This morning my husband and I drove an hour for a five-minute visit to a residence for independent elders. We stayed in the lobby – standing – for our allotted portion of three-hundred seconds, and then headed back to the car to drive an hour back to our home. Why did we choose to burn so much fossil fuel for a five-minute stop so far away? For a very important reason…
Today is my father-in-law’s 90th birthday, falling while Montréal continues to grapple with outbreaks of COVID-19 despite both a curfew and partial lockdown. As part of this half-hearted lockdown, only ‘essential items’ may be sold in stores while our restaurants have been operating solely on a delivery and take-out basis for months.
The newest restrictions on shopping, which took effect on December 26 and were originally scheduled to be revoked on January 11 (1), have now been continued indefinitely. Although pharmacies remain open, they’re permitted to sell only prescription products and “everyday essentials”. (2) Somehow in the planning of this, boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolates have been deemed essential yet it’s prohibited to purchase get-well or condolence cards. Or a 90th birthday card.
Birthday cards, candles, and decorations are not – as I was told by an otherwise helpful employee – considered to be essential, not even for a loved one’s 90th birthday. So I returned home and did what I usually do when someone tells me that I can’t do something; I found my own way to make it happen. I MacGyver’d (3) solutions and created the items that I’d wanted.
To be clear, as someone who has spent a career in healthcare and bioethics, I agree that lockdown measures are necessary in Montreal – although I don’t feel that they go far enough at present. That, however, is a story for another day. What I find odd in our current situation are the arbitrary distinctions between essential and non-essential items; surely selling condolence card, during a deadly pandemic, is more in society’s interest than giant boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolates?
As for my skills in MacGyver-ing or improvising solutions to problems, I view this as part of my sometimes too-optimistic attitude of “I’ll find a way”. This borders at times, I admit, on abject stubbornness. Living with a rare disease and chronic pain for the past few years, I’ve come to appreciate that sheer pig-headedness can be a vital coping mechanism: “This neuropathic pain flare is NOT going to kill me. This neuropathic pain flare is NOT going to kill me. This neuropathic pain flare is NOT going to kill me…”
Whether from my early experience as a reserve officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, or working within a not-for-profit healthcare organization, or my more recent experience as a patient advocate and Patient Partner in events, projects, and research, I’ve learned to find creative approaches to problems.
This time around, I applied this attitude to creating a memorable 90th birthday experience for my father-in-law while working around the fact that we’d only have a five-minute non-contact visit. First off I found a blank card as well as some bits and pieces of craft items scavenged from around our home. Most of these were from over a decade ago, when I could still use my right hand and arm properly. With these bits and bobs I put together a milestone birthday card, with an inscription inside which has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln:
It’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”
Translated into French, because my husband’s family are descendants of the French who settled here and none of them speak English. My English-speaking relatives have been in what’s now Québec for an even longer period, with one having apparently fought in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham near modern-day Québec City with the Fraser’s Highlanders in 1759.
This foray into history gave me another idea to mark my father-in-law’s 90th birthday; I’d use fancy paper, left over from another long-ago project, to print a scroll-type document showing events which had taken place back in 1931.
As Montrealers we’re all ardent fans of the Montréal Canadiens hockey team, nicknamed the Habs, so of course I had to include information about their 1930-1931 season! We won the Stanley Cup that year, on April 14, 1931, beating the Chicago Black Hawks three games to two. Habs player Howie Morenz was recognized as the first true superstar of the National Hockey League, having won the Stanley Cup in 1924, 1930, and again in 1931. He was also named the team’s Most Valuable Player three times; what we now simply refer to as the MVP.
Also in 1931, in hockey news, a radio show named the “General Motors Hockey Broadcast” made its debut. Later renamed “Hockey Night in Canada”, it became a television show in 1952 and it is now the oldest televised sports show still on the air.
Did you know that the Oscars can trace their roots to 1931? That year, the big winner was All Quiet on the Western Front for best film and best director. James Dean was born soon after my husband’s father, on February 8, 1931.
Other movies that year includes Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Rich and Strange from Alfred Hitchcock, and Mata Hari starring Greta Garbo with Lionel Barrymore. Movie houses would also have still been showing silent romantic comedies, including City Lights which was written, produced, directed by, and starred Charlie Chaplin. Other features playing might have been Dishonored starring Marlene Dietrich, or Fascination with Joan Crawford and Clark Gable.
With a milestone card and a tribute to 1931 now completed, I set about finding ways to MacGyver a 90th candle and a table-top decoration. Back in 2018 I’d picked up a 60th birthday candle on sale, but hadn’t used it; one of the disadvantages of living with a mild cognitive impairment, related to my rare disease (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, or CRPS), is that I tend to buy thing that are appropriate for an occasion – but then forget to use them when the time comes.
I was able to pry the six and the zero of the candle apart, as they’d been joined only at their base. An upside-down six doubles perfectly well as a nine, but first I had to carve away the wax and wick at the base of the number six candle. For the two candles to match, I then repeated the exercise on the candle bearing the zero. I don’t think this would count as a creative arts project, but it definitely felt very creative!
Voilà! Candles for a 90th birthday, although they were now flat at the bottom so would have to on the surface of a dessert rather than being stuck into it to stand upright. No matter, I’d simply bake something other than a cake, so that I could set the candles at an angle…
The choice of home-baked goodies was an easy one to make, by the way; I baked my double-dark chocolate brownies, which contain neither lactose nor gluten. They’re made with black beans, so my husband jokes that they’re ‘health food’. Because I tend to do a lot of gift-baking, outside of pandemic lockdowns, I had a few food-grade gift boxes leftover from the 2018-2019 holiday season. One of them has a design of snowflakes rather than Christmas images, with a silvery background perfect for a gentleman’s winter birthday.
What did that leave, of my planned 90th birthday celebration-to-go? A table-top decoration, which my father-in-law could simply place on the little wooden table in his apartment. We wouldn’t be allowed into his home, within the elders’ residence, so it had to be something with no assembly required.
Carefully packed away in a box of decorations in our under-the-stairs storage area, I found an odd-looking party decoration that I’d purchased for my husband’s 50th birthday. He’s sixty now (older than I am!), so we wouldn’t need this again. It took quite a while, but I was able to remove all the of the foil “50”s from this item. After adding two little circles bearing the number ninety, one on each side of the decoration, it made a passable table-topper for a 90th birthday.
These different craft-style and baking activities took me hours and hours to complete this week, all for a five-minute visit with my husband’s dad. Because we’re in the midst of a pandemic, and because celebrations are not considered by our provincial government to be ‘essential’ to our health and well-being.
It was all worth it. We walked into the building with a bag of gifts and goodies, with this crazy-looking 90th birthday decoration sticking out the top of it, and his eyes lit up. Under our face masks, it was smiles all around. Those five minutes mattered. The handmade card, the candles on the double-chocolate brownies, all the rest – it was all ‘essential’.
Today is Bell Let’s Talk Day, on which Bell Canada will donate 5 cents to mental health organizations and research each time the hashtag #BellLetsTalk is used over on social media (Twitter, for example). It’s also a good opportunity to reach out to someone who might be suffering from loneliness, a person who might be sheltering from the pandemic at home – alone.
As always, thanks so much for stopping by. Stay safe, look after your well-being, and let’s all carry hope for the future in our hearts. Distant hugs…
References
(1) Jason Magder. Quebec merchants adjusting to new restrictive retail reality: Out of underwear? Montreal Gazette (a Division of PostMedia). 28 Dec 2020. Online. Accessed 28 Jan 2021:
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/quebec-merchants-adjusting-to-new-restrictive-retail-reality
(2) Daniel J. Rowe. What is considered an essential service in Quebec? Here’s a list. CTV News (a Division of Bell Media). 26 Dec 2020, updated 28 Dec 2020. Online. Accessed 28 Jan 2021:
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/what-is-considered-an-essential-service-in-quebec-here-s-a-list-1.5245449
(3) Kelly, Jon. How ‘MacGyver’ became a verb. British Broadcasting Company (BBC). 27 Aug 2015. Online. Accessed 28 Jan 2021:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34075407