his mother-in-law has caught in a live trap. Later in the day he returns to apply the final paint coat. Again he works quickly and efficiently, looking secure and comfortable on the highest rungs of the ladder. Doug and I are just finishing up on the lower windows as Stan puts the final touches on the high ones. We thank him and the HU song that brought him to us, profusely. He smiles and refuses payment.


Later Doug, Melody and I discuss the day’s events.

“Do you think, because we were so desperate, that we were in an altered state to start with?” I wonder out loud.

Melody is not convinced. She was aware of some additional resonance while she was singing the HU, and thought it was likely due to the empty house. But to Doug and I, it has the attributes of an out of body experience. I equate it to the dance of the whirling dervishes which reportedly produces ecstasy. The altered state they achieve is created by a combination of heightened receptivity to start which is augmented by repetitive actions such as dancing, chanting and whirling.

“But we were passively listening,” protests Doug. “We weren’t doing anything to shift us to a heightened state.”

“There are different ways to become more receptive,” I protest. “We were stressed to the max and not saying anything about it at all. It was weird. We have been in high stress situations during our wilderness canoe trips. How do we react? Our usual behaviour is to holler at each other and curse the elements. We talk non-stop. Since when have we ever used the technique of blithely ignoring something as a coping mechanism?”

‘You’re right about that,” acknowledges Doug.

“This is like the types of situations William James mentions in Varieties of Religious Experience,” Melody adds, “But being William James, while he may have reported it, it isn’t likely he worked out why it was happening.”


“Whatever,” Doug responds in an awed voice, “It was a very special blessing that delivered Stan to us.”

“Amen to that,” the three of us agree in harmony.

Photos: mountain ash in fall, Bear paw snowshoes, Ojibway/Cree snowshoes, most inaccessible windows, Nuisance grounds sign and sunset as we leave.

The Honey Farm

I pitch up at my friend Ernie's place in the South Okanagan in the middle of the fall honey extraction. There's no one in the main house so I head down to the Honey House on the ‘back forty’. The Honey House has been in construction for more than a year and now is finally fully operational. Although work remains to be done on the building, the equipment is all in place.

The floor of the Honey House looks clean but feels slightly sticky, probably from minor bits of wax or honey. Sam and Ernie are wearing rubber clogs in the extraction room so I don a pair as I enter.

Sam joins his dad after school and for a couple of hours the Honey House is a-hopping with activity. Supers, the square wooden boxes which hold the frames, are stacked up inside and outside the Honey House. Inside, first the top of the super is removed exposing the frames. Sam lifts out the frames, which sit vertically in the super, one by one to scrap the wax off. Once the wax has been removed, the frames are placed upright in a rotating stainless steel drum where the honey is whirled out of them. Liquid honey pours out transparent plastic tubing which Ernie directs it into massive metal drums as CBC FM plays in the background.

Besides his own crop, Ernie is extracting for his friends, neighbours and a number of other small operations in the South Okanagan valley so the supers and drums from each extraction need to be kept separate. It also means the phone is constantly ringing with people coming and going and advice offered and solicited.

Ernie’s crop is mostly clover, alfalfa and mountain fireweed, the latter a very popular item. There are small quantities of specialty honeys such as St. John’s Wort. I am surprised when I taste the honey and the propulis, the queen’s special food, that I can distinguish the various flavours. My only prior experience with flavoured honey has been those to which flavour was added. I can appreciate why these specialty versions are so greatly favoured.

Supers which are placed strategically near crops such as mountain fireweed seem to attract only bees feeding on that specific flower with often the colour of the propulis alone making it easy to identify which variety. And this separation seems to occur even if two sources of nectar are located close together.

For a while, when honey ale was popular, most of Ernie's honey went to breweries. Now some of the drums will go to a local granola manufacturer. A portion of the honey will also be sold during the summer at the local Farmer’s Market.

Ernie and his wife have been serious about the quality of their crop and have numerous 1st prize ribbons from the Provincial Fair. Their display of honey and bee paraphenalia is always a crowd pleaser as over the years they have collected stories, pictures, smokers, antique equipment, honey tins and beehive jars.

I leave Ernie and Sam to finish off in the Honey House and head back to the house. The computer desktop is full of articles about use of oxalic acid for mites, comparisons of various organic and non-organic approaches, notes about raising queens and marketing strategies. If I come back later in the year, I will find Ernie and his wife making and distributing their hand-dipped and molded beeswax candles. In the middle of the summer they are off early in the morning to the Market.

Later when his mom, dad and I are talking about a community development project with bee keeping as the income generating aspect, Sam hangs around on the edge of the discussion. On hearing someone mention restitution, he comments, "That's a great word, what does it mean?"

Later over dinner he tells us that his teacher asked them, because it is the start of the new school year, to list their favourite TV shows, celebrities and hobbies.

"What did you list," we inquire.

"I told him, I don't watch TV and celebrities are nut cases," Sam says. "I don't have time for them because bees are my hobby"

"Bees, like most agricultural pursuits, are a full time vocation, year round and totally encompassing", Ernie tells me later, "But I had never considered they might also help me raise my kids."

Photos: Road sign; flats in the super; flats in the extractor; cutting off the wax; liquid honey into the drums,bee paraphenalia & jars in stacks

Remembering Don

Recently I lost a wonderful mentor. In medicine when you lose a good mentor, you lose a great deal more. You lose a warm friend, a supportive colleague, a committed teacher and an inspiring leader. What begins as a somewhat distant professor and student relationship gradually modulates over time into a delicious blend of collegiality and friendship.

It comforts me somewhat to know that I am not alone in my sorrow. Like all great mentors, Don has many mentates, a word adapted from Kurt Vonnegut and science fiction to better describe the disciplineship involved in having a mentor.

I first met Don when he was head of the Janeway Hospital in St. John’s charged with establishing pediatric training in Newfoundland’s first medical school. He had come to the Janeway from Montreal with his wife, Liz, also a pediatrician. This wasn’t the first time they had undertaken such a challenge. With their five young children in tow, they had gone off to Nairobi for McGill University to help establish pediatric specialty training in Kenya ten years earlier.

At the time we met, I was the travelling doctor of the northern Labrador coast for Grenfell Health Services. Residing in the Inuit hamlet of Nain, the most northern settled community on the coast, I traveled back and forth from Nain to the other Inuit and Innu settlements staffed with nursing practitioners along the coast, Rigolet, Postville, Hopedale, Davis Inlet and Makkovik. Most of our pediatric referrals went to Goose Bay but occasionally when tertiary care was required a child would be sent to St. John’s, more than 1500 miles to the south.

On one visit to Davis Inlet, a tiny community of 250 Nascaupi normadic hunters still living on the land, the nurses and I resuscitated a dehydrated, convulsing nine month old infant and sent him on the long trip to St. John’s ICU. We called regularly for updates for the parents and ourselves. Then one day two Mounties (RCMP) in full uniform flew into the tiny hamlet to arrest the parents for child abuse. Luckily, as this was a rather unusual task at that time, they first dropped by the nursing station where the nurse recognized an enormous mistake had been made. The parents were well known to us, and not abusing the child.

The Mounties were sympathetic. They said they had other things that needed to be done on this visit to the coast, but while they could delay a little they could not ignore the instruction. Their order had come directly from the Department of Justice and even their bosses were unable to withdrawn it. This was something you will understand, that took a number of phone calls to ascertain.

We were frantic and not sure what to do. We were unable to find out who was on the Child Abuse team and calls to the doctors, ward and ICU failed to produce anything useful. Finally I contacted the head of the Janeway. By this time I was under a full head of steam. Dr. Hillman heard me out and asked a few pertinent questions. He seemed to appreciate what a miscarriage of justice this would be and how devastating in this small community. Then he asked, “What can I do?". I was so taken aback, I was, for a short minute, speechless. I had been hearing so many versions of, “It really isn’t my problem”, or “I think it is too late” that I was totally unprepared for someone who cared.

“ Well,” I said, much bolder than I actually felt, thinking we might as well go for bust, ” we need someone to phone the Minister of Justice and withdraw this order”.

“Done”, said Don, “anything else?”

Obviously a busy man, I thought, so better get it all in now.

“Well, that Child Abuse team needs an overhaul.” I said. “They didn’t even contact us and our numbers and names are in the kid’s chart. “

“That might take a bit longer,” he said, “but I agree.”

Don was like that, decisive and willing to take responsibility. He was also a master at sorting the fluff from the seeds, seeing through the histrionics to the wound. He had time to listen to an inarticulate cry from the wilderness and to really get the full impact of the story behind it. This combination was decidedly unusual in tertiary care centers, which, at that time, had a remarkable lack of interest in their more remote service areas. He had done the right thing and I was grateful. I didn’t give it much further thought.

A couple of months later, I needed a supervisor for my community medicine residency. It had to be someone in Newfoundland with a fellowship. My main supervisor suggested Liz Hillman, whom he had met at the Medical Council. Liz willingly agreed and a six week spell in St. John’s was organized in ambulatory pediatrics for me. No mention was made of the Mountie Episode, as I came to call it. I assumed Don had not made the connection that I was the irrate doctor on the coast.

Don had a way of taking in much more than any narrow view of his specialty or corner of the world would dictate. It wasn’t long before he decided since there was no community medicine grand rounds for me that I ought to come to his Pediatric rounds, to get in some critical thinking. He was a pediatric endocrinologist and really grilled his residents, but he made an effort to direct my way challenging community questions that added to the rounds and also sent me scurrying to the books. He challenged all of us to provide solid evidence and to support our points. He wanted us to see the whole picture and the connections. It was no surprise to me to find his residents scored near the top, even though the program was a new one.

Don’s greatest success was not however in pediatric endocrinology, despite his academic excellence, but in international health. With Liz, he created a world wide linkage of medical education projects and people over the years. In his so-called retirement he continued to lead problem based learning workshops for students in Ottawa and McMaster and built up the international health program in Ottawa. He was working with Liz on a project to document some of the medical education successes in East Africa for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada when he died.

I did one of those mapping exercises of my connections and jobs in international health and found that almost all of them link in one way or other back to Liz and Don. Others too have been influenced greatly by them over the years. One of the first online guest books I have seen is attached to Don’s obituary. It has attracted comments from Uganda, Kenya, Pakistan, China, Malaysia, US and Canada. The guest book allows those of us who have known and worked with Don to acknowledge our global connectedness and caring, and indeed our common medical origins. This appreciation of our global connectedness in medicine was one of Don's great gifts to us and is surely a much needed antidote for the alienation so many in the world feel today.

A year ago, I needed a dose of Don and Liz's optimism and enthusiasm for global health. We had a chance to link up while they were being entertained as WWII veterans in the Netherlands and I was visiting friends in The Hague. I turned up in the lobby of an overbooked hotel in Appledorn and soon was bedded down in a pullout couch in their room. Don’s army buddy, a retired judge, had kept a diary of all the places they had traversed in Holland during the war, so the following day, a young Dutch family who had adopted Liz and Don, escorted the whole group of us around to the various sites. Don and Liz had this wonderful knack of making friends everywhere they went. And once again, as was so often the case, the whole time I was with them, supposedly on holiday, we were reviewing articles, plotting projects and exchanging connections.

Just last November, when Don was 80, he and Liz joined me in East Africa to teach pediatric residents and students and to provide feedback on student inclusion in a child health project. He and Liz set off for a long bus ride to Gulu in the war-torn north of Uganda with several potential projects in their pocket for an isolated hospital there. Just one month before he died, we received word that a Pakistani project we had prepared at the request of an NGO working in North West Frontier Province had been funded for two years.

I had a dream the other night that he hadn’t really died. I believe my dreams are the real, unvarnished truth, the gold as Marion Woodman says. This dream was so real I woke up thinking I had made a big, Mark Twain type of mistake, as in "the stories of my death have been greatly exaggerated". Then I recognized the gold. One can’t lose a mentor, it is a gift that never ends. I will always have access to him over my shoulder. Just writing up the story of how we met, I can hear him laughing, "Whose version do you want to hear?".

His gift of mentoring will continue to manifest though his wife, Liz. Then, too, its pretty hard to be sad about such a productive, fruitful, wonderful more than 60 years of medical service.

Photos: Don and Liz receive the Order of Canada; Don & Liz at the 60th celebrations of VE day in Holland and Don & Liz in a dugout canoe, Lake Bunyonyi, Uganda.