Meat Pies and Wild Strawberries

As we grow older, many of us begin to reflect about why we are here, and what we may have to offer those who soon will inherit whatever it is we are able to leave behind.

In America, that often amounts to the degree of wealth we have acquired in our (all too brief) visit to this planet.

Money, land, assets.

I've often blogged here about the disparities in income and wealth between people, and classes, and races in our modern world. You could easily infer from these posts that I believe in redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor, but I am sorry to report that that is not the case.

In my experience, people who have the discipline to save, and who strive to be excellent at whatever they do, become quite successful in America.

That is why this country continues to exert such a seductive hold on the rest of the world. Those who are motivated enough to strike out in the way our ancestors did, leaving their ancestral lands for the prospect of thriving in this "new world," usually continue to do much better here than they would have in wherever they came from.

At the same time, as all immigrants know, much is lost in the process.

By now, the cycles of first generation / second generation assimilation are so well understood that most of us easily recognize where somebody new we meet is along the spectrum of fitting in.

Me? I have a deep and unfulfilled desire for Scottish Meat Pies, made as they were and still are in my mother's native Scotland.

As well as a lust for the tiny wild strawberries that grew along the train tracks in my father's native Ontario.

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