The luck of the Irish: Parts 1 & 2
Everyone will have their stories of this pandemic. Many will be unbearably sad. Others less so. This is my story.
The plan for our second year was for Drina and the girls to spend it in Paris, and I would work part-time in Canada. During the girls’ February school break, we had enjoyed a lovely, albeit slightly chilly, time in Spain and Portugal. Coronavirus was in the news, but not yet really a major concern outside of China. Barcelona had signs everywhere about the upcoming World Mobile Congress. By the time we got back to Paris in late February, the Congress had been cancelled. Northern Italy was beginning to show signs of worsening, and France had a few news reports of cases. I had to go back to Canada for one more stint of work but already had my return ticket to France for April 4th. We had planned a road trip to Normandy and the Loire Valley for the April school vacation and were planning to take advantage of the multiple long weekends in May to visit a few more European cities.
So it was that I prepared to leave for Canada on March 4th. I remember saying goodbye to Drina and expressing that I was worried the Coronavirus situation would get so bad that I would be stuck in North America with her and the girls in Europe. I never imagined what would happen in less than two weeks!
The day after I arrived in Calgary, Alberta had its first case. As a habitual news junkie, and worried about the growing global pandemic, I was trying to stay on top of European news. One week later on March 12th, I was at work when an alert on my phone said Emmanuel Macron, the French President, was speaking to the nation in a few minutes. With the time difference, I was on a lunch break and could briefly listen as he declared that the nation was at war against the virus and announced that in a few days the country would effectively shut down. European borders would be closed for a month. After exchanging a few texts with Drina, I got back to work. By the time I got home, she would be asleep, and I would have a little more time to think about our situation.
Desmond was in Toronto, Drina’s parents in Calgary, and while I knew my group would support me if I asked, I did not want to renege on my promise to work through March and cover spring breaks. In Canada, I would wake up around 4:30 or 5:00am so I could chat with Drina before my day started. We decided that I would stay put and see what the next few days brought. It turned out they brought a great deal.
On March 15th and 16th Alberta schools and universities closed, a public health emergency was declared on March 17th, and by March 18th, Canada had essentially shut it’s borders to all non-Canadian travellers.
The girls’ school in Paris had very impressively, literally overnight, started a structured online curriculum. While they were not thrilled, the structure kept the girls busy and Drina was the conductor keeping the orchestra of life playing in Paris. As we considered what the next best steps would be, my first thought was that, if I went to Paris and joined them in our apartment, I would be disruptive to the rhythm of their life. I knew that Drina would have created a finely tuned engine that powered a sports car elegantly around a racetrack and that my arrival would be like asking the sports car to tow a boat trailer on a highway. On the other hand, I didn’t like the idea of us being apart for months as a pandemic swept across the globe.
So, I did what Drina says I often do when I am faced with stressful situations: I became very task oriented. Every day I knew what flights were leaving Canada for Europe. Luckily for me, Calgary had been declared one of four airports in Canada still receiving international flights, and KLM, with whom I had a ticket, was still operating the odd flight from Calgary to Amsterdam. I also read French and European Union websites to familiarize myself with the rules and knew if the time came, I would have a good chance at getting through the closed borders.
Drina and I then had a brutally honest conversation about whether or not I would be additive or subtractive to their life in Paris; of course, that would assume I could even make it there. I asked her and the girls to spend a few days thinking about it.
The Luck of the Irish: Part 2
In the meantime, I needed to figure out Desmond’s situation and he and I had a few good chats. The favorite part of my solo life in Calgary had been my dinners with Roy and Moira (Drina’s parents), and though I had already decided to physically distance myself from them, through daily phone calls and chats across the front lawn they were invaluable council. Between them and Desmond’s well-articulated reasons, I knew Desmond would do better in Toronto than Calgary.
Many people have asked me why Drina and the girls didn’t come home. It was a multifactorial choice, but in very broad strokes it had to do with the amazing education the girls were still getting Paris and our boiler! After the first few days of complaining, both girls got into the groove of online school and had told Drina that they didn’t want to go back to Calgary and be out of school for six months. We agreed with them. As for our boiler, it has to do with France’s strong tenant favoring laws. You see, tenants have lots of rights in France and with those rights, come some responsibilities that are foreign to us Canadians. As tenants, we are legally responsible for our boiler and radiator system. If anything leaks or goes belly up, it is us who must have it fixed, and if water damages the building, it is us and our insurance that pays to fix it all up. If we abandoned our apartment for longer than two weeks without some proof that the boiler and water pipes were being maintained, our insurance would be void. Our boiler has been temperamental the entire time we have known it and we were not at all keen on the idea of having to pay for hundreds of thousands of euros of repairs to our elegant Haussmann building if anything went wrong. So, the only way we could leave Paris was to permanently unwind our legal obligations and move back to Canada. Not a task I could in good conscience add to Drina’s long list of tasks she was already faced with as solo mom in French lockdown.
While I was sorting out Desmond’s plans, Drina and the girls had many chats and weighed the pros and cons of adding me to the mix and in the sweetest way imaginable told me that my “intensity” needs to be tempered during a pandemic. I knew my ladies were bang on as their list was eerily similar to my own as I thought about why I was less like high octane fuel to their engine and more like a heavy boat trailer. We agreed that I would do my best to follow the family quarantine peace plan. I was pretty sure it would be an opportunity for self-improvement.
My final task was to confirm my ticket. It appeared that my flight on April 4th was still scheduled to leave. I started trying to get a hold of KLM to explain to them that I was eligible to be on that plane. After five hours on hold, an agent said that they only helped people who were flying in the next 72 hours and I was not in that category. She suggested I use private WhatsApp and Twitter channels and wished me good luck. I dutifully sent messages to both social media accounts and waited. And waited. Nine days before my scheduled departure, I got canned replies from robots directing me to the website with which I was already very well acquainted and asking me to resend messages again if I really wanted to fly! So, I did and waited.
On Friday, March 27th, I got a voicemail that made my heart sink. KLM had called my travel agency and cancelled my ticket and was offering me a refund. I was at work and Drina and the girls had just sent me a message about the things we could do once I got there. I decided to tell them the next day, so they’d have the weekend to process what it meant. As a Hail Mary pass, I called my travel agency. I explained to them that according to both French and EU laws, I was allowed to enter Europe to be with my wife and children, and that I had spent six days trying to speak to someone at KLM. I begged them to help. They said they would try. Two hours later, they called me and said they spoke to KLM/Air France representatives in Montreal and explained my situation. Not only did KLM re-instate my ticket, but they also offered me a ticket on the only possible flight from Amsterdam to Paris the evening I landed in Amsterdam. They asked if I was OK spending the day in a shutdown airport. Was I OK???? I was ecstatic and said I’d spend two days in the airport if it meant I could see my family again. The travel agency is that of American Express credit cards and I will never again question the value of my annual fees! By that evening I had received new tickets and an internal KLM/Air France email for repatriation of Dutch and French citizens. The day had been a roller coaster of emotions the likes of which I have trouble remembering.
The final week in Calgary was a blur. I went to work, got the house ready to leave, and prepared photocopies of documents I thought I would need at the airports. This entire sabbatical project ended up becoming possible because I was allowed to live and work in France as the husband of a European citizen – Drina, my Irish wife! The way I would be allowed back into Europe was the same. When it came time to renew my status for the second year, the charm and charisma of our immigration consultant Moira got me a five-year carte de séjour. So, per French law I was a permanent resident of France, and right there on my card it said I was married to a European.
My dear friend Dave dropped me off at the airport on April 4th. The KLM desk staff spent a lot of time studying, having private chats about, and phoning people about my decidedly Canadian passport and French residency card and eventually let me on the flight. Once on the plane, the flight attendants told me they were all surprised I was on that flight because the manifest showed me as a Canadian. Once I told them our story, they told me how lucky I was as my flight was the very last KLM flight out of Calgary until further notice. Two weeks later, I am still incredulous at my luck.
Some 32 hours after I got on that plane in Calgary, and two very thorough interrogations by border officers in both Amsterdam and Paris, I was sitting in a cab about to rejoin Drina, Sophia and Mavis.
Not knowing what I was exposed to my last week at work and during my travels, I spent two weeks pseudo-quarantine in a corner of the Paris apartment. So, in fact I was indeed the heavy boat trailer I imagined. Other than taking Sophia for her jogs, I didn’t contribute to daily life and all was done for me, so I didn’t inadvertently infect a common object or surface. There is a large debt to repay my ladies after quarantine.
The Eurythmics open Sisters are Doin’ It For Themselves with the lyrics:
Now there was a time when they used to say
That behind every - "great man"
There had to be a - "great woman"
But in these times of change you know
That it’s no longer true
Oh, how very palpably true those words are to me. In these times of change, I am so truly grateful for my wonderful Irish wife. Our Parisian adventure has made me a far better person than I used to be, and it is only because she is so very capably in front of me, paving our family’s path, that I got here in the first place and was able to get back to her. In more ways than I can ever count, I have been blessed with the luck of the Irish. Thank you, Drina! I love you.
