Feeling Weird

I sat there looking ugly, looking ugly and mean.

That’s a line from R.E.M., in case you don’t love and know them quite as much as you should, and today it’s stuck in my head because I feel like Scott says. I don’t know why. I’m reasonably sure I’m not uglier than I was yesterday, except of course for that incremental notch further toward decrepitude and its accompanying hideousness that each passing day brings all of us. I’m not meaner than I was, either. I know that because I’m still feeling the love.

I’ve been feeling the love for some weeks now. What I mean by ‘the love’ is not an urge to throw away all my supportive Olga bras and tie die some long, cotton skirts, but rather a feeling that I can sense something really fine just over the horizon. It’s a sort of inexplicable optimism, and it’s a wonderful feeling but it drags around behind it a foul, hot-faced beast of negativity that Theo and I call the Pit of Red Ants. The name probably paints a sufficient picture for you.

So I’ve got all this happy feeling, and sometimes I’ve got the paralysing horrors of the Ants riding hard up behind the happiness, and it’s all swirling around and has been for some weeks and I don’t know why. I’m pretty sure I haven’t floated off to the fairies. I would know if I had, wouldn’t I? Anyway, it’s not that kind of feeling. Reality doesn’t seem distorted. People and things seem exactly as they have always and more’s the pity for that, I say, because I’ve always half-envied the patients my friend Berg used to see on her rounds at the mental hospital. Oh, I don’t mean that really. Don’t get your knickers in a twist and start fuming that I don’t really know what it’s like to be mentally ill. I don’t, I’m just babbling, saying what comes into my head, and sometimes one needs to be a bit colourful to make one’s point.

I wouldn’t, for example, wish to be like the lady who tried to take out her own eyes. But there was a guy who used to dart down the corridors like he was trying to avoid sniper fire and that intrigued me. Berg had a conversation with him involving a glove, I don’t remember the details, but he said that he didn’t understand the glove, and the phrase struck us all as being so wonderful that it has entered our inner parlance. If I say to Berg or to Theo, “I don’t understand the glove,” they get it. They don’t ask what the hell I mean. That’s what I’m talking about when I say that I half-envy some crazy people. It’s these glove kind of people who seem not so much ill as differently programmed.

I see that I have started in the middle of this blog post, going on about weird feelings and leaving you wondering what the sam hill is going on and where is the light-hearted snipe about life in Lebanon that you’ve come to expect. With this post I believe that I only set out to say that I’m feeling both strangely good and fairly bad these days and it’s very unsettling. Everything seems a lot more intense. I think it may have to do with a possible impending change in our living circumstances but that can’t be everything. I’m not new to this expat lifestyle of frequent change.

Theo says it’s probably hormonal changes. You know, the beginning of The Change. I said how can that be, I just turned 28. Well, you understand. You always feel quite a bit younger than you are, except when you look in the mirror, and then you lie and say the light is bad, and smile so that you don’t look quite so droopy, and you carry on with your day not quite believing that first glimpse.

Theo knows about hormones, on account of all her reading. She is quite interested in things like glands and tumours and probably missed her calling. She should have been an pathologist, hunched over her microscope examining slides of human liver tissue, occasionally grunting in satisfaction at the detection of some lesion or other and making excited notes in scrawling, block letters on a pad of paper beside her.

What Theo has been reminding me is that hormones are the ones actually in charge of our bodies. We think our brain is at the helm, but that’s not quite right because it does what the hormones tell it to do. Apparently we’re all just hapless lumps of meat which do exactly as our endocrine system dictates. I don’t even mind the thought of that, to tell you the truth. There’s something very soothing in the idea of being a mindless sack of flesh. For example, maybe I don’t need to worry so much.

So whether it’s hormones -- God help me -- or the stress of possible change or what all of a sudden I’m as restless as a fat horse on boggy ground. I can’t bear to stay in the house for a half-day stretch at a time. This from the woman who normally flares with outrage because a plumber or water delivery man has dared to interrupt her six-hour stretch of solitary tranquillity. I’ve been out walking a lot, scraping beggars off my arm, enduring garbage and pollution stink, soaking up the spirit of Hamra. Thankfully the weather is cool enough now to make walking enjoyable.

Speaking of walking in Hamra, here’s a tidbit for you that has nothing to do with anything. The other day when I was walking down Hamra Street I saw a man in front of me reach over and wipe his thumb down the back pant leg of his companion. It was the lower leg, and there was nothing lewd about the gesture, but it was so strange that I couldn’t help staring. I mean, they were walking just in front of me. The one who had done the wiping caught me looking, and though I quickly looked straight down at my shoes the damage was done. I had embarrassed him. But he had done me a greater wrong by saddling me with such a mystery. If one needs to clean one’s thumb, aren’t there easier surfaces on which to do it than the back of your companion’s calf? Also, why did the companion not seem surprised or in any way put out at being used as a tissue? Lastly, what was on the guy’s thumb anyway? About then I needed to cross to the other side of the street and I decided it was a grand time to go. As I moved away from the two men I heard the wiper say something I didn’t catch, and then the wipee answer, “Don’t worry, she looks like a foreigner.”  

So there you have a brief, disjointed account of the state of things with me this month. I really wanted to start blogging regularly every week but it’s been next to impossible to sit down and write anything lately. I hope to get back to it very soon. I hate when I leave the blog dead for months at a time. It feels like neglect. I’m not a person who should even have potted plants and a blog is the same kind of thing. But I won’t let it die, I won’t.

Another Mention of Deliveries

Is it just me or are movies getting really crummy?

Don’t answer that. We went to see the second installment of The Hunger Games last night. I didn’t want to go but I went because the kids and M were all keen. The main reason I didn’t want to go is because I rather vividly remembered the first one in the trilogy.

It’s not that the first Hunger Games was a bad movie – actually it was quite good by what seems to be today’s standard. What I mean is that I didn’t enjoy watching children forced to kill each other. Sure, I might have gotten past that when I was a teenager but it doesn’t work like that anymore. I just feel upset.

But that doesn’t matter. All I wanted to tell you was that about fifteen minutes into the movie a guy appeared at the end of our row of seats carrying a box of take-away food – it looked like sushi – and delivered it to someone sitting in front of us.

I couldn’t stop laughing. I embarrassed the kids and I think M, too, but I just couldn’t stop the laughter from coming out. I couldn’t decide which was funnier: that someone had ordered sushi for delivery to a theatre or that the restaurant agreed to the “address” the customer gave. (There was a small cafe right outside the theatre which we later saw did have sushi on the menu, so I guess it came from there, but still...)

Speaking of deliveries, one of Noonie’s friends ordered movies to our house last week when the girls were here having a get-together. She rang up a shop called Nabilnet and said she wanted such-and-such a movie, and another one, and short time later there was a delivery guy at our door with the DVDs. They were for keeping, not for borrowing. Of course they were pirated but the quality was good enough, and you tend to forgive small flaws in clarity when the movies cost five thousand a piece (around three dollars). Delivery was free.

You can’t beat Beirut for home delivery service. You can order groceries for delivery, too, but I’ve never done it. M’s parents used to get a lot of wrong numbers for a grocery store in their neighbourhood with a phone number very similar to their own. They said that at the beginning they used always to explain to the confused caller that they had dialled the wrong number but eventually grew weary of this unrewarding chore and began simply to take the orders.

I didn’t quite believe M’s dad when he told me this but then once I was at their house when it happened. The phone rang, M’s dad picked up and I heard him say, “Do you want the big pack or the small one? We have paper plates in 50-count packs and in 25-count.” M’s mom started cracking up, and then I realised what was happening. My gosh but that man can keep a straight face. He pretended to take down the rest of the order, which included tea bags and some kind of cheese, and then cheerfully hung up the phone and continued talking with us like nothing had happened.

Kassem Buys Grapes

            I sent Kassem off on a few errands this morning not long before two bombs went off in Bir Hassan. One of the things Kassem was to do was buy me some vegetables, and the roadside market he goes to is in Bir Hassan.

            After M called and told me about the bombs I tried calling Kassem. The line was busy, as expected. Whenever there is a bomb here the mobile networks get overloaded and don’t function. It’s one of the many reassuring things about Lebanon. Another reassuring thing about Lebanon is that you find yourself writing sentences that begin with: “Whenever there is a bomb here...”

            I wasn’t exactly chewing my fingernails off with worry for Kassem because the bombs weren’t on the same street as the vegetable market but still, they were pretty close. Then I remembered that text messages seem to get through even when the mobile network is clogged so I sent Kassem a few words in phonetic Arabic: “Kassem, are you all right?”

            About five minutes later my landline rang from an unknown number. “Hi Madam,” said a familiar, cheery voice.

            “Oh, you’re fine!” I burst out, rather more loudly than strictly necessary. “I was worried about you.”

            “Yes, I’m fine,” Kassem chuckled. “I’m calling from the grocery story by the dry-cleaner’s. There are other people waiting to use the phone so I won’t stay on the line but I saw your note and wanted to let you know that I was okay. I’m on my way back to the house.”

            When he rang the doorbell ten minutes later and swept in carrying bags of green peppers, cauliflower and clementines, he was in his usual good spirits.

            “I found you some grapes,” he said proudly, dumping the bags down on the kitchen table and opening one to reveal about five pounds of pale green grapes.  “It’s the end of the season but I managed to find these.”

            “Great, thank you,” I said, and I meant it. The grapes looked delicious. “But Kassem, what about the bombs? Were you anywhere near the area when they went off?”

            “No, no,” he said off-handedly and without apparent interest in the topic. “You mentioned you had a light bulb you wanted me to find a replacement for?”

            This was incredible. And yet, it was not.

            “Do you want to use the house phone to call your wife?” I asked. “She might be worried about you.”

            He laughed at the very idea. “No, she won’t be worried.”

            “Well, okay,” I said, a trifle nonplussed. “Uh, I guess that’s everything for the moment then.”

            We made our way toward the door. As I opened it to let Kassem go out he paused and turned to me, suddenly looking grave.

            And do you know what he said then? Please bear in mind that this is a man who lost his parents during the civil war when their building was destroyed by an Israeli air strike. He is also a man who never stops talking about his grandchildren, who constantly shows me their pictures and tells me what this one said on the weekend, or how that one is the best reader in his kindergarten class. He is full of love and compassion.

            From the living room a voice on the tv could be heard saying, “It is a scene of horrific carnage here and the number of known dead is expected to rise...”           

            Kassem shook his head in a sorrowful way and said, “Do you know what happened, Madam? Our fridge died last night and we’re going to have to buy a new one. It’ll be six hundred dollars at least.”

                       

                       

           

Little Beasts

            A mosquito spent last night in my hair for no apparent reason. Every time I turned over there was a startled buzzing near my ear and the sounds of a short, desperate struggle. A few seconds later the mosquito would escape the imprisoning hair and fly off into the night – hopefully, I thought, to M’s side of the bed – but later I would turn in my sleep and another spasm of frantic buzzing would erupt in my ear. The mosquito kept coming back, risking life and proboscis, to camp on my head, and I would like to know why.

            Generally mosquitoes prefer M to me so I don’t get a lot of bites when he’s in the room with me. And when they do decide to go for me they get in and do their blood sucking and get out again. Last night’s mosquito didn’t even bite me. Maybe it was a male mosquito just looking for a swig of flower nectar. It occurs to me now that I have just switched to a new brand of shampoo. Perhaps some floral ingredient in the shampoo tickled the mosquito’s fancy. But if I’m going to have winged insects checking into my hair on a nightly basis as though I’m running some kind of bug youth hostel I’m going back to my old brand of shampoo.           

            Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not above making friends with a bug. Sometimes they can be a kind of companion to you when you’re home alone and have no pets but the bug in question has to big enough to seem like a fellow creature. Mosquitoes are closer to being specks than fellow creatures, in my opinion, and anyway I could never learn to love them.

            Last year I befriended a beetle that showed up on the balcony one day. I’d never seen a beetle like this one out there before. He was green with a long, tube-like mouth that made him look like a tiny anteater. I don’t know what he was doing on the balcony or what his plans were, but he stayed for some days. Every time I went out to hang up clothes I would see him in a different place, just pottering around happily like an old man inspecting his rose garden.

            One day I found him in the same place as he’d been in the day before, and when I gently nudged him he only managed a feeble wave of his antennae. He seemed like he was dying and I mentioned it to M later that evening. M immediately looked regretful and said that he was sorry to inform me that he had probably stepped on the beetle the night before. “I felt something crunch under my slipper,” he said. “I’m sorry but there was nothing I could do. I would have told you sooner but I didn’t realise you, ah, knew him.”

           

            You would think an old, dense city like Beirut would be infested with rats but the only one I’ve ever seen here was squashed flat on the road in front of our old building, a perfectly two-dimensional form like Wile E. Coyote after a steamroller has run over him.

            I’ve never seen live rats – Norway rats – except behind bars. We don’t have them in Alberta, thank heaven (and any sighting of one instantly raises headlines and lynch mobs). I’ve always liked gerbils and hamsters and mice as pets, and have heard that rats make even better pets than these, but the difference between my own pet rat companionably munching popcorn beside me as we watched tv together and a strange rat darting between my ankles when I opened the pantry door would, I think, be stark.

            Last year when I was cleaning out a shower drain I asked M why the drain filter was screwed into place.  I could see no reason it had to be secured like that since it already sat snugly in a rubber-ringed depression. “I mean, it’s not like the glob of hair and slime is going to try to crawl back out of there,” I said, and then added in a less certain tone: “At least, I’m pretty sure it won’t.”            

            That seemed to remind M of something. “I think they screw down the drain filters in case rats try to come up through the drains into the house.”

            “What!” I cried, grabbing at the screwdriver and scattering screws all over the shower floor in my haste to get the filter screwed back into place.

            “I’ve heard they can come up through the toilet as well,” M added thoughtfully. “Though I’ve never seen it happen. But we should probably make sure to keep our toilet lids down at all–”

            But I didn’t hear the rest of his sentence. I was already gone, running from room to room around the house slamming down toilet lids.

           

            We don’t even have ants in our present apartment but they were permanent residents in our old place. I think the walls of that building were so filled with ant colonies that you could never be rid of them no matter how enthusiastically you dumped noxious powders around your baseboards and window sills. Anyway, I didn’t like killing them.  In the beginning I would kill them wherever I found them because I thought that if I didn’t my kitchen would be overrun.  But by and by I noticed that it didn’t seem to matter whether I killed them or not.  All that mattered was whether or not there was anything tasty left out for them to eat.  When there were no crumbs on the cutting board or bits of egg left clinging to a dirty plate someone had neglected to put in the dishwasher, their presence would fade to the  odd sighting of a tiny dot trundling up a wall, minding its own business. But if I were to carelessly drop a crumb of ground beef on the floor while preparing spaghetti sauce, within an hour the kitchen floor would look like Woodstock, with hundreds of ants milling around the dropped crumb, tiny tents being set up nearby and someone selling t-shirts reading ‘Meat Crumb 23-09-12 I Was There’ near a hole in the wall.

            During the last year at our old apartment I began to suspect that the ants were up to something covert and very possibly sinister. About twice a day while using my laptop I’d notice a tiny ant strolling very casually across the back of the keyboard. It was always just a single ant and it always acted like it hadn’t a care in the world and was just doing a bit of casual crumb scrounging but it seemed to me that it acted a little too disinterested, if you know what I mean. Sometimes it would turn its dot-sized head up toward the computer screen for a moment and just stand motionless for a moment like that, as if it were reading what was displayed there.

            Am I crazy? Listen, I killed a lot of ants before I mellowed into my present passive stance. And let us not forget that I participated in the Bloody Sunday massacre at my mother-in-law’s house when dozens of ants were boiled up with the rice and partially consumed before M took a closer look at the ‘seasonings’ in the rice and sounded the alarm (his mom hadn’t had her glasses on when making the rice). I mean who’s to say I’m not on the ants’ Ten Most Wanted list?

            A few weeks ago as we walked out through the garden beside our building Noonie spied a very small lizard in the pool. It’s a decorative pool with water continually flowing over the edges and down into drains, and we didn’t see any way that the lizard could get out of it alive. How he had come to be in there in the first place was a mystery. He was a good swimmer and seemed to tread the water with tireless ease but sooner or later we knew he must become exhausted and drown.

            He watched me alertly with tiny, bright eyes as I slowly extended my sunglasses out toward him. I thought if I could just get them close enough to him he might have the sense to climb aboard. But as soon as the glasses got close to him he swam quickly out to the middle of the pool.

            “Oh no,” I moaned. “We’re never going to get him out of there. Look how he’s looking at us. He’s feeling fine and in no immediate danger from the water so he’s got no reason to climb onto anything we offer him.”

            While I put my hands on my hips and began to think up elaborate plans of rescue involving inflatable rafts and pasta strainers, M crouched down at the edge of the pool without saying a word. The current of the water was slowly bringing the lizard our way again. He was watching us as keenly as ever but M sat motionless.

            “Nobody move,” he said.

            As the kids and I watched with held breath the moving water brought the lizard closer and closer. His little eyes seemed too intelligent, too wary, to fall for whatever M had in mind.

            Then, with the abruptness of a crocodile leaping out of a Serengeti watering hole onto the neck of a gazelle M’s hand shot out, there was a great splash, and the lizard was sitting on the stone outside the pool in a quickly-receding puddle of water.

            What M had performed with perfect timing and execution was a high-speed scoop. He waited until the lizard was within range and with a cupped hand scooped the water around the lizard and the lizard itself, flinging liquid and beast horizontally onto the stone tile beside the pool. The lizard was completely unharmed but the shock of the incident had robbed him of his wits.

            The little creature seemed confused to the point of stupefaction. Gone from his gaze was the fiery hauteur with which he had regarded us from the pool and he stared straight ahead with dull eyes. He didn’t even seem to notice us as we crowded around him for a closer look.

            “Do you think he’s all right?” I said.

            M straightened and shook water off his hand. “He’s fine. Let’s go.”

            And you know, he was fine. As we walked off I saw the lizard rouse himself, the way birds do (the lucky ones) after flying into a window, and creep slowly away. There was a thoughtful air about him which boded well for any future occasions when the urge to take a swim in the pool might come over him, and I guessed he was going to be all right.

           

           

Nothing much

Lately I’ve been trying to post something every week but today I feel too low to think of anything amusing or interesting to write. I keep thinking about Mohammad’s white shirt. Mohammad is the son of my cleaning lady, Selma. I’ve never met him but I see him every day now from a distance, working as a parking valet at a restaurant my kitchen window overlooks. Selma pointed him out to me when she was here last week. “He’s the one wearing the white shirt and red tie,” she told me.

He’s been wearing the white shirt and red tie every day since. I know because I see him nearly every time I look out the window. His family –Selma, her husband, and the six kids– live in a tiny, dark apartment without a shower. When they want to bathe they heat a bowl of water over a gas ring and wash themselves in it.

I keep thinking about Mohammad going home after his shift at midnight and removing the white shirt and red tie. Does Selma (or, more probably, her eldest daughter) wash it right away and hang it to dry for the next day? Or is everyone asleep, necessitating the washing of it first thing in the morning and a hasty ironing to get the last of the dampness out before it is back in service? It seems unlikely to the point of inconceivable that he would have two good white shirts.

This afternoon we walked past him on our way to the shops. I looked at him and for a second our eyes met. I could see that he was doing fine. So I don’t know why I’m still thinking about that white shirt.

The Monty Hall Problem

Would you like to fry your brain in a completely organic way? You can, simply by trying to understand the Monty Hall problem.

Maybe you’ve already heard of it. Until M told me about it, I had not. Also, until M told me about it I thought I had a reasonably good grasp of basic logic.

The problem is named for the host of the American game show, “Let’s Make a Deal,” though it doesn’t actually have anything to do with him or the show. It is a probability puzzle in which a game show scenario is used to illustrate an apparent paradox.    

Here it is.

You are a contestant on a game show. You stand before three identical, closed doors. The show’s host – let’s say it’s Monty himself -- tells you that behind one of the doors is a car, and behind the other two are goats. You are allowed to choose one door and to claim as a prize whatever is behind it.

You tell Monty, “I choose door number 1.”

Monty then says that before he opens your chosen door he is going to give you a chance to change your mind. He walks over to door number 3 and opens it, revealing a goat. He says to you, “Do you want to stick with your original choice of door number 1, or do you want to switch to door number 2?”

And now we arrive at the brain bursting bit. Do you think you should change your choice to door number 2?

I hope you said that it doesn’t matter, that both door 1 and 2 are now equally likely to hide the car. That will make me feel better, because that’s what I said and that’s what I argued for two hours to M the wretched day he told me about the problem.

But it is wrong. You’re actually better off switching your choice to door number 2, and here is why.

As you probably already assumed, the host knows what is behind each door. This is one of two things at the nub of the riddle. The second thing, and the one that I think most people pay too little attention to upon initial consideration, is that this is a probability puzzle. It does not predict what will happen in a single enactment of the scenario but rather gives chances based on what would happen if you played the game a whole bunch of times.

So you mustn’t think about the problem in terms of having a single chance to choose a door and probably ending up with a goat, which you will name Ethel. Think about playing the game a hundred times.

Two-thirds of the time you are going to choose (as your first choice) a door that has a goat behind it. In these cases, when Monty opens his door – and he’ll always open one with a goat behind it – he will have ‘shown’ you that the door neither of you chose hides the car. In these cases he has given you a one hundred percent chance of finding the car.

But wait, you say. We don’t know which times I have first picked a goat door. I accept that it occurs two-thirds of the time, but what is the use of that if I don’t know which times they are?

Just hold on, dearie, and focus the old coconut on what I said about it being a probability puzzle.

The remaining one-third of the times you play the game your first choice will be the car door. In the excitement of considering this, you might neglect logic. You desperately want the car and you’re tired of taking Ethel home (she has wrecked your house and farts in front of company). Why on earth would it be a good idea to switch your door in such cases, when you’ve landed on the right one the first time? It wouldn’t, of course. But even if you do switch your choice of door and end up with a goat, this is still only happening one-third of the overall times you play the game. The other two-thirds of the time, if you switch doors after Monty shows you a goat, you’re going to get the car.

This means that if you always take the chance to switch doors, you will go home with the car two-thirds of the time. Ethel, alas, will only get the chance to poison the atmosphere of your dinner parties every third week.

Now do you see? I don’t mean to patronise. Believe me, I smelled smoke when I was trying to work out the first time. But then again, I didn’t have a kindly blogger explaining it to me in words that I could understand. I had only M, sitting on the couch with his superior knowledge of mathematics and intuitive ability to understand things like terminal velocity, while my dogged, pack-mule-like brain stumbled through the underbrush.

If it’s still not making sense to you, this might help. Think about playing the game if Monty did not know which door hid what. Of course it would be a silly way to play because sometimes he would open the door hiding the car and the audience would probably feel less than hysterically excited to watch you try to decide between the remaining two doors. But of the times when Monty opened a door onto a goat there would be no advantage to you changing your choice of door. There would be exactly a fifty percent chance of the car being behind either of the remaining closed doors.

The reason the Monty Hall problem is so perplexing is that it seems to be a simple random chance situation, but it’s not. Monty knows where the goats are and acts upon that information. This adds an element of predictability to the results, but only an element. There is still a random element, too, and the co-existence of the two in one simple problem seems to jam our mental gears.

My mental gears got jammed just trying to find a way to say that. So I’m going to go now and unload the dishwasher and give the ol’ circuits a chance to cool down. As for you, I can tell that you so thoroughly enjoyed the Monty Hall problem that you are heart-broken to find yourself at the end of the blog. Don’t cry, I’ve got a treat to leave you with.

It’s called the birthday problem, and it shows mathematically that the chances of two people in a group of 23 sharing the same birthday are fifty percent. Can you explain why?

Ah, come on. You need to hone your mental skills. What if the human race gets nearly wiped out and it's up to a dozen or so of us to re-invent combustion engines and mobile phones? Don't look to me. I'm going to be swamped with my mould-growing operation, hoping one of them turns out to be penicillin. 

The In-laws Return from Newfoundland

My in-laws recently came back to Lebanon from an extended stay at the family cottage in Newfoundland. How they lasted several months alone on a windswept, rocky outpost thousands of miles away from the frenetic bustle of Beirut is a mystery to us all. The cottage is perched above a beautiful cove but there is nobody for them to talk to. Some of the neighbours are quite friendly, but things never progress past polite interest.

For my in-laws there is a language barrier on top of the ordinary challenges of making friends while vacationing in a small, remote village whose inhabitants are nearly all related to one another and a whole culture removed from you. My mother-in-law doesn’t speak English and although my father-in-law does, he misses a lot if it’s spoken too quickly or with an accent. I’ll leave it to you to imagine him trying to follow a rapid exchange between a couple of rural Newfoundlanders. It’s a shame because both of my parents-in-law love to laugh and those cod-swallowing, shanty-singing Newfoundland folk have a fantastic sense of humour.

It seems that my in-laws filled the long hours of their trip with food-related activities. I don’t mean that they ate too much, though that is an unparalleled way to pass time on vacation, but that they spent a great deal of time talking about, acquiring and preparing food.

First it was caplin, the little fish that roll onto Newfoundland shores to spawn in early summer. The locals go down with nets to scoop them up and my in-laws were right there, gathering up bagfuls. For some weeks the consumption of fresh and then frozen caplin was their reason for getting out of bed in the morning. They fried them, poached them, grilled them and ate them in garlic sauce.

Then it was cod season and new methods of preparing and cooking were needed to stave off boredom. My mother-in-law put a portable burner on the front step and made homemade fish and chips out of doors as salivating seagulls stood watching from the roof, hoping to find the plate of fish unguarded for a moment (they never did).

When the cod fishing season was over my in-laws looked to the land for employment. They planted parsley, mint and purslane and hunted for strawberries in the lanes.  Then the wild blueberries ripened and they threw themselves into the task of collecting every berry within a ten-mile radius of the house. Like everything in Newfoundland, the blueberries there are tiny and grow close to the ground. My father-in-law would do the picking each morning, grabbing up whole clumps of berries along with their leaves and bits of stem and carrying them home for my mother-in-law to clean. He must have developed a distinctly gorilla-like hunch during that period, roaming the endless meadows above the rocky cliffs, head lowered, eyes scanning the ground. With his arms dangling low to the ground he would have only had to shape his hands into claws and drag them through the dense scrub like a human hay rake, filling his plastic shopping bags with the prickly harvest.

My mother-in-law spent a couple of hours every third day or so cleaning the blueberries. Sitting in front of the tv, she would pick them off the stems, throw out the bits of twigs and rubbish, and then wash the berries. She would spread them out to dry on the table and when all the water was evaporated she would put some aside for immediate consumption and the rest in ziplock bags for the freezer. The fresh berries she pulverized with a wand blender and she and my father-in-law would sit outside in their twin chairs overlooking the cove, sipping their blueberry juice and discussing with satisfaction the anti-oxidant benefits they were getting.

When they weren’t harvesting the produce of the land my in-laws would take shopping trips into St. John’s. These journeys were executed in such a way as to deliver the maximum amount of diversion for the smallest outlay of money. They would spend the morning looking in clothing stores and hardware stores and wandering the enchanted aisles of Walmart but what they were really there for were the big supermarkets. These they would save for last.

The supreme over-sized supermarket is, of course, Costco, and through its hungry doors they would eagerly step, my mother-in-law with a steely glint in her eye and my father-in-law with a steely grip on his wallet. They have been fascinated by Costco since their first trip to Canada years ago. Naturally, they were amazed by the quality and prices, but it was the size of the packaged products that excited their imaginations. Here, in the magnitude of granola bar boxes and wheels of cheese was an explanation for the size of Canadians. They had been wondering about that ever since they got off the plane but now they wondered no longer.

 Two senior citizens who grow their own salad vegetables don’t require many groceries, and Costco doesn’t let you escape with a small quantity of anything. If you want Shreddies then by God, you’ll get Shreddies. You’ll have to carry the box home strapped to the roof of your car but my, what a good price per gram! There just aren’t many products in small-enough portions for my parents-in-law but they always found a few things, especially among the fruit and vegetables.

And so the weeks passed. Then it was time to return to Lebanon and my mother-in-law packed empty Metamucil tubs with blueberries she’d been saving up. She had my father-in-law seal them with duct tape and double-wrap them in plastic bags and then she put them – four in all, one for each kid – into her suitcase. At least she didn’t try to bring back any fish. (The first year I was there our kindly neighbour Sadie tried rather vigorously to get me to take back to Dubai a block of frozen cod fillets. Citing the risk of fish juice leaking into the suitcases of four hundred strangers who would understandably want to kill me, I refused.)

Yesterday my in-laws were over at our house for coffee and my mother-in-law was fondly recollecting the superior quality and better price of the Costco lemons compared to those in the local Dominion while I fought to remain alert. It’s hard for me to muster interest in grocery shopping at the best of times but there is something particularly numbing about vegetable prices. The information just seems to float out of my head. You could say to me, “Remember this: tomatoes at Hairy Bill’s Veggie-Mart are 80 cents a pound”, and then five minutes later ask me how much the tomatoes are at Hairy Bill’s, and I wouldn’t have a clue.

It’s not that I judge my in-laws for their interest in vegetable prices. It’s a sort of hobby, and a no less useful one than knitting or making twig furniture and -- if you come down to it -- a lot more useful than painting pictures of yellow warblers or writing mildly amusing blogs. It just seems a pity, as I said before, that that is all they could extract from their weeks in Newfoundland.

Part-way through my in-laws’ visit I had to leave the room to fix supper for Dude and when I came out again they had gone. Clearing away the coffee cups, I saw a small package lying on the table. “What’s this?” I asked M.

“Oh, the neighbours in Newfoundland gave that to Dad,” he said.

I picked it up. It said “Official Newfie Mosquito Trap” on it. Inside the clear covering was a miniature leghold trap, and a diagram of how to “trap” a mosquito with it.  “Ha,” I said, “that’s pretty funny. Did your mom and dad get a kick out of it?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “They didn’t realize it was a joke. Dad was asking me how to use it.”

How to Close an Email (I'm Actually Asking)

I can’t take it anymore. If I don’t discover or invent a good closing for my emails soon, I’m going to use ‘love’, even when writing to my kids’ teachers or the guy we deal with at the bank. “Dear Anthony,” I’ll say. “I wish to meet with you to discuss renegotiating the terms of our mortgage. Are you free on Monday at ten? Love, Jenn.”

Ever since email became the ordinary way to communicate with people I have never felt satisfied with the way I closed a semi-formal note. I haven’t found a word or phrase that sounds quite right. And unless the email is to a friend or family member, in which case I use ‘love’, a couple of x’s or no closing at all, almost all my emails are semi-formal.

           

Truly formal emails are easy. ‘Sincerely’ is an excellent, if old-fashioned, way to sign off. You’ve also got ‘Regards’ at your disposal. It is somewhat lame but feels less dated than ‘Sincerely’, and it’s used so much now that nobody notices it.  ‘Best regards’ is terrible and should never be used by any person in any situation. (I speak on this matter with no authority whatsoever but rely on my inner compass of common sense which is correct at least eighteen percent of the time.)

I once knew an Irish woman who closed notes with ‘All the best’. How I coveted the phrase: perfectly in-between and all-purpose, and with as genial a meaning as could be. But I could never pull it off and I knew it. That woman’s Dublin accent gave her lexical impunity. She could say “perforated colon” and it would sound like poetry. When she signed off with ‘All the best’ you felt she was really wishing you well. If I signed an email with “All the best” the recipient would think I was either senile or sarcastic.

           

Don’t even think about signing off with “Cheers” unless you were raised in the British Isles, Australia or New Zealand. These are the only suitable accents. No, I’m sorry, there’s no negotiating on this one. While I commiserate with you and wish I could get away with it myself, I can’t condone it.

Some people say that signing off with “Yours” is a safe bet but I disagree. Do you know what are you committing to, when you say that you are theirs? You’re leaving it wide open to interpretation. You could be saying that you are their toe hair, or personal chef. I say, don’t take those kind of chances.

Years ago Theo received a letter from a friend’s mom which was signed, “Fondly, Shirley”. We still treasure the memory.

           

Have you noticed how everyone else seems to close their emails with absolute confidence? You never suspect a first-time usage, or doubt beneath a confidently typed “Looking forward to meeting you, Linda”. It’s that weird authority that a typed word carries. We all know that any moron with a laptop can put together a spell-checked email but somehow when it arrives in our inbox it has a gloss of professionalism just because it’s the typed word. When we see, “With best wishes, Stephen”, it looks polished and competent, even if we know Stephen to be two brain cells away from fungus.  

Maybe the whole problem with closings is that we write emails today more or less the same way we talk, but in the past letters were always more formal than conversation. We’ve grounded on some kind of transitional sandbar. Other than using “Dear --” to open an email (and more often than not it is “Hi --”), we are casual. The body of the note is brief and informal. We no longer write Jane Austen letters full of things like “My dear Sir, further to my letter of the 4th, I wish to ascertain the likelihood of your attendance at Lord Gherkin-Bunwich’s on the morrow”. We say, “Hi Bill. Are we still on for coffee tomorrow?” And when we tie up such a note, we instinctively shy away from formal closings. Yet, for reasons I can’t imagine, it looks strange to type ‘Bye’ or ‘See ya’ at the end of an email, the way we would at the end of a quick phone call to that person.

I don’t get it.

Love,

Jenn