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La poisse

Posted on January 9, 2020 by MELewis

I’ve been having a run of bad luck lately. A series of unfortunate events. Nothing too serious or life-threatening (she says, knocking on noggin) yet oh-so frustrating. If it had only been one thing or another, I might have put it down to ‘shit happens’. But no, I fear that I may have la poisse.

Being of an inquiring mind, I had to first understand the origins of this French expression. It comes from the word ‘poix’, a type of glue made of pine resin back in the Middle Ages. From this came a derivative word, ‘poisse’, meaning something sticky that you can’t get rid of, which became a slang expression for misfortune.

I suppose it makes sense. Bad luck is sticky. Once you have it, it seems to attract more of the same.

Mine began a few days before Christmas when my daughter’s flight from the UK to Canada was cancelled at the last minute. There seems to be a run of such things just when people are rushing to get home for family celebrations. It was annoying but no biggie: they rescheduled her for the next day and put her up in a hotel. A few hours later, I was about to board my connecting flight for Toronto when my Canadian passport went missing. I mean it literally evaporated between the security check and the gate. These days you cannot get on a plane bound for Canada without either a Canadian passport or an electronic travel authorization. So I was stuck in Amsterdam, watching my family board without me.

By the time security found my passport (yes, they had it all the time), I was rebooking a flight for the next day. KLM waived most of the charges but it still cost me a couple hundred euros including a night in an airport hotel.

Arriving in Toronto, our vacation rental had no heat or hot water. Thus ensued two days of chasing the owner and the property manager before giving up and moving to a new place on Christmas Eve. In the meantime, my son’s girlfriend got the stomach flu and was out of commission for a day or two.

A week later, as we rang in the new year in Québec City, I got a sore throat that turned into a nagging cold. On our return flight, this led to a nasty case of airplane ear that hurt like hell and made me feel like I was in a decompression chamber for the whole next day.

Arriving home, we discovered that our senior house sitters (we use an association that sends retired people to care for your pets and house while you’re away — normally they do a great job) had been rather less than respectful with our house and pets. We’ll never know exactly what happened but I suspect they enjoyed the house while providing at best haphazard care for our dogs and cats.

The last straw came yesterday, when I dragged my sorry butt to the year’s first fitness class. This is a fabulous class at our local community centre that combines strength, balance and stretching. I didn’t feel 100% but I was pleased to get myself there. Just before it began, I turned to say hello to someone and felt something slip in my back. “No way,” I told myself. “You are doing this.” So I did. An hour and a half later, I realized my mistake. My back was well and truly out. I hobbled to the car and drove home. This morning I can still barely move.

I don’t usually believe in luck, at least not the kind where some benign or evil force controls your life. You make your own luck, that’s always been my philosophy. So I have to question why all this is happening and what I need to learn from it.

First of all, despite the ups and downs, I have been incredibly lucky. Getting on the next day’s flight at such a busy time of year, getting a refund on one rental and finding another, getting upgraded to business class on our return flight. Coming home to our pets in good health after all. So the glass is definitely more than half full. My cold is getting better and in a few days my back should be back to normal.

Secondly, I have learned a few things. One is that I’m too trustful: I trusted security with my documents, and strangers with my home and animals; I will not be so trusting in future. Another is that I can be own worst enemy: I should not have forced myself to exercise when my back was saying no, however inconvenient it might be. And finally, when shit happens, I need to roll with it better.

This year is shaping up to be one of big change for us. More on that later, but in the meantime, I will focus on my learnings from the past few weeks. I don’t really do resolutions, but I have set an intention for 2020: to be present. To me that means breathing into change, not to be distracted by too many demands on my attention, to focus on what matters, to get offline and enjoy one thing at a time.

Wishing you a wonderful new year filled with health and happiness: Bonne année et bonne santé!

What do you hope for in 2020?

Photo credit: Clément Falize on Unsplash

The dual dilemma

Posted on January 8, 2015 by MELewis

People sometimes ask me: “Where is home? Canada or France?” The answer is both. Toronto will always be where I’m from. But after living in France for so many years, it is my home. Je suis chez moi ici.

A funny thing happens when I go ‘home’ to Toronto now. Everything seems really familiar. People speak my language, in my accent. I know all the street names. I feel like I belong.

It doesn’t take long for that feeling to go AWOL.

“This is my country, eh? I’ll do the talking,” I say to my husband as we line up at Canadian customs and immigration in Montreal. For some reason known only to Air Canada, our direct flight to Toronto has us deplane and enter Canada in Montreal before continuing on to our destination. Baggage, duty free and all.

My husband and I cannot go anywhere without arguing. He considers himself a seasoned and erudite traveler, and takes pleasure in showing me where to line up and how to do basic operations at those automatic terminals that check you in and print your boarding pass. Most of the time, when he is not overly lording it up, I will listen to his wisdom. But not on my home turf. He may guide me in Europe, Canada is all mine.

The customs agent, a friendly young fellow with a strong Québecois accent, wants to know the purpose of our trip and our final destination. “Visiting family, in Toronto,” I reply in French. He studies our French passports and landing card with interest before stamping them and waving us through. But not before saying something absolutely incomprehensible. The French Canadian accent stretches my adopted tongue into an unrecognizable form of the lingo. I nod and smile as we leave, then turn to my husband for guidance. He may be foreign but his grasp of French will always be better than mine.

“What the hell did he say?” He gives me a look to say, I thought this was your country?

“He told you that he had ticked the box for returning Canadian citizens. I think he was hinting you should have a Canadian passport.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I retorted. “I’m a French citizen now. Why should I bother keeping up two passports?”

“Because you can.” This is one of those silly arguments.

I repeat all the reasons I let my Canadian passport drop: it’s expensive, they have a special photo requirement, you need to have a guarantor. Besides, you don’t need a passport to be a Canadian citizen.

There are advantages to going through customs in the more licentious Québec rather than puritanical Ontario: no one questions our duty-free alcohol allowance. I had duly noted the allotted two bottles of wine on our landing card but neglected to declare a bottle of scotch and a magnum of champagne.

In Toronto, they often bring out sniffer dogs when you pick up your bags. I still remember how I trembled the last time we went through customs at Pearson aiport with two illegal raw-milk camemberts in a suitcase. It is strictly forbidden to bring in any plant or animal materials to Canada. I nearly fainted when a customs agent with a beagle wearing brightly colored Canadian maple leaf came right up to us before sniffing something more interesting in another passenger’s bag. “Relax, they’re only interested in drugs,” my husband whispered. Later, I almost fainted for a different reason when I unearthed those stinkers from our stuff. Never again, I swore.

Once we’ve arrived and settled in, I begin to notice that things are not quite as familiar as they first seem. We go shopping in downtown Toronto and I wonder where stores are that closed years ago. (“This is the Eaton Centre – but where’s Eatons?”). In the massive urban sprawl of the Greater Toronto Area, I am no longer on familiar ground. Christmas Eve finds me doing last minute shopping in Ajax, a remote east-end suburb of the GTA where my parents live. It is big box store and shopping mall paradise. I exit the mall and cannot find the car. I stumble around in the freezing rain, cursing to myself until I realize: this is exactly the kind of thing that used to happen to me in France.

I want to go home, like Dorothy. I tap my heels together three times and find the car.

All of this reminds me of a song from my teenage years: