Electricity, Men and The Underwear Drawer

           

            It’s just getting worse.  Whatever scraps of knowledge I managed to acquire over the years seem to be falling out of my head like turnips from the back of a pick up truck.

            If I didn’t have kids, I probably wouldn’t even notice this terrible leak. How often are you pointedly asked where Andorra is and whether it’s really a country or what? But kids do ask you stuff like that and they expect you to know the answers. If you don’t, they start to question the usefulness of secondary education and that is a very sticky wicket to find yourself on, my friend.

            When my kids were smaller, they didn’t ask questions that I didn’t know the answers to.  At least, I could always make something up.  And a few years from now they won’t even bother coming to me with homework or general knowledge questions because they’ll know I can’t answer them.

            But right now they do ask. Especially that bookish, older one with the big hair.  She always wants to understand the big picture and frankly, I'm not up to the task.  

            Yesterday she had homework about electricity and started asking me about polarization and what does it mean to induce something.

            I squirmed in my chair. “I don’t really remember detailed stuff like that, sweetie.”

            “But you took electricity at school, right Mom?”

            “Probably.  I don’t remember.”

            “And didn’t you, like, study science at university?”

            “Now listen to me. It’s cruel to make a biology major study physics.  It took me three attempts to pass Introductory Physics and I still have nightmares about metal balls hurtling endlessly through space.”

            “Okay,” she sighed.  “I’ll look up the answers to the homework questions.”

            “An excellent idea.”

            “But before I do that could you please just help me understand what electricity is, like in a really general way?”

            I froze. 

            Noonie waited politely for a moment.  “Mom?  Did you hear me?”

            “I – yes, I heard you.  I was trying to think of the best way to sum it up for you.”

            I couldn’t believe it.  I didn’t know what electricity was.  Not really.  And the thing is, I really thought I did.  I went about my daily life using electrical appliances with the belief that I understood on a basic level how they worked. 

            I had to come clean to Noonie.  “Upon reflection, I don’t think I understand it very well. It’s something to do with electrons moving around but I’ve never really gotten a handle on how something that’s not actually a thing can move around.  An electron is a charge, they say.  But what’s that?  Is it a thing?  I don’t think it is a thing. You’d better wait till Baba gets home from work.”

            “He’s good at things like electricity, isn’t he?”

            “Oh yeah.  He’s actually interested in it.  Do you know that he used to design and play with electrical circuits when he was a boy?”

            “You mean like for fun?”

            “Yes.”

            “Wow.”

            “And your uncle Hiss used to do the same thing. I’d find him in his room bent over a piece of board onto which he’d nailed all manner of tiny, whirring  motors, miniature lights and switches. He even installed lights in his gerbil cage. Those rodents were on the grid, man.”

            Noonie shook her head. “I don’t understand how doing any of that could be fun.”

            “Me either.  But it explains a lot, don’t you think?”

                                                           ***

              My crummy memory has made me an ardent enthusiast of filing cabinets.  Everything goes in a file folder in my house.  If it doesn’t, it’s gone forever, and I understand that.

            But M works on a different system.  He doesn’t forget things so he doesn’t see the need to file.  Where’s the receipt for the monitor we bought last July?  Oh that’s in the back pocket of my black jeans, he’ll say.

            But for really important things he has a special place: his underwear drawer.  This, for M, is the safest spot in the house to stash not only papers and business cards and but also foreign money, extra watch straps, ties that haven’t been taken out of the box yet, throat lozenges, phone chargers, flashlights and cuff links.

            It gets a little full in there, you can imagine.

            Last week when I opened the drawer to put away his clean underwear I found there wasn’t room for them.

             So I cleaned the drawer out.  It had to be done and I knew from experience M would never get around to cleaning it himself.  (Once I tried leaving it until we moved house, thinking M would feel compelled to organise it before the movers came but all that happened was the drawer and its contents got wrapped up and transported exactly as they were).

            “What happened to all my underwear?” M said the next morning. “I used to have a whole drawer full and now there are hardly any.”

            I was surprised that the underwear were his primary concern.  I thought he’d be worried about what I’d done with the other stuff.

            “You didn’t have that many underwear,” I said. “Your drawer was just so full of other stuff that it looked like there were a lot.”

            “What do you mean, my drawer was full of other stuff?  Two or three business cards don’t take up much room.”

            “Two or three business cards – are you kidding me?  It was like a pack rat’s pawn shop in there.  And just out of curiosity, when did you get the Betty Boop tie?”

            “Look, I have to pack for this trip and I barely have enough clean underwear to take.  Are there a bunch of them in the wash right now or something?”

            “No, there are none in the wash, I just did all the laundry.  I’m telling you, it was an illusion that the drawer was full of underwear.  It was the same half-dozen pairs floating on top that you kept seeing.”

            M frowned. Clearly he didn’t believe me. “If there really are none in the laundry then it means someone has been stealing them.”

            “Maybe you’ve been forgetting them in hotel rooms when you travel.”

            M whipped his head around.  “Maybe the hotel employees are stealing them.”

            “Uh, I think that only happens to movie stars.”

            “I wonder…”  he mused as he opened the underwear drawer and withdrew the pairs needed for his trip.           

            “Hey!”  I cried.  “What’s that?”

            M quickly shut the drawer, pretending not to hear me, and said, “So you think that no one would want to steal my underwear?”

            “I caught a glimpse of a paper in that drawer.  You’ve already started filling it again, haven’t you?”

           

                                                                        ***

           

            He had started stashing stuff in there again.  Later I had a look and found not one but three different receipts, all dating from several years ago, none of them important.  One was for a 3 dollar lemon squeezer from the Dubai IKEA.

            I don’t know where M pulled them from.  Is his underwear drawer some kind of conduit to the past? 

            Weirder still, we’ve never bought a lemon squeezer from IKEA and, now that I think about it, M is right – he used to have more underwear.

            

24 Fairly Subjective Facts About Lebanon

 Here are some things I would tell a friend who knew absolutely nothing about Lebanon but was planning to move here. 

1. A red light at a traffic signal doesn’t necessarily mean stop.  You can stop, if you wish, but cars behind you may honk impatiently.  When you have a green light, be bloody careful to look to the right and left.

2. You can’t flush toilet paper down the toilet.  You have to throw it in the garbage, no matter what it’s got on it.  This goes for almost every toilet in the country, except maybe the swish hotels (I wouldn’t know, I’ve never stayed in them). Lebanese toilets plug if you look at them sideways so not only must you avoid throwing any sort of tissue in there, you would be well advised to eat prunes regularly.

3. Straight men sometimes kiss each other on the cheeks.  This can be an overwhelming concept for an Albertan, but there you are.

4. What kind of phone number you have says a lot about you.  When you’re getting your first sim card for your cell phone, you should shop all over town to find a ‘good’ number – something catchy and easy to remember.  People will judge you on what kind of number you have.  But not before judging you on what kind of phone you have.

5. The same goes for your car license plate.  There is no set number of digits in Lebanese license plates and people pay a lot of money for low numbers and for distinctive numbers.  If you see a ‘777’, for example, you know the guy driving the car probably paid thousands of dollars for that plate. 

6. Foreigners -- or rather, white, European-descended foreigners -- are revered here.  There is no reason they should be, they just are.  I mean, we just are.

7.  American money is used almost as much as the Lebanese currency.  The conversion rate is fixed at 1 dollar to 1,500 Lira.  We always seem to have a mix of American and Lebanese banknotes in our wallets and you get quick at converting after a while.

8. Hardly anyone lives in a house within the city of Beirut.  It’s too built up -- people live in apartment buildings.  But they all call their apartments ‘houses’ so it’s confusing at first.

9. Beirut city streets have names but no one uses them.  Try to imagine for a minute how you could give directions to your house without using any street names.  People who live by well-known bakeries or medical clinics are lucky.  The building I live in has no shop or institution beside it so giving directions takes fifteen minutes every time (“…Okay, so after you make that right hand turn you’re going to see a tall palm tree in front of a building with red shutters.  There’s a parrot in a cage on the first balcony of the building beside the palm tree.  If you don’t see a parrot in a cage, it’s the wrong building.  Or maybe the parrot has gone to the vet, in which case you have to look for a yellow plastic chair on the sixth floor balcony.  There’s always a yellow chair on that balcony.  Okay?  So if you see the yellow chair. . )

10. Women do not wear burkas or cover their faces.  What you will see is a lot of frighteningly tight jeans, plastered on make-up and tiny, glittery t-shirts stretched proudly over pushed-up boobs. Note: the age of a woman is no hindrance to the tightness of her jeans.

11. This is not a Moslem country, as such.  The majority of the people here are Moslem but a whacking great portion is Christian.  There are Druze, too.  It’s very complicated. The presidency of the country is reserved for a Christian.

12. French and Arabic are the two official languages of Lebanon but English is everywhere, too. The most prestigious university here is the American University of Beirut where the instruction is in English.  Most of the educated Lebanese speak all three languages.

13. Lebanon is not a desert.  It stretches along the Mediterranean sea.  It has rivers, a lot of rain in winter, and snow on its mountains.

14. Which leads me to say, because it really is too important not to, that Lebanon is a water-rich country in a part of the world with a fresh water deficit.  I’m not going to get into politics but just think about that for a moment.

15. But it’s a startling small country.  To compare: it is one third the size of Vancouver Island.

16. The cost of living varies hugely.  You can live cheaply – there is cheap food and cheap housing – but not in the good part of town and not with the luxury of sending your children to the best schools and best doctors.

17. Fresh fruits and vegetables are cheap and absolutely delicious.  They’re almost all grown here.  You can buy fruit that was on the tree yesterday and once you’ve tasted that there’s no going back.

18. Cars are expensive but Lebanese people don’t seem to like public transport and most have their own car.  Or, at least, a moped.

19. Beware of the mopeds.  They zigzag around cars on busy streets and zoom by within inches of the sidewalk edge you are about to step off.  Sometimes they drive on the sidewalk.  Being a pedestrian here is hazardous.

20.  Don’t drink the tap water.  Just don’t.

21. The night life is incredible so bring your little black dress.  I know a lot of people who want to live here just for the night life.  They are not people with young children.

22. There are wonderful beach clubs just outside of Beirut.  You have to pay around twenty dollars entry fee but it’s totally worth it.  The swimming pools are lovely and the sea is warm.  It’s actually warm. 

23. Oh yeah, and the weather all around is unbeatable.  It’s only a bit too hot during the middle of summer but the rest of the year is very pleasant.

24. There are ancient ruins here that will blow your mind and nobody in North America seems to know they exist.  Walk on Alexander the Great’s stone-flagged road and sit in the spectator seats of a Roman chariot track.  But keep Baalbek to the last.  Once you see it you might not remember who you are or how to speak.

                       

           

            

Back in Beirut

            A week back in Lebanon and already the memory of my home planet grows dim. It’s always like this.  As soon as I get off the plane in Beirut my grip on reality begins to slip.  Within a month I’ll only remember Canada as a long-ago dream.

            As we were driving home from the beach yesterday five or six motorcycles swarmed past us, two of them doing wheelies.  This was on the highway to the South -- a frighteningly generous stretch of asphalt by Lebanese standards.  There are a lot of motorists in this country who go as fast as the road will allow them.  On all but the biggest highways the width and condition of the road impose limitations of some kind.  But when this sort of driver finds himself out on a straight, smooth highway he stomps down on the accelerator and hurtles over the road with all the caution of mean kid in a bumper car.

            A lot of drivers don’t follow the most basic road rules, either. And when I say ‘basic’, I mean things like noticing the painted lines on the asphalt that organise the driving surface into lanes.  Or overtaking slower vehicles by moving to the left of them.  Or wearing seatbelts.  Or feeling some stirring sense of unease when piling wife, three kids and weekend luggage onto the moped behind them and going out to the highway where SUV’s are blowing past them at 130 kilometres per hour.

            You get the dangerously slow drivers, too, doing their best to cause disaster by spewing blue smoke and creeping along in the right hand lane (or even the left hand lane) at 20 km/hr.  They often have no working rear lights and sometimes no reflectors.  The entire rear end of the car may be made of duct tape.

            Almost nobody uses signal lights to indicate their intentions.  If anything they use signal lights to distract you --  by leaving the left one on, for example, all the way from Sidon and then suddenly, without warning, swerving to the right across three lanes of traffic to take an exit.  The only light drivers here are fond of using is the headlights high-beam, which they will flash at you impatiently if you are in the left hand lane and don’t get out of their way quickly enough as they approach from behind.

            I saw two men sprinting for their lives across the highway, nearly getting themselves squashed to smithereens, about 200 meters away from a bridge they might have used to cross safely.  It’s been years since a sight like that has surprised me.  It’s how pedestrians cross busy highways everywhere in the Middle East.  I don’t know whether they don’t understand the danger or don’t care. 

            The motorcycles doing wheelies were driven by young men in jeans and t-shirts, the hair on their helmetless heads whipping crazily  in the wind.  Each bike carried a passenger.  As the driver of the closest bike noticed us staring at him he grinned, moved closer to our vehicle and put one leg sexily (or so he must have fancied) on the upper portion of the machine, the better to impress us. His passenger clung on desperately, his face and its expression disappointingly obscured from our view.

            Nothing about this was unusual.  You see it all the time here and no Lebanese person would think it worth mentioning.  I don’t even think it’s worth mentioning, except that I am.