Category Archives: Pandemic

About the Mail

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So, do you have your Christmas cards ready to get mailed out? Are you looking forward to an avalanche of cards and packages (that you didn’t order from Amazon) to pour forth from your Superbox when you insert that magical key to reveal the wondrous contents inside?

Yeah, no. Mail really has changed in the last twenty or thirty years. It’s rare to open up my mailbox and see handwritten addresses in the to and from spaces. Occasionally there’s a birthday card or a thank you. But mostly the mail is a never-ending invitation to recycle a bunch of paper that I never asked for. Even bills don’t come in the mail anymore unless they’re from my offline plumber or some magazine that I never subscribed to telling me to “Pay Now!”

When I was a kid I so loved the idea of getting mail that I was okay even with getting junk mail sent to me, thrilled because it was addressed to me. In a magazine I discovered the answer to my quest to be noticed by Canada Post: a sign-up form with circles to fill in if you wanted to be “contacted” by multiple retailers. Little did they know that I was twelve years old and had no money or no idea what an onslaught of mail I was setting my parents’ mailbox up for. Not unlike my inbox when someone sells my email address without my permission.

It was mostly junk, yes, but I think I must have received occasional free samples of brand new products like cereal that I didn’t like or dishwasher soap for an appliance we didn’t own. I even became a Regal Catalog representative and pored over their magazines like they were Christmas catalogs, blissfully unaware that most of their stuff fell apart moments after you purchased it or was “not exactly as advertised”.

I did, however, also receive actual letters back then, because I also collected pen pals along with those free samples and catalogs. The Edmonton Journal had a kids page where you could get your name and address published if you were interested in writing to someone across the province or across the world. I had several “first-date” letters that never went anywhere – kind of like the swipe left of my time. But I also had a lasting correspondence with two girls, one from Winterburn, Alberta and the other from Belfast, Ireland. One taught everything about the horses she was so in love with, the other about punk rock and what it was like to have bombs blow out the windows in your living room.

Although I bemoan the fact that I don’t get any letters anymore, I’m not exactly writing them either – it’s just too easy to slough off the job of hand-writing anything to anyone anymore. Gone are the days of having to decipher someone’s handwriting, of pressed flowers or photographs falling out from between the leaves of paper, of saving such things in shoeboxes for all eternity. Because they are saveable: they’re usually thin, unique and can contain valuable information.

And so sometimes I will even print up a memorable email and paste it into a journal or fold it up like a letter and second it in a shoebox. And you can bet that I save any Christmas letter or card that I receive, for at least a little while, and if it has a handwritten note all the better. These things might take time, but then those messages can last for a lifetime.

Here’s wishing that your mailboxes will all be full of only good stuff this COVID Christmas.

About Career Choices

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[It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Throwback Thursday. It’s fun to read about what my under-10-years-old children were wanting to be when they grew up. It’s safe to say that they were not expecting a worldwide pandemic and a shaky job market for the year 2020.)

            One of the great advantages about being five years old is that you can make a career choice without considering the logistics of the situation whatsoever. Never mind that we live no where near Cape Canaveral, my youngest son Simon, for the longest time has wanted to be an astronaut, or in five-year-old language, a spaceman.

            Tim, the middle child, made a point of getting clearance from us that he DOES NOT have to do the same thing as his Dad. When we said that he could be anything he wanted, he decided that he was going to be a millionaire. (Get the connection? Dad: not a millionaire.) Rick and I capitalized on the moment and began considering early retirement since we figured Tim the Millionaire could take us in. But when we asked him if he would take care of us when we were old, he flatly refused.

            We then turned the question on Gil, the oldest, a.k.a. most guilt-ridden, son. Gil’s preferred occupation, like most kids, usually reflects what he’s interested in at the time. So at the moment, he’s torn between becoming a professional soccer player or a professional Lego builder. Bolstered by his younger brother’s answer to our plea, Gil smiled at us and said, “No way!” And so the ball was in Simon’s court. Four pairs of eyes were on him as the youngest child had the question posed at him. And with the carefree attitude of the baby of the family, he absolved himself of all responsibility by announcing, “I’ll be in space!”

            Simon has been so resolved upon the astronaut route that it came as a huge surprise the other day when all that suddenly changed. At a car dealership, he saw a car that he particularly liked and said, “I want that one!” To which I replied (with all the coldness of a parent who has been shut out of their child’s home when social security becomes obsolete), “I guess you’ll have to go out and get a job.” This presented no problem for him. “ Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna be a wrestler!”

            A wrestler? The change of course was easily detected. The night before we sat in a pizza joint, subjected to big screen WWF, which the two younger boys were especially enthralled with. “What about space?” I demanded. “Don’t you want to be an astronaut anymore?” Sure the moon made for expensive round trip visitation, but a WWF wrestler? Astronauts rarely go slamming other guys around in zero gravity.

            But Simon had it figured that since there were no towns in space, and he liked to go to town, his life’s occupation would have to change. If television has such an effect on such important decisions, however, I think we’re going to have to buy a copy of Apollo 13 and start playing it over and over again. And even though the pizza was good, we’ll have to stay away from that pizza joint.

[Apparently, I wasn’t too thrilled about Simon’s WWF aspirations eighteen years ago. I’m happy to report that while he’s neither an astronaut or a wrestler, he’s pursuing a career that he loves and he spends most of his time on Earth.]

About Alex Trebek

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

What is 2020, Alex?

Although living through a global pandemic that appears to be ramping up right now is decidedly NOT FUN, there are always silver linings to be found as we huddle, zoom and binge. Losing Alex Trebek, however, is not one of them. The beloved host of the popular game show Jeopardy lost his battle with pancreatic cancer last Sunday, November 8. It was the year 2020. In case you weren’t listening.

In the face of this great trial, Trebek was still such an optimist. When he announced on the show in March of last year that he had been diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer, he allied himself with the common man, saying he was just one of the 50,000 other people in the United States who were told the same news that year. And he said he would fight it.

So when Alex kept showing up for his hosting duties as if nothing was out of the ordinary, it really seemed like he was not only fighting, but beating it. He looked a little older when I tuned in to the new season of Jeopardy this fall, with contestants spaced out and separated by plexiglass shields. That didn’t stop him from chatting them up as usual, encouraging them to win big and teasing them mercilessly.

It was all in good fun, of course. Calling a contestant a “loser” when they described a dorky hobby or roasting them because they missed a clue that was right in their wheelhouse was part of the charm of Alex Trebek. If Alex corrected your pronunciation, you believed him. If he called someone a nerd, it was just him saluting one of his own.

If watching Jeopardy made you a nerd, well, so be it. My kids learned early that when Jeopardy was on, I might ignore them: I couldn’t risk missing the satisfaction of calling out the questions to the clues that I knew, which some days were not very many. Jeopardy was a trivia show, after all, and most trivia is, well, trivial. Nevertheless, if I could show off a little of my knowledge of biology or books that I had never read, of obscure definitions or even some math, it made me a little happy inside.

My son, Tim, is the one who asks me when I’m going to try out for Jeopardy and one of my first reactions when I heard the news was that now I never would get to meet Alex Trebek, at least not in this lifetime. But as much as I liked playing at home, I don’t think I would like the pressure of playing for real, of getting frustrated with my clicker not working when I KNOW the answer, and of ringing in too many “educated” guesses. One of my favorite stunt authors, A. J. Jacobs went on as a contestant after he spent a year reading the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica. And he bombed. Just sayin’ – I don’t think it’s that easy to not-bomb.

If Alex had been a contestant on his own show, I think he might have given Ken Jennings a run for most-winningest player. I remember an interview he did years ago where he was asked what he was going to do when he retired and he replied that he hoped to re-read all his favorite books. I resonated with that. I hope he had time to do some of that, but it was so obvious that he was a people person, that I suspect he spent a lot more time with the living than the dead while he could. When he got to where he was going, he could look forward to a Babette’s feast with his favorite famous people.

And maybe with some people that were not so famous. My sister texted me on Sunday that our mom would be happy to see him. What made losing Alex that much more poignant for us was that our mom fought the same kind of cancer – and we knew what a rough go that was. And also: she loved Jeopardy and she loved Alex. She maybe didn’t know that much about Greek mythology or African geography, but she knew a nice man when she saw one. I’m sure that she recognized him when he got there.

About Spookiness

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It’s that spoooooooooky time of year again. The weather gets colder and everything around us just dies (or hibernates – which can look pretty much the same). The shadows become murkier as the sun disappears earlier and the setting becomes perfect for an eerie holiday.

Things that are innocent can get a little twisted. That creepy cat on a broomstick? It’s just a medieval feline on a Roomba.

That being said, I am not immune to getting goosebumps when my brain decides to play tricks on me. Many moons ago, Rick and I were in our minivan when we noticed a strange thing up in the sky. It was an odd shape, it was glowing, mayyyyybeeee it was moving? We were partly apprehensive and partly excited as we wondered what in the world this unidentified flying object was?

And then the clouds parted. And it was, in fact, the moon.

Oh.

Other-worldly, yes. But not unidentifiable. MOMENTARILY, however, it was deliciously scary.

Generally I don’t like to be scared unless it comes at me in ways I can control. Like rollercoasters: a nice dose of adrenaline within the confines of a super-seatbelt.

I suppose that metered scariness is the attraction about Halloween. If the masked strangers at my door are under 5 feet tall, I will reward them with a treat. Anyone bigger than that might get the 5th degree before we open the door wide and offer up a bag of potato chips with barbeque tongs.

This year, of course, I’ll be wearing a mask myself at the door, albeit a disposable medical one. Maybe I’ll dress up in hazmat suit, too. You can never be too safe this time of year. Or this year, actually.

It is 2020, after all.

Happy Covid Halloween!

About Travelling

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Although it seems counter-intuitive to travel during a global pandemic, we decided to do just that this last week. Eschewing our plans made last December to visit Disneyland this fall with our adult children, we opted for safe(r) travels within the confines of our Canadian border. All of our pictures are clearly time-stamped by the masks we had to wear anywhere we ventured outside of our pod.

About a month ago we booked flights for six to Vancouver and held our breath, took our vitamins and said our prayers that we would actually be able to take said flights, barring any fevers, sore throats or other COVID-like symptoms. The plan, over which we had absolutely no control, went according to… well, plan.

Travel, as they say, is broadening. Our main destination was not Vancouver but the giant island to the west of it. Sure we could have flown directly there, into Victoria or Nanaimo, where we spent a couple of nights each. But part of the charm of visiting The Island is engaging in what I like to call Ferry Culture. For those of us born in the wide open prairies, we can get into a vehicle and drive ad nauseum for days. But when you live on the coast, water sort of gets in the way.

Ferry Culture involves a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. If you need too make sure you connect to a flight, you have to get to the ferry in time and before it fills up. So you get up super early, drive to the ferry landing nearest you, and then you wait in line. Then you get on the ferry and you sit back and wait again as the ferry takes you over. This can all take hours. Fortunately there was food and phones and, in this case, family to amuse us.

And it’s fun, especially when it’s novel and when you’re on vacation. And when the scenery around you is beautiful. All that water surrounding you seems to do its job of cleansing your brain – which is really what a vacation is for.

Maybe it’s the change of scenery or the brain-washing, but I found myself fascinated by the number of small things that added up to big things on this trip. While the boys skipped rocks on one little beach in Chemainus, Sharlie was able to look for seashells to her heart’s delight – there were so many on that little piece of paradise that she could literally take her pick of the best ones. On that beach there were hundreds and thousands of shells and rocks and logs that the tide had brought in.

Should I even mention the grains of sand? Or the gallons of water?

And then we visited the Butchart Gardens. Of course, there are very green plants and trees and flowers (still) everywhere in October on Vancouver Island but the Gardens do an especially nice job of arranging and clustering them in a way that gives you pause. And when you try to estimate the number of petals on an accordion-like chrysanthemum, you count past 100 quickly. When you consider the petals in a twenty foot square patch of mums, it’s boggling.

And most of the plants were not even in bloom at this time of year.

In the rather large Butchart Gardens there are also trees, shrubs, leaves and needles you could consider “counting”. But really, that would get old, fast.

And then, there is the travelling itself. The ferries we rode on could hold hundreds of vehicles, some of tremendous size. Where the heck was everybody going and what was so important that it had to get done on the other side? And plane travel: what would have taken us a good day or two in the car to traverse, we managed by crawling into a giant sardine can in just a little over an hour. 500 miles an hour at 30,000 feet. Really, you don’t want to think about it too hard or the whole relaxing part of the vacation just goes Poof!

All this makes me consider my own tiny mortality. It’s really not much in the scheme of THE WHOLE WORLD, is it? And sometimes, I wonder: what am I really doing here, anyway?

On a podcast recently I was reminded of something that Andy Stanley said – whether it’s his words originally or not, no matter – it’s still good. He said that when we get overwhelmed with the idea of doing something good for mankind, just try instead to do for one what you wish you could do for all.

For some reason, I was reminded of this as I considered the seashores and the sand and the seas this last week. The stones that were skipped and the walks that were taken and jokes that we shared didn’t do that much for the world, but they did a world of good for us.

Thanks for the nice holiday, world. I owe ya one.

About Odd Jobs

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It’s a rough time to be a twenty-something looking for work right now. All three of our boys fall into this category and they are in one stage or another of flux: going to school, just finished school and between jobs. The pandemic-economic climate has made job hunting – and keeping – difficult, especially when you haven’t had a lot of traction yet.

One thing that keeps me optimistic about their situation is remembering all the odd, crappy, weird jobs that I had when I was just trying to pay for my own schooling and make the rent. Oh, and be able to take myself to restaurants. At one point, I quit school and seeing the last of my student loan in sight, I needed to find work and I couldn’t be picky.

The summer of ’87 first found me selling ice cream in a semi-temporary booth in downtown Edmonton. Some entrepreneurial friends I knew (from church!) took a chance on me and I became – as my co-worker Barb liked to call us back before we were PC – a “scoop-chick”. It really wasn’t a bad job except I often worked the semi-scary late shift alone (on Jasper Avenue!) and there was no bathroom on site. It also probably wasn’t that great that I got to eat all the ice cream I wanted either. (My love of ice cream still knows no bounds.) A highlight of that summer? In the middle of an Oilers cup race during which we sold our trademark blue-and-orange-striped ice cream, I scooped a cone for Philly goalie Chico Resch which he bought for his friend Ron Hextall. (He picked vanilla.)

I was, however, still short a few hours of full-time and when I became friends with the franchise owner’s son, he put a good word in for me at his place of employ where I could work extra hours around my scooping job. The okay part? It was at a store at West Edmonton Mall which, in those days was where my friends and I spent a lot of time between the waterpark and the movie theaters and Bourbon Street. The not-so-okay part? I was HIGHLY UNQUALIFIED to sell automotive parts and accessories.

Working at JB’s Automotive definitely rings in as my WORST JOB EVER. If they would have let me just work the till, I would probably have been fine. But noooooo, THEY made me LEARN stuff. About CARS. Ew. On my very first day, I took apart a floor model of an engine, forever sealing the word “manifold” into my vocabulary. And then there was the time when I was called “dumb” because I couldn’t locate a certain part to order in the four-foot long catalog collection that rested behind the counter. At one of my next shifts at the ice cream shop, I overheard the same guy tell my boss about how he liked to go to JB’s and ask the girls there to look up parts he knew did not exist.

OHHHHH!!!

As summer was coming to a close, ice-cream was less in demand and I had to find another job to offset the angst of my auto-parts-sales job. It turns out, it’s always who you know. Another friend recommended me for a part-time teller position at the bank where she worked and so I became a “money waitress”.

Working for Canada Trust had its advantages with it being open till 9pm, especially since I elected to go back to school the following September. Classes filled my days and a decent-paying job filled my evenings. But being a teller had its sore points: we routinely ran out of cash (Cash? What is Cash?) during high seasons like Christmas and I was robbed once by possible gunpoint (it was in his jacket pocket so it could have been a fist-and-finger). I was a happy teller until the end of the night when my exuberance for serving customers was overshadowed by my propensity to make data entry mistakes. My supervisors were very disgruntled with me when I kept them overtime because I had trouble with my manual balancing at the end of shift. Their solution: they promoted me to Part-Time Teller Supervisor. Once I had to balance other tellers, I never had trouble again!

I worked at the bank for four years, paying for my schooling as I went until I graduated, pregnant and unemployable. Oh, and married. Which led to another chapter of odd jobs: wife, mother, homemaker…well, the list is kinda endless. Because there is ALWAYS something to do, right?

And even if I didn’t always like my jobs, I am happy that I have the stories. Plus, I survived the ’87 tornado unawares in West Edmonton Mall probably selling radar detectors and fuzzy dice. At least I knew what those things were.

About Weeds

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Oh, the tenacity!

It’s been a weird year. (Oh, sorry. I should have started with the caveat that I would introduce this post with a Magnificent Understatement.)

For starters there was the COVID. I was reminiscing just yesterday morning about how I used to go to the local library and peruse the shelves, TOUCH THE BOOKS, and not even think twice about how much fun that was. We used to eat free samples at Costco, high five strangers at hockey games and plan vacations with hotels and amusement parks. We even used to think that the United States was relatively harmless.

On a personal note, we sold a business which changed my job from going in to an office regularly to exclusively working from home. This happened to coincide with the whole world #stayinghome so at first it just was part of the General Weirdness. Then everyone that had camped out in my house with me for those two months went back to their regularly scheduled programming, but with face masks and lots and lots of hand sanitizer.

At first, it was pretty weird being Alone In The House Again, but I got used to it because I have a certificate in Introvert Skills. I still went for lots of long walks, because that was A Pandemic Recreation Highlight that I liked. I shopped for groceries (without free samples anywhere) and learned to do pretty much everything, including some grocery shopping, online.

At the beginning of 2020, we had also moved into a new/different house, under cover of a lot of snow. It’s only been about seven months here, but let’s just say, I’m pretty familiar with all the insides of this house. We’ve made changes to suit us better and to make it feel like Home. Most of the square footage of the house gets inspected daily, especially since I got a FitBit and get reminded to complete 250 steps at ten minutes to every hour. I do a couple laps up and down the stairs, check for boogeymen in the bedrooms and pee in the downstairs toilet. If I excel, I get rewarded with a little fireworks celebration on my left wrist when I hit 10,000 steps (not for peeing.)

All this is to say, I seem to be taking the Stay (in the) Home thing kind of seriously, much to the detriment of my yard. Unlike all those other teal, emerald and lime thumbed folks out there who stormed the greenhouses in Spring 2020, I did only my bare minimum of planting lots of tomatoes and a few other plants that would mostly die under my watch.

And then I dug my heels in about the weeds.

All around this “new” house of ours are plenty of gravel beds, the kind that harbour weeds like they were hostages in a Die Hard movie. To add to the matter, these weeds have some kind of Stockholm Syndrome where they don’t want to be released. And NOTHING is so unsatisfying as pulling out the TOP of a weed, knowing you’ve guaranteed its roots to multiply in perpetuity. So I just kinda gave up trying.

But a funny thing has happened. I’m starting to enjoy the weeds. Well, okay, not the weeds exactly, but certainly their tenacity. I mean weeds have this Amazing Ability to Grow Anywhere.

And also: Weeds Have No Shame. We live on a corner lot with one of those gravel beds right there for everyone to inspect as they walk by. There are plenty of weeds already camouflaging the rocks, but there is One Dandelion in particular that just has some attitude. Every day, she stands a little taller and gets a little yellower and I swear, has one leaf bent over one hip. I tell myself that I should go pull (her) out, I make reminder notes in my daily planner to do it, I write freaking blog posts about it this damn dandelion.

But: I kinda wanna see how far she’s gonna take this, y’know. And I’m not exactly going anywhere (especially the United States), so I might as well have something to watch out my front window. If there’s something that needs to be admired right now it’s the ability to flourish in less than optimal circumstances.

What a sassy dandelion.

About Writing: One Year Later

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There are two ways for me to look at this last year of blogging: it has been either a complete success or a total failure. How I choose to look at it could be an illustration of that classic conundrum: is the glass half empty or is it half full?

Or, is it neither of those things?

Perspective really is everything, so let’s look at it first from the glass half-full side of things. I DID NOT get as much accomplished with my writing as I had hoped in this past year since I started my (second) blog. Because the blog was supposed to be my side-thingy, my practice space, my other writing project.

This is the assessment of someone who writes admittedly unrealistic to-do, to-read, to-write, to-learn, to-visit, to-cook, to-go, to-knock-out-of-the park lists. When I compose such lists, I have endless resources in my estimation: all the time, ambition and money necessary. And then reality hits that ALL of those things are finite: I HAVE TO CHOOSE how to use WHAT I’VE GOT. Half a glass is plenty to get me where I need to go. It can get me to the bathroom, if that’s where I want to go, eventually.

To flip things, my half-full glass was a lot. A year ago, I was trying to figure out what kind of blog I wanted to write, what the heck were widgets and plugins (in blog-speak) and how to get over the fear of just putting my words out there into the blogosphere (a.k.a blogophobia.) Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out those things.

And then, there’s the simple fact that for the last year, at least once a week, I posted something to this blog. When I hear about the discipline of someone like Seth Godin who posts every single day, I’m humbled in my efforts. Sure, his daily posts are super short but any kind of regular writing simply requires: 1. ideas of any calibre; 2. actually writing the ideas and; 3. coming back to the keyboard again and again and again.

I haven’t yet become an no-day-without-the-line kind of writer (which I have resolved to do on at least one of my to-do lists) but 52 weeks times about 750 words is…well, it’s a book. So bravo, Bon. It’s only a novella, perhaps, but some of my favorite books – The Little Prince, 84 Charing Cross Road, The Wizard of Oz, The War of Art, Animal Farm – are just teeny-tiny but they have a pages and a front and back cover and I bought them without any qualms that they weren’t what I thought they were: a book.

But maybe, just maybe, this last year of writing has been something else. Not pee in my glass, exactly, but certainly not what I expected. I mean (said in a Monty Python voice): NOBODY EXPECTS A GLOBAL PANDEMIC. And if I was not writing my blog, I probably would not have reflected on it as much as I did – at least not for public consumption or in any coherent way. I would never have written about George Floyd or a letter to Santa Claus or about Clarence the TV Dog.

So what is this other thing? It’s a glass, of sorts, a receptacle, it’s a ball diamond in the middle of a cornfield. If I hadn’t built it, I wouldn’t have come to the page week after week. Maybe I haven’t knocked it out of the park – yet – but at least I wrote about it.

And I can let that be enough.

About FOMO and JOMO

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I don’t know about you but I’m not sure that I want to be a part of this global pandemic thingy anymore.

Okay, I know I don’t really have an option. But after nearly six months of this, some serious FOMO is starting to set in. Even though some of the things I’m missing aren’t even there anymore. Like outdoor festivals (which I usually don’t go to) or sports (which I usually don’t watch). So it’s not so much FOMO as just MO.

Plus, I’m starting to miss weird things.

Like the ridiculous amounts of Back-To-School fliers that inundated my recycle box in all the previous years that didn’t begin with the numbers 202… Or the over-zealous same TV commercials that showed off tiny children wearing clothing way more fashionable than mine. Instead, there’s just Apple and Amazon commercials telling me that It’s going to be okay. (Because they’re the two companies making the most moneys right now. So I guess it’s nice of them to share…sentiment?)

I also find I’m missing crowds. Normally I can do without shouldering my way through people in shopping malls. But a visit to West Edmonton Mall this week was just eerie. I mean, WHERE DID ALL THE PEOPLE GO? Answer: At home on their iPhones placing another Amazon order.

I’m also missing playing chicken on the sidewalks. I mean, in a normal non-COVID season, one would walk towards someone on the sidewalk and play that little psychological game with them of “You-move-I’m-not-moving.” You might even (gasp!) TOUCH THEM as you swerve by. But now oncomers move differentially to each other, creating cow-paths on peoples’ lawns and preferring oncoming traffic to touching an actual human being with a six-foot pole. It makes me want reflexively check my deodorant levels, but then I remember – Oh right, it’s just an epidemic.

A solution, perhaps, would be to embrace JOMO – the joy of missing out. I mean, there is a certain simplicity in less: less people, less (physical) shopping, less decisions – because they’re just not there to make. But I feel like I’m completely glossing over all the really-real problems. After all, not-shopping is not technically a hardship, at least not-shopping for new clothes and school supplies at the malls when most of last year’s will do just fine.

Maybe there were aspects of the world as we knew it that weren’t particularly healthy – I mean, if people aren’t at the malls and in the restaurants and swerving on the sidewalks, that’s not really essential anyway, is it? But as I miss things as they were, I need to ask myself what exactly am I struggling with?

I am struggling with change. I kind of liked the world – with all its craziness – just the way it was. I’m sad for businesses and sports and churches that have had to shut down and are figuring out how to survive – or realizing they can’t.

I am struggling with uncertainty. I was told this week that THIS might last for two, maybe even three years. I don’t even want to say that out loud, but there it is. Buckle up and settle in – COVID appears to be the new tenant in the building previously occupied by HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, EMPLOYED and UNPHASED-BY-COMMON-COLD-SYMPTOMS. And we don’t know how long of a lease Mr. Epidemic took out.

And I’m struggling with plain old selfishness. I want things to be the way they used to be. I want to not wear a mask, not worry about visiting people outside of my bubble and not give a second thought to touching them. I want to travel again and not shake my head at Americans (over this). I also want kids to go to school and for teachers not to have to worry about disinfecting every surface, every second of every day. I want health-care workers to be able to relax a little and for people who are immunocompromised not consider everything a life-threatening decision.

Maybe it’s not even about shopping, not even a little bit. Maybe I want my party not just with cake, but with people, too, the way it used to be. I’m not sure I even want to think about Christmas and how different that will be.

But maybe realizing what I miss is actually making me more thankful for what was, what is. And let’s hope, for what will someday be, even if it looks a little different.

About Weddings

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https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/regina-couple-pandemic-wedding-plans-1.5579744

Weddings are looking a lot different this year, aren’t they?

We have two friends who are planning their weddings for the same date in August, one here in Vermilion, Alberta and one in Regina, Saskatchewan. It has been interesting to hear about the moment-by-moment changes that have been made since we went into COVID lockdown in March. The anticipated numbers of attendees first plummeted, then rose back up a little. Dresses have been held up from being shipped from the U.S.A. And the venues have been changed. All in all, it seems like some things have gotten a little simpler.

As my eldest son Gil has relayed to me via the numerous twenty-somethings he knows that planned their weddings for this year, in the end, all that really matters is the getting married part. If the fluff and the gifts and the mega-decoration and all your millions of friends in attendance are what you REALLY want out of a wedding, well then maybe you need to postpone it to next year. (Or, never. Just sayin.)

Well, okay. Just because I’m not huge Party Girl now, doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the fact that I had a pretty big wedding myself some (gasp!) twenty-eight years ago. In a lot of ways, growing up in the middle of the Borscht belt, in the town I affectionately nicknamed The Ukrainian Wedding Capital of Canada, my wedding was pre-planned. I knew where I would get married (the little RC church in Derwent), where the reception would be (the Derwent and District Recreation Centre), who would be invited (all my friends, all manner of relatives both shirt-tale and front-collar and the twenty people my non-Ukrainian fiance’s family got to invite) and what we would eat. (Hello! Ukrainian food!)

We grew up going to weddings so we knew exactly what to expect. We learned how to dance at weddings, got drunk for the first time at a wedding and got our first kiss there – and second, third and fourth if there were a lot of groomsmen or bridesmaids in the reception line. In a close-knit community like Derwent, back in the day, not inviting all the neighbors to your child’s wedding was… well, it was just not done.

Case in point: this year, as the quarantine had just begun, my mother’s birthday fell on March 22. She would have been 92 this year and I try to do something each year to commemorate the day. Since it was #stayhome, I decided to go through the box of wedding invitations that had come from her house. And then, because it’s me, I decided to “organize” them by date.

These are the stats. From the 1950s, my mom had saved 15 invitations. From the sixties, there were 62. From the eighties, 85, and the nineties, there were 38, one of which was mine.

Oh, and the seventies? From the seventies, my mom had ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN WEDDING INVITATIONS. I mean seriously, I had to go take a nap afterwards. Simon took pictures of the stacks and posted them on Instagram because: 1) He’s a Gen Z; 2) He had never seen a wedding invitation before – him of the age of internet invites; and 3) He (rightfully) couldn’t believe Baba had been invited to well over 300 weddings in her life.

All told, even though I had lived through that golden age of weddings, it was hard for me to wrap my head around. Sure, Mom and Dad didn’t go to every wedding they were invited to – sometimes two (or even, three) weddings fell on the same date. But I do remember when I was growing up that a summer weekend without a wedding to attend seemed a little, well, boring. And if an invitation specified “No Children, Please”, we were horrified to be deprived of a meal equivalent to “eating out”, of stacking up plastic drink cups as high as we could make them and of tooling all around Main Street Derwent with a crowd of other kids, pretending we were the Lords of Flatbush.

The marriage is the most important thing. But there’s a whole lot of other fun stuff that can make a wedding memorable. And right now, COVID-19 is making the weddings super memorable as intentions and guest lists get more concentrated. Going through with happy plans in the middle of a pandemic is always going to be something to remember.

You won’t beat my Mom’s record for wedding invitations this year, or this decade, because it’s just not a thing anymore. But the main thing? It’s still the main thing.