When One Ring of the Doorbell Just Won't Do

            The closest I ever come to physically attacking anyone is when they show up unannounced on my doorstep and signal their arrival with multiple, impatient jabs on the doorbell.

            Friends don’t do this.  Very few people do, thank goodness.  I believe it is the exclusive domain of delivery men, refrigerator repairmen, Kassem and my mother-in-law.

            Do they think that when I’m home alone I pull a chair up to the inside of the door and wait there in the off chance that the bell will ring? If I don’t whip open the door within two nanoseconds of my mother-in-law’s first ring she’ll want to know if I’ve been sleeping.  Honestly, I swear I’ll take maybe five seconds to get to the door and she’ll ask if she’s woken me up.  Well, I don’t know about you but if I’ve fallen asleep in the easy chair I can’t even lift my head off my arm and recollect where I am in less than ten minutes.  To get to the door and answer it with eyes that are lined up in parallel directions in five seconds would be utterly out of the question.

            One day when we lived in Dubai I was upstairs cleaning when I heard the doorbell ring three or four times in quick succession.  I looked out of the window and saw the delivery van of a company I’d never heard of.  The way our house was structured I couldn’t see the doorstep or the manner of life-form lurking there but I was pretty sure that the driver of the van had made a mistake.  We weren’t expecting any deliveries.

            Because it was a long haul from the upstairs bedroom to the front door, and because the driver had nettled me with his impatient rapid-fire ringing of the doorbell, and also because I don’t like opening the door to strange men when I am home alone, I decided not to respond.  When the man realised no one was going to come to the door he would probably have a second look at the delivery address and see that he’d got the wrong house.

            A moment later the doorbell began to ring in a non-stop fusillade.  I stood, frozen in disbelief, as the ringing went on and on for half a minute or more.  The unseen presence on my front step was having a temper tantrum.  My own temper flared and I threw down my rag and thundered down the stairs.  No longer caring if it was a serial killer out there I flung open the door – the bell was still being rung – and found an agitated little Indian man with flaming red hair stabbing the doorbell with a stubby finger.

            “What is going on? What are you doing?” I said.

            The man immediately composed himself.  “I have a delivery for you,” he said.

            I took the package and looked at the address written on it. “This is for number 7 on street 9.  This --" I indicated our house number on the wall "-- is number 9, street 7.”

            “Oh?” he said in surprise, peering at the paper. “Yes, it seems you’re quite right. Can you tell me where is street 9?”

            “It’s just there,” I said, pointing to a T-junction about thirty metres beyond our property. “Turn right for villa 7.”

            “Okay, thank you,” he said pleasantly, as though he hadn’t been acting like a complete lunatic one minute earlier.  He went down the steps and got into his tiny van, drove off unhurriedly to the T-junction and turned left.

            After that I asked M if he would rig up the doorbell so that it could be inactivated with a switch and he did it, bless him all the way to tranquillity.  We didn’t get a lot of wrong-address delivery men but we did get scores of gardeners and maids all seeking work.  They averaged about one ring a day and after a year or two the thrill of rushing to the door had palled.

            When we lived in Lebanon the previous time Kassem almost caused the rupture of my best forehead vein.  He was our driver then, too, and as solidly trustworthy and good-hearted as he is now, but he had the habit of coming up to our apartment numerous times a day with a very silly pretext – usually to ask me if I “wanted anything” -- just so that he could pass a few minutes of his wretchedly boring day.  Kassem, you see, is constantly restless and impatient and unable to amuse himself for even the briefest wink of time.  Since the role of a driver in Lebanon amounts to ninety-percent waiting around and ten percent driving, I can’t think of a more unsuitable job for him.

            In the beginning when he’d ring the bell I tried dropping hints.  I would answer the door with a look of exasperation on my face.  I would tell I had been busy and that I would call him if I needed anything.  Those tactics didn’t even pierce the outer crust of his hide.  Things went on and I retreated deeper and deeper into passive-aggressive, non-confrontational behaviour until M blew a fuse one day. 

            Kassem had exasperated him somehow; the event was quite unrelated to the incessant pestering at my door. In truth, Kassem manages to annoy M almost constantly.  He achieves this by ignoring instructions or neglecting some small aspect of his job or making the kind of poor decision which inflicts needless pain and suffering on our vehicle.  M tore a strip off the poor, silly fool that day and included in his barrage a request to stop bothering the madam twenty times a day.  He was not to come to the door unless asked.

            For a couple of weeks after that I was left in serenity but slowly Kassem began finding excuses to pop up.  When I saw what was happening I thought I would just have to find a way to get through to him that I don’t like to be disturbed.  I decided to play the serious artist hand. “I’m writing a book,” I told him.  I wasn’t (unless 5,000 words of a story one has been reworking for ten years counts as writing a book) but I hoped he would think I was some kind of Booker Prize-winning eccentric who needed complete solitude.

            That little speech of mine didn’t accomplish a darn thing.  I don’t know why I thought it would. Kassem is a man who spends hours every day standing and sitting around doing absolutely nothing, jittery with impatience but never once to be seen with a book in his hand.  He is educated.  I don’t know how successful he was at school – it’s hard for me even to imagine him in a classroom --or how much learning he has retained but he certainly can read and write (Arabic) as well as anyone.  Not everyone likes to read, of course. I know some very intelligent people who don’t enjoy reading and it’s unremarkable that Kassem doesn’t appear to enjoy it.  What astounds me is that when there is absolutely nothing else for him to do he isn’t driven to it out of sheer desperation. 

            The doorbell-ringing/scolding cycle went around two or three times more.  I would complain to M over the course of a few weeks, Kassem would eventually do something to tick M off, and when the verbal blows fell M would include in them another request to stop bothering Madam. 

            I would squirm to hear the grisly details of the scolding.  “Oh, I wish it didn’t always come to this,” I’d say.  “I wish he’d just do as you ask and not deviate into his careless habits.  Was the scratch on the car quite bad?  And do you really refer to me as ‘Madam’ when you speak to him?”

            “The scratch isn’t bad, it’s the reason it got there that annoys me,” M would say. “And yes, of course I call you ‘Madam’ when I speak about you to him.  What did you think I’d call you – the old ball and chain?”

            “I don’t know.  I hate the sound of ‘madam’. It makes me feel like I should be running a brothel. I wouldn’t mind being called ‘Empress’.”

            “Do you know that he refers to me as his master?” M said.

            “What?”

            “I’m afraid so.  The word he uses to address me translates to ‘my master’.”

            “I don’t know how you keep a straight face.”

            “It’s difficult.  Especially since lately he has started carrying my briefcase to the car for me.”

            After about a year Kassem finally seemed to get the message and stopped ringing the bell.  I got less exercise after that, since the front door was about twenty metres from the den where I sat at my computer and the frequent sprints down the corridor had kept my blood moving, but I was much happier.

            I reflected that Kassem never did seem to understand that when I was inside my head I hated to be interrupted.  I don’t think he understood that someone could be inside their head.

            I’ve met other people like him.  Well, not completely like him – two such manifestations of compressed, seething energy on one planet would surely cause a cataclysmic meltdown -- but equally unable to understand that some people can spend a lot of time inside their own heads. 

            I remember once years ago a friend in Calgary ringing me up and asking me what I was doing.  I knew her well enough at that point – I thought – to admit truthfully that I’d been sitting in a chair thinking. 

            She was flabbergasted.  “Thinking?  Just sitting in the chair doing nothing but thinking?  What were you thinking about?”           

            “I don’t know.  Lots of things,” I said.

            “But isn’t it boring just to sit there doing nothing?”

            “But I wasn’t doing nothing.  I was thinking.  It’s not boring at all.”

            “And you really weren’t thinking about one specific thing, like a problem?”

            “No. I was just thinking about this and that. General wondering, I guess you could say.”

            “Oh my god,” she said.  “That is so weird.”

            I decided not to tell her that part of that wondering had been done aloud.

            Back then I had barely heard the terms ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’ but I didn’t need to.  I understood from experience, like all introverts do, that there are people who get lost in their own thoughts and people who don’t.  It wasn’t always as black and white as that but in general there were the two types. And it seemed to me that the external people, if you will, spent approximately zero time contemplating what made the internal people tick, whereas the introverts puzzled endlessly over what went on in extroverts’ heads.

            I don’t always want to be alone with my thoughts.  I love my friends.  At least, I love them when I have them (they’ve been a bit thin on the ground since we came back to Lebanon – I really must check the expiry date on my deodorant) and am truly delighted when one calls me up and wants to come over for a coffee.  There’s something about knowing ahead of time that someone is coming to my house that allows me to decompress.  Even if I have only five or ten minutes’ notice it’s enough.

             My theory, which I will eagerly explain to anyone who is interested (so far only Theo, who knows all about decompression and doesn’t need it explained) is that it’s like a scuba diver coming up to the surface.  If he ascends slowly enough, he’s fine. He’ll bob up from the depths feeling perfectly grand.  But if something forces his too rapid return to the surface – the sudden recollection that he left his curling iron on, for example--he’ll suffer agonies with the bends.

            I realise now that no friend who reads this will ever want to come to my house again. You’ll be afraid that secretly I didn’t want you here at all.  I do want you, I promise.  I’m just crabby from Lebanon and its incessant, unbearable noise.  I can't hear myself think.

Chickens Under Olive Tree

As we drove along under a hot noon-day sun we saw these chickens taking a break from the heat in the shade of this old olive tree. (Photo by Noonie)

They Eat Green Things

            Here in the land of gentle weather and fertile soils you can grow just about anything.  Without having any data whatsoever to back it up I would bet that this teeny, tiny country could be put under indefinite siege and no one would go hungry.  Of course the growing and distribution of food would have to be properly managed and not commandeered by an immoral, money-grubbing politician, and all the marijuana crops would have to be ploughed under and replanted with wheat or legumes.  But bellies would be filled. Beans would be eaten.  Farts would ring out across the land.

            The Lebanese diet is the healthiest one I’ve ever beheld -- mainly vegetables and beans, yogurt and olives.  Meat is eaten too, but people still buy most of it from independent butchers who have earned a reputation for trustworthiness.  The meat is local, usually raised on natural pasture, and fresh.  When I say fresh I mean you can pick your beast out of a group corralled at back and return a little while later to collect your parcel of meat. That is not something I have done myself or ever plan to do but, like so much else in Lebanon, underneath this distasteful task is a bracing whiff of reality.

            But it is the vegetables here that really hit the high note. They’re fresh, cheap and don’t require any moral struggles to butcher.  The bulk and selection of fresh greens in my local Spinney’s supermarket is wonderful.  Heaped on shelves and pawed at by Lebanese woman (who shoulder past me in that startlingly non-Canadian way) are parsley, cilantro, spinach, dandelion, purslane, giant-leaf thyme, chard, something posing as dill but milder, romaine lettuce, frizzy lettuce, green onions and rocket.

            Those are just the leafy things.  There are also potatoes, turnips, carrots, cabbages, beets, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, squash, zucchini, beans and peas of all manner including the beloved chick pea and fava bean, green peppers, red peppers, hot peppers, tomatoes, apples, oranges, clementines, lemons, watermelon, sweet yellow melon, peaches, grapes, plums, pomegranates, cherries; all locally grown.

             There are the cheeses and yogurts, too, local and fresh; and walnuts, almonds, figs and honey. I just can hardly ever believe all this great food is grown within twenty miles of the store I’m buying it in. I don’t mean to boast.  Goodness knows I spend a great part of each day bemoaning the crummier aspects of living in Lebanon so I feel I should be excused for tooting the Lebanese horn, as it were.           

            What perplexes me is the way the Lebanese often choose to eat something before it’s ripe.  They do this with almonds – eating the soft nut along with its outer covering (which would later have  become the shell) and also with little round plums, sour as lemons. Both of these you dip in salt to eat. I don’t understand this.  I love almonds and I love plums.  Eating them green when they have almost no taste and are very sour just seems like a senseless waste to me. The difference, I think, in the way I see it and the way the Lebanese see it is that they know there is no shortage.  They can eat all the green almonds and green plums they like and there will still be more than they can eat left ripening on the tree for later.  For me, forever trapped in the belief that fruit comes from I.G.A and only in small boxes at certain times of the year, the bounty of Lebanon is beyond comprehension.

            Last time we were in M’s ancestral village I was fixing a salad with the coffee-table-sized Romaine lettuce we’d bought at the side of the road when I discovered there wasn’t any vinegar in the house. 

            “Darn. No vinegar. I didn’t buy any lemons because I thought your mom kept vinegar in the house,” I said to M. “I guess we’ll have to eat our salads with just olive oil and salt.”

            “I saw a few lemons on a tree behind the house,” Dude said. “I noticed them when my soccer ball went back there.”

            We went down and sure enough, in a forgotten strip of soil between the back of the house and the neighbour’s wall, dangling high in the branches of a leafless, winter-quiet tree were three or four beautiful, bright yellow lemons.  M managed to get two of them down: one huge one and one tiny one.  They had very bumpy skin, as though they’d recovered from a terrible case of teenage acne, but when I cut them open they were gorgeous and bursting with juice.  I squeezed one of them onto our salad with a mild sense of disbelief.  How much were lemons priced at last summer in the Newfoundland grocery store? Two for a dollar?  And here they were forgotten on weedy trees that sprang up behind houses, certainly the progeny of seeds spit over balcony rails during long-ago breakfasts.

            The ancestral village is thick with olive groves and every fall M’s mom calls me down to her place to pick up a huge jug of green, foggy-looking virgin oil she has set aside for us.  It has come from their own plot of land and has been pressed right there in the village.  The taste of this oil is not what you’d expect; it’s rich and full and a little bitter.  Bitter?  Yes.

            The olives the Lebanese prize above all others – indeed, eat almost exclusively -- are bitter enough to bring tears to your eyes.  We’re talking bitter as in coffee grounds would be sweet in comparison.  You can acquire a taste for these olives, but my own has largely been sheer effort of will power.  I try to like them.  I try so hard I do succeed, a little, at times.  They’re really good for refreshing your mouth after a garlicky meal (and every meal in Lebanon is garlicky).  And I genuinely like the hotness they acquire from the hot peppers added to the brine. But what I really like are mild, Spanish olives.  I buy them at the supermarket, imported and exorbitantly priced, and carry them home feeling like a drug smuggler and eco-failure. 

            M’s mom asks me about once a month if I need a refill on olives (she means her kind of olives).  Like most of our conversations, this is one we repeat almost word-for-word every single time the subject comes up.  I say thank you most kindly, but no, not yet, we don’t manage to get through olives very quickly. Then she reads her lines about how healthy olives are, and that we should eat more of them, and lists all the different times and ways in which we could eat them.

            On the last occasion this happened I came right out and told her that I don’t like bitter olives (I’ve told her before, it’s not as devil-may-care as it sounds; she just chooses not to remember).  M and his dad, sitting nearby, chorused along with my mother-in-law as one voice: “But bitter olives are where the real flavour is.  Bland olives have no taste.  Who would want to eat an olive with no taste when you can have an olive full of taste?”

            “Me,” I said.  “I want to eat an olive with no taste.”

            Up until recently I had assumed the bitter, tree-sap-tasting olives were that way because they weren’t allowed to ripen on the tree.  But M tells me that it is not so; it is the type of olive itself which is bitter.           

            “Good grief,” I mutter. “It doesn’t make any sense.  It’s like deliberately breeding a dog to have a tiny, under-sized head. Why?  Why?”

            Maybe I was overreacting a bit with the olives.  People like coffee, after all, and it’s bitter.  Heck, I drink black tea when a spoon can float on top of it.  But now what about the Lebanese propensity for eating raw meat?

            That’s right.  If you didn’t know before, raw meat is a delicacy here.  They take a big cut of fresh beef, grind it to a paste in the food processor, and serve it up like pink ice-cream.  M’s mom mixes really nice tasting herbs with it and that’s about all you taste.  I find it quite a pleasant dish.  But again I must ask: why? Is it worth the ick factor and the risk of parasites?

            People here would say yes, it is, it has a lovely flavour that you just can’t capture any other way, and while we’re on the subject have you tasted raw liver?

            Oh yes.  I forgot to mention the raw liver. Do you know they eat it for breakfast?  Raw liver and onions.  For breakfast.

            “Live a little.  Eat food with some taste to it,” M will say to me as he tucks in to a plate of dark, jiggly flesh that his mom has brought up.

            “Don’t want taste,” I say, looking away and heading to the cereal cupboard.  “Want soft, bland, processed North American food; obesity and bowel cancer.”

            See, it’s not like I don’t realize how healthy the Lebanese diet is.  Fresh food must always be better than packaged food.  And as for the risk of eating raw meat, from what I’ve read and observed it’s minimal when you eat it as well-sourced and fresh as they do.  Surely it’s better to eat that kind of meat than the pre-frozen, Brazilian feed-lot beef I buy in Spinney’s?

              "I do try, you know," I say to M as I pour milk over my Weetabix.  "Remember the time at that fancy restaurant when I ate the--"

            "Sheep testicles," M finishes for me. "Yeah, I remember. But you wouldn't try the lamb brain spread."

            "No, alas. Not the lamb brain spread."

            "Isn't there a saying about that?"

            "Hm?"

            "All balls and no brain. That's it, more or less." M chuckles heartily. "Well I guess that's you, then. All balls and no brain."