Nothing But Iron:  Maraming Salamat, Canada By Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. September 27, 2009 I began this issue 17 days ago from Canada, because that’s where I was at the time.  I went there to meet my Aunt Nelia, and my cousins, Nida and her husband Pablo, for the first time.  Aunt Nelia lives in the Philippines, the homeland of my father, who died in 1984.  Nida, her daughter, and Pablo moved to Toronto in 1990.  These are the first paternal relatives I have met, with the exception of my grandparents who visited us when we lived in Kansas in the 1960’s.  For years I have written letters to my aunt, because I knew it was important to keep our families connected, if only by paper in envelopes.  I knew my dad would have been pleased.  My aunt always wrote back promptly, though it sometimes took weeks for our letters to reach their destinations.  My favorite letter, one that I have since archived in electronic form, was her reply to my request for information about my dad growing up in the Philippines.  I learned, for example, that my dad was afraid to go to first grade, so every day of that first week he hid in a tree during school hours.  That practice ended quickly when my grandfather, a strict disciplinarian, found out about it.  My dad did develop a taste for education; he later graduated from medical school at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. The rendezvous with my not-yet-seen relatives could have been complicated because I managed to leave my cell phone on the night stand in my bedroom, which is far enough from the departure security check point that it might as well have been in another country, which it was soon enough.  I discovered the deficit when a TSA official said, before I walked through the metal detector, “Cell phone in your pocket?”  In fact there was not.  After a moment of subdued panic, which luckily did not prompt a strip search, I was able to convince myself that the cell phone was not essential and that this would be an opportunity to practice the resourcefulness that can be a by-product of inconvenience.  I learned long ago that the essence of survival when one is a partial, or at least intermittent, moron is not the elimination of error, but preparedness to manage it when it inevitably occurs.  At the time I was not sure why I had grabbed an unused AT&T calling card from my desk drawer, but it came in handy. The flight was short:  45 minutes to Chicago, and under two hours to Toronto.  It seemed silly that I had not visited before.  I met Nida first, as she was the one-woman airport scouting party sent ahead to find a guy who looked half like her and half not.  It wasn’t much to go on, given that the only minorities in Toronto are those who actually look Canadian.  I knew what Nida looked like from the recent pictures she had e-mailed, but I forgot to send pictures in return, so I wondered if we might walk right by each other like, well, strangers in an airport.   As fate or chance or genetic radar would have it, our first meeting could not have been easier.  There I was walking toward her and there she was walking toward me.  She recognized me first with an it’s-you-right? look, a smile and then, outstretched arms.  We said each other’s names to verify that which was already certain, hugged and off we went. I was immediately comfortable in the presence of my insan (the Filipino word I now know to mean cousin).  (Nida would be amused to know that my spell checker tried to get me to convert insan to insane.)  Likewise, Aunt Nelia, who I met a short time later at my hotel, was not at all the stranger to me that one might imagine after 48 years of never having met her.  Her smile was broad and warm and sincere.  Her hug was familiar.  I could see traces of my father in his sister’s face.  It had been a long time.   Nida’s husband, Pablo, also greeted me.  His affable personality, graciousness and well-applied sense of humor came as no surprise.  It took all of a minute before the four of us were talking, joking and discovering mutually-endearing similarities.  It was much more reunion than first encounter.  I did not wonder if I would like my relatives.  I just knew it would be so.  Tita (Aunt) Nelia treated me as if I were her son.  It began even before I arrived.  “Mom was worried that we would not be able to find you at the airport,” said Nida as we walked from the terminal.  Worried.  Just like my own mom.    The days that followed were both a blur and unforgettable.  Stories, pictures, tourist attractions--all punctuated by kindness and laughter and the good-fortune feelings of discovery.  I did most of the driving, which was easy in Toronto, once I got used to the metric system.  “We drive 110 on the freeways and 60 in the city,” I reported as a novice on my Facebook site.  Once you do the metric-English conversion, you’ll see that Toronto motorists actually drive a little more slowly, but the math conceals the real difference:  They drive with much less aggression than we do.  It was almost as if they used their vehicles for transportation rather than competition (or weaponry).  On several occasions fellow travelers slowed down so I could to merge.  It is not so rare to see that kind of courtesy in Madison, but in Toronto, common courtesy was common indeed.  I imagined a lower rate of in-vehicle profanity and obscene gesturing as I rolled along a major freeway, and wondered if Canadians even knew the words moron or idiot.  I was told that Toronto is a big city, like Chicago.  Yes, it’s a big city.  I am not so sure it’s like Chicago.     We visited Niagara Falls.  If you ever want to see, hear, feel and taste the power of water, go there.  I wondered why anyone would want to go over the falls in a barrel and then I remembered it is because they are really stupid, or they don’t understand that death is a permanent milestone.  I would regale you with facts and figures, but you have Wikipedia for that.  Bottom line:  Don’t let your bass boat run out of gas above the falls.  And bring a rain poncho and quick-dry shoes if you want to see the falls up close without getting soaked.  Someday I will visit Niagara in the winter.  It will be bitterly cold, but worth it, I think, for the pictures.   My favorite place, though it didn’t really matter as long as I was with my relatives, was downtown Toronto.  It was a quick ride in, and because of the Labor Day holiday, the crowds were light.  We saw CN Tower, which at one time, until some guy, compensating for anatomical shortcomings, built one bigger somewhere else before riding off in his H3.  The significance of the tower is that Patrick used to draw pictures of it as a little kid, during his dinosaur-whale-continent-tall-building-fascination-with-all-that-is-huge phase.  I sent him a picture.      We rode a tour boat, and a double-decker tour bus and we visited St. Lawrence Market, where I bought a quart of the best blueberries ever.  Outside the market I immediately noticed something that most tourists probably ignore:  triple-option garbage cans.  On the left:  recycling.  On the right:  waste.  In the center:  compost.  No kidding, city-wide composting.  Banana peels, front and center.  Like I said, it’s not Chicago.  I was reminded of one of my many favorite phrases that I imagine myself to have made up:  It is certain we can achieve that which has already been achieved.   I suppose that applies to learning a new language.  I know I can speak Tagalog, because millions of Filipinos and probably thousands of light-dark hybrids before me have done so.  In fact the words feel natural in my mouth—soft and sweet, yet tangy, like rhubarb cobbler.  (I wonder if I speak them with an accent.)  Having missed out on the golden, painless childhood opportunity–dad did not teach us–to learn the language of my ancestors, the assimilation of this musical, whimsical and, for now, perplexing mode of communication will challenge, but I lack a compelling reason to avoid it.  Besides, I now have some highly qualified teachers.  I say whimsical, because one of my first Tagolog lessons was how to say, “Are you going down (the stairs)?”  Translated:  Ba ba ba ba?  The affirmative is “Ba ba ba.”  (Yes, I am going down the stairs.)  We had a lot of fun with that one.  But I wonder . . . Were they just messing with me, like the time I was sent to find a left-handed axe at Boy Scout camp?  I guess I’ll find out next time I meet a Filipino in a stair well. The dialogue, most of which (for my benefit) was in English, was the best part of the trip.  I was told that all Filipinos speak English because the entirety of their education, from day one, is presented in English.  My relatives did have Filipino accents (for example, i’s have the ee sound), but this was no trouble for me after so many years of hearing my dad speak.   I was eager to learn more about my dad.  I remembered him once speak of soccer as a popular sport in the Philippines.  I asked Tita if my father played.  “No.  Basketball,” she replied.  Go figure.  My dad played my own favorite sport.  Turns out that my cousins played basketball too.  I suppose, because of his size, my dad was a point guard.  I wonder if all Filipinos must be point guards, or if there is a genetic variant of power forward Filipinos with whom we share an imperceptible genetic connection.  I knew my dad played piano, but I did not know he started with the trumpet. Though he learned to read music, Dad could play piano by ear—just like Tita Nelia, my brother Mike, and my son Connor.  Me?  Well, I can whistle by mouth, but that’s about the extent of my musical prowess.  But, as we say in Lambeau (French for sieve) Field, it’s early.    I learned that about the challenges of the scarcely profitable business of growing rice and selling vegetables to market vendors who cannot pay for them in advance.  I learned that my aunt raises chickens and grows orchids in her garden.  She told me that orchids grow just fine in the sun, though most people believe they need shade.  My aunt, using the amazing web technology of Skype, was able to ask my cousin Ray how her chickens were doing:  “I ate them,” he teased.  He also wondered why his mother was more worried about the welfare of chickens and orchids than that of her son.    At dinner one night we talked about World War II, the cruelty of the Japanese soldiers during the occupation and the generosity of the American liberators after General MacArthur’s return.  My father and aunt were in grade school then.  Tita knew of many young Filipino men who were taken away by the Japanese, never to return.  I told them the story of my father’s gunshot wound, which really was just a story.  For years my dad had told us he had been shot while fleeing the Japanese.  I remember touching the smooth, believable, half-dollar-sized scar on his leg.  Years later he confessed with a sheepish grin that the wound was actually inflicted by a barbed-wire fence, but he assured us that he was running from rifle-toting Japanese soldiers when it happened.  That brought much laughter.  I learned, as we discussed the short-lived notion of eating our next dinner at a Japanese restaurant, that there is no such thing as a long time ago for someone who was actually in a war.  It is a perspective that I do not have and one I hope never to have.           During my many informal lessons in Filipino language and culture I learned, as Pablo succinctly stated and frequently demonstrated, that “Filipinos feed you”.  And feed you and feed you.  I had adobo and lumpia and pansit and bitter melon and rice and undecapitated fish and seconds and thirds.  There was always rice, and it became apparent that seconds and thirds are official dishes in the Philippines.  Had I stayed longer I would have soon begun my second career as a sumo wrestler.  Irresponsibly, even though Pablo told me, I forgot to write down the most important phrase in the Tagolog language:  the one for “I am full.”   You probably want to know if Canadians really talk funny.  They do.  Take sportswriter Tom Tebbut, for example, who wrote in his article about Melanie Oudin (Globe and Mail, Tuesday September 8), that “there was an ingenuousness to her words that was part of a youthful insouciance that has struck a chord with fans at the 2009 U.S. Open.”  You probably know that I would never use ingenuousness and insouciance in the same sentence unless I was messing with you or had just downloaded new thesaurus software.  By the way, if you were wondering how to pronounce Oudin, it’s Oh-YOU-dee-in.  She’s from Marietta, Georgia, not Paris, dummy. My trip to Canada offered a cursory look at the health care system.  I did what little research I could (n=2), but I hope to learn more.  I could not take the time to seek out physicians, but Nida is a nurse, so she was able to offer a medical professional’s perspective on universal health care access.  To summarize:  1) Everyone is indeed covered.  (Citizens, not tourists, that is.)  2) Rationing is not a hot topic.  3) Doctors are generally unhappy with pay and workload.  Pay is capped, so after a certain point, if they wish to continue to care for their patients, they do so for free.  4) Emergency rooms are “badly abused,” meaning patients commonly seek ER care for non-emergent conditions.  5) Delays are common, for example, six months is a typical wait for elective surgery.  6) Doctors decide who gets care. 7) High risk patients do not get high risk surgical procedures.  Example:  An 80-year-old with coronary disease could get bypass surgery, but an 80-year-old, obese, diabetic, smoker would probably not.  8) Doctors are not compelled to accept new patients, and most do not.   On the plane ride back I sat next to Briar, a Canadian who runs her own personal training business.  She added these perspectives (or at least my recollection thereof):  1) Wealthy people, including many of her clients, purchase expensive health care coverage that pretty much gives them what they want when they want it.  We agreed that carte blanche might not necessarily be better care.  2) It is very difficult to find a new doctor.  Those moving to new cities might have to use walk-in clinics or emergency rooms until they are lucky enough to find docs.  3) Briar did not agree that doctors have autonomy in making health care decisions.  She said the government strictly regulates utilization.   These are just two perspectives, and both are subject to the memory-dependent distillery that separates my ears from my computer keyboard.  Nonetheless, my perception of these perspectives is a source of fascination, and I now suspect what I wondered before:  There may not be a perfect system that serves the needs of all in the ways that all want, but we may indeed be able to come up with a way to care for more people, more adequately, or at least to share the inadequacies and frustrations of our system more evenly.  I do not, however, think we can do much unless we are willing to honestly answer the question that the elephant in the room wants to ask:  What are you willing to give up?  I am convinced that the answer cannot be nothing, unless you don’t desire a solution, or you are a vote-grubbing politician masquerading as someone with the courage to make a difference.  The last thing I will say about our health care crisis is that I am afraid it has overshadowed a much bigger problem:  our health crisis.  (That topic is coming soon to an NBI near you.) So, I did not bring back the solution to the problems of our nation, but I did return with a fondness for my new-found family and many memories that I will treasure always.  I am so glad I went there, and I imagine the regret I might not have fully known had I failed to overcome the potent forces of inertia that might have kept it from happening.  The experience made me realize the importance of doing that which is not routine:  Visit family.  Speak a new language.  Eat unfamiliar food.  Talk to a stranger.  Thank a soldier in an airport.  Toss an apple core into a street-corner compost bin.  Ask a question.  Take a chance.  Share.  Learn. __________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column that sometimes has only a little sports and a lot of other stuff that is probably related somehow to sports if you ponder it for a long time.  This issue is dedicated to the author’s gracious, generous hosts, Insans Nida and Pablo and Tita Nelia.  Maraming salamat means “many thanks” but you probably already knew that because you are inquisitive, resourceful and computer literate.  ©2009 DrTM Enterprises.  All rights reserved.  See more photos from Canada.