KEEPING OLD RESOLUTIONS
Good habits build up
We're 19 days into 2021. Have you broken any New Year's resolutions yet? I haven't.
I'm not being smug. My resolutions are impeccably intact for one good and simple reason: I didn't make any.
Well, none other than the obvious in these troubled times: Avoid unnecessary human contact. And if interaction is necessary, always wear a mask.
For a 72-year-old cancer survivor who lives alone, a COVID-causing self-isolation resolution is not an insurmountable challenge.
The resolutions that are harder to maintain are the ones I didn't have to make this year, for reasons I'll explain. Here's the list of resolutions I didn't make:
■ No more junk food. Still can't totally abstain from potato chips while watching sports, but I don't fry my dinners, each of which is accompanied by a green salad and some healthy veg.
■ Cut back on booze. No problem there. For medical reasons, it's been a while since my daily happy hour included two old fashioneds (in the spirit of Mad Men's Don Draper). Now it's down to one small-brewery craft beer with dinner. And that's been working well.
Far more difficult, however is: No coffee. This has been a tough one. When I was a working journalist, like most of my colleagues I would ingest a minimum of four hearty cups — sometimes six — of good, strong coffee every day.
It took its toll. In the past couple of years, drinking coffee has been like pouring battery acid into my sensitive gut.
I cut back to one cup, hoping I could handle that. And I could, for a while. But the reflux continued, and I had to stop.
Now it's one cup of tea. And I have it at about 11 a.m., as breakfast is being digested.
I saved the best abstention for last: Cigarettes.
Does any sane person smoke anymore? Well, maybe some of us 70-somethings who grew up before the link to cancer was established and well publicized.
But even that didn't stop me. I started smoking when I was 15, encouraged by a Grade 10 friend whose father — probably not coincidentally — owned a small store (we call it a depanneur in Quebec) that sold cigarettes.
By the time I was a coffee-swilling, deadline-dreading journalist, the high-school/university habit was up to two packs a day.
Total addiction. I'd wake up in the middle of the night to smoke.
That changed in the winter of 1985. The Gazette assigned me to cover the Montreal Symphony Orchestra's tour of Japan and Hong Kong.
My wife joined me on the trip, and on the 20-hour flight home — with several stops — she had to sit with her addict husband in the smokers' section.
When we finally got back to Montreal, my wife was feeling nauseous, but not from the flight. Shortly thereafter, we found out she was pregnant.
Background: I had grown up in a small apartment with a mom who smoked a pack of Players Plain every day (flakes of tobacco on her red lipstick: an indelible memory.)
That was the 1950s and 1960s. No way my child was going to endure that in the mid-1980s.
I signed up for SmokeEnders. It was — and still is — a seven-week program.
For the first few weeks, you still smoke. But your habit changes. A different brand, of successively less tar and nicotine, every week. No smoking for increasingly long periods after meals and before bed. Holding your cig with the hand opposite to the one you're used to. And then you stop.
It worked. I smoked my last, ridiculously light cigarette 36 years ago. Haven't smoked since. Well, at least not tobacco. But I've cut way back on that recreational habit, as well.
Here I am, in early 2021, living a life of abstention.
I'd be the dullest guy at a party, if anyone were still having parties.