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

Hurting Yourself in Lebanon

Yesterday over coffee, when a friend described how she fallen on cockroaches on her way to the café, it struck me how many peculiar ways there are to hurt yourself in Lebanon.

For my friend it happened on one of the steep streets in Clemenceau. As she picked her way carefully down the sidewalk she came across a patch of dark objects scattered over the concrete. Normally a wearer of eyeglasses, she had only non-prescription sunglasses on at the time and mistook the spots for small fruits fallen from an overhanging tree. She took care not to step directly on any of them but nonetheless suddenly found her foot coming down on something which rolled, and she fell to her knees. From her position near the ground, she now saw that the fruits were moving, and that they weren’t so much fruits as cockroaches. They covered the sidewalk, skittering about in their peculiarly revolting fashion, and the sight enabled my friend to leap rather youthfully back to her feet and disappear around a bend in the road before she had taken in what had happened.

And just this morning, when Dude got his finger stuck in one of the decorative holes cut into the backs of our kitchen chairs, I was reminded of the time he got his head lodged between the stone balusters of a balcony. That was when he was just five and we were living in one of the poorly planned but over-sized apartments so cherished by the Lebanese. The ‘salon’ of this apartment was the classic bowling alley design, meant for hosting guests or local track meets, and we hardly ever went in there. One day Dude, carried along by some private whim, went out through the salon to its balcony and put his head through the curved balusters. Once through it wouldn’t come out again and he had to wait there until we noticed him missing. His head didn’t come out easily, as I recall, and involved a good deal of pulling, vegetable oil and debate as to whether or not ears could be sewn back on again, but in the end we got it out and he retired to his bedroom with red, swollen ears for a evening of quiet reflection.

This spring, when we were still in our old apartment, M and Dude and I left the house to go watch Noonie in a play at the school one evening. When we came out of our building we found the back glass of our car completely shattered but still in place, with a bullet hole in the middle of it. So recently had it happened that the glass was still making crackling, settling sounds. A lady sitting on a nearby first-floor balcony called out to us that she had heard gunshots just a few minutes before. As it turned out, that was all we were to ever learn about it. M secured the glass with many criss-crosses of Gorilla tape and we went off to watch the play. 

Another time, during one of those nights of fighting in our neighbourhood I talked about in a previous blog, Dude’s friend who lives not far from us was woken by a bullet coming through the window and shattering his computer screen.

My cleaning lady, who comes once a week to do the floors and bathrooms, has been trying to kill me for some months now but doesn’t realise it yet. Her favourite weapon is a puddle of water left on the tiles while she’s finishing washing one room and about to start another. I’ve asked her repeatedly to cease this perilous practice and use a mop but she cannot. For a Lebanese woman like her, the only proper way to clean a floor is to tip a pail of water onto it and push that water around with a giant squeegee before directing it all down a drain set into the tiles.

My ancient Croc sandals are partly to blame. They’re old and ugly and I should retire them but can’t find anything else so spongy and comfortable to wear on stone flooring. I’ve bought several newer models but they don’t fit as comfortably as the old ones. Unfortunately, old Crocs are absolutely deadly on smooth, wet surfaces. As soon as that bumpy tread is worn off the bottom, you really should toss them out because if you hit a patch of water on a slippery surface you may end up with the back of your head caved in all the way to your nose. I have already sustained permanent brain damage and the reason I know this is I have fallen twice in my old Crocs but am too stupid to stop wearing them.

The first fall wasn’t too bad because my head remained upright that time. It didn’t happen in Lebanon, which might at first seem to render it ineligible for inclusion in this blog post, but it was a Lebanese accident all the same. It was in Newfoundland one summer when I barrelled through the front door of our cottage, unaware that my mother-in-law had just washed the floor with a large quantity of water (you see, this is why it counts as a Lebanese accident, because Canadians don’t clean floors that way). My leading leg shot straight out in front of me, the other rocketed backwards, and if anybody tries to tell you that an out-of-shape forty-year-old can’t do the splits, you can tell them they are wrong.

You already know that it was Selma’s floor cleaning that got me the second time. But that time was much, much worse. First of all, I wasn’t in Canada with its wooden houses and forgiving, force-absorbing floors. This time I was in Lebanon and I went over backwards, head first. My skull struck the ceramic tiles with such force I distinctly remember thinking it could be curtains for me. But I soon realised that I had to be conscious to be able to form such a thought and, immediately cheering, began to focus on how I would kill Selma as soon as I was back on my feet. She was in the same room when it happened and flapped over, hyperventilating with well-meaning, brainless concern, genuinely sorry and fully prepared to leave more water puddled on the floor even before she went home that day.

After some days with a sore head I made a full recovery, but privately I was disappointed not to have undergone any interesting personality changes. I thought such a knock on the head would cause me to start cursing uncontrollably in public, for instance (but it turned out that I did so only at home, and then only in regards to Selma). Similarly, I wondered if some untapped cerebral synapses had been shaken into alertness which would allow me to effortlessly solve Rubik’s Cube, thirty years after stamping one to bits on my bedroom floor. (Not only was I unable to solve it, I could no longer get even part-way along, as I had used to do.)

Selma didn’t learn her lesson about leaving water puddled on the floor, nor I about worn-out Crocs. I do wear one of my new pairs when she is here now, though. They aren’t as comfortable as the old ones but they grip the floor a whole lot better.

New Crocs won’t protect you from poisoning, however, and, worryingly, I don’t have any idea of what could. When at home I am never far from my teacup. I have used the same set of teacups for years. They’re vividly floral and unmistakable. The point is, Selma knows I sip tea continuously throughout the day. She’s watched me do it one afternoon a week for two years. She knows which cups I use.

When she was here cleaning last week she took it upon herself, with no word to me, to remove the tea stains from my cup. The problem was, it was the cup I was currently using. I left it sitting on the kitchen counter while I went to fold some laundry and when I came back it was more or less where I had left it, but full to the brim with slightly-tinted water. That was perfectly normal. I always fill it up with water on top of the bit of tea left in the bottom because it makes the water taste better. I did note that I hadn’t filled it up to the brim with water before going off to fold my laundry but, alas, that thought didn’t detain me. I assumed that Selma, in pouring out the last of the water from one of the 5-gallon bottles, had looked for somewhere to put the last drops and so topped up my cup.

I guess you can see where this is going. The cup wasn’t filled with water but with bleach solution. Bizarrely, I didn’t smell it. Maybe it was because the air in the kitchen was already choked with the smell of Selma’s beloved Dettol or maybe I’m missing some olfactory connections as a result of the fall on the tiles. I don’t know but I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary, not even my own imminent death. I just scooped the cup up for a quick sip on my way past and the next thing I knew I was spitting into the sink and splashing handfuls of water into my mouth, swishing and spitting again, as fast as I could.

Except for an hour of mild burning sensation in my mouth, I emerged from that attempt on my life unscathed. Certainly it wasn’t easy to overcome the urge to push Selma off the balcony, but I was getting used to having to deal with such feelings.

Last year I was cleaning the floor of a built-in closet in our bedroom when the most ridiculous of my situations arose. The closet was a strangely-shaped thing, built into a cleft in the wall, and rather deep. M’s instructions to the carpenter at the time of the commission had been to put only a very thin doorsill on the floor between the inside of the closet and the outside, but the man who would later become known in our house as The Idiot instead built a huge, step-like sill, six inches high and three or four wide. It was annoying but, compared to the mistakes being made elsewhere around the apartment, something we decided we could live with.

For cleaning I had removed the big tote bins I kept in the bottom of the closet, as well as the laundry hamper and M’s travel bag, and then stepped inside with a wet rag. The shelves of the closet were deep, so the spaces under the lowest shelves at the back of the closet were very hard to reach. I had to get down nearly onto my face to run the rag around at the very back and that’s when trouble struck. When I tried to extract myself from beneath the shelf I found that I had somehow become wedged, with my legs against the stupid giant doorsill and my back jammed up against the underside of the shelf.

I think I might have panicked a little. Afterwards, over a calming cup of tea, I reflected that I could probably have eased my way out comfortably if I’d just been patient and wriggled myself one way and then another. I know that’s what M would have done. Probably he would have calculated the angle between his back and the shelf and done a quick bit of math involving Newtons and counter forces. But not me. It was dark and stuffy in there, and I was in as undignified a position as a woman who once sold vacuum cleaners door-to-door could find herself in. As soon as it became evident that I had tried all possible directions and couldn’t move in any of them, any chance of reasoning my way out of the closet fled. I began to push with my legs as hard as I could. One of the them found a bit of  an opening at the top of the sill so I rammed it as hard as I could. The leg went over, but at great cost, and I more or less mangled it in my desperate bid for freedom.

These are just some of the many strange ways in which you can come to harm in Lebanon. There are many more. I didn’t talk about chunks of concrete falling off buildings and crashing to the sidewalk at your feet, or the “slow motion hit-and-run”, whereby you bounce off the bonnet of a car travelling at low speed while you are trying to cross a busy, traffic-clogged road. Nor did I mention the absence of safety tape or barricades around holes in the ground, some of them immense. You have to be on your toes to make it here. I don’t really, as you can see.