The Fart

            It came to my attention late last night that a fart which is somewhat of a legend in our family is being falsely accredited to me.

            Now, I’m sorry to you people who have found me through the expat blog site and came here expecting some useful information on Lebanon. I’ll be back in Beirut in a few days and promise to share more examples of my inability to adjust to Lebanese life. Today’s blog is about clearing my good name.

            It started last night when Theo made a Thai stir-fry and the smell of it settled in the bedroom Theo and I share (she has been with us here in Newfoundland since M and Dude and my in-laws left).  We opened all the windows in the house while she was cooking but the smell of fried onions and peanut sauce, instead of blowing out into the brisk, fishy air of Conception Bay, collected in our bedroom with a kind of solid resolution and plans to spend the night.

            The windows in the bedroom were wide open so there’s no reason why the stir-fry air should have pooled there.  I can’t explain the phenomenon scientifically.  Maybe there was some kind of thermal inversion going on.  All I know is that when I went in to get ready for bed I was surprised by how strong the smell was and called out a comment about it to Theo, who was in the bathroom washing her face.

            Hardly were the words out of my mouth when I heard a thundering in the hall and there was Theo, nostrils twitching and an expression of alarm on her face.

            “Good god,” she cried, “you weren’t kidding. It stinks to high heaven.  Are those windows open as far as they’ll go?”

            Without waiting for an answer she fell on the nearest one and cranked it, rocking wildly, to the limits of its range.  Then she grabbed her pyjama top which had been hanging by a hook in the wall and began fanning the air furiously with it. “Quick, get the hall door open, it might create a cross breeze.”

            “Geez, it’s not that bad,” I said, standing in the middle of the room idly scratching a black-fly bite. “We probably won’t even notice the smell once we’ve been in our beds a few minutes.”

            She shot me a withering look.  “Says the person with no nose.”

            “No nose! Hey, now, I happen to have a very sensitive nose.  It’s just that compared to yours it’s nothing more than a fleshy out-pouching on my face.  You don’t have a human nose.  What you’ve got is the olfactory super sponge of a sniffer dog.”

            “I can’t help it.  I just experience smells very strongly.”

            “I know.  I vaguely recall the eight thousand times this sort of thing has happened before.”

            “It’s not just that I experience smells more strongly -- they can actually make me feel sick. You want to help me fan or what?”

            “You should get a job in the airport.”

            “I think this fanning is helping.”

            “Or in a perfume factory.”

            “At least, I hope it’s helping.  There’s no way I’m sleeping in a peanut sauce cloud all night.”

            I sat down on the bed. “Say, it has never occurred to me before to ask you if you experience fart smells more strongly than a normal person. A packed elevator must be hell for you.”

            She eyed me wildly. “Of course.  You have no idea.  I don’t even take elevators if I can help it for that reason.”

            “Hmm.” I mused. “Have you ever tried customizing some  sort of charcoal air filters to fit up your nose? Though you wouldn’t want to be smell-impaired all the time.  Like if there was a gas leak in the house or something.”

            Theo stopped fanning and took a rest in the chair. “That reminds me.  Remember the story of the Gas Leak Fart?”

            “Remember it? It’s only the most famous fart in our family history.”

            “Yeah, well, when we had the family get-together at my place last month I overheard it being retold.”

            “Oh yeah?  Well, I certainly never get tired of hearing it.”

            “Well, me too, but the thing is, this time the story had changed a little.”

            “Well, stories do that over time.  As long as the essence of the story remains intact I guess it doesn’t matter.”

            Theo hesitated. “Maybe, but in this case the starring role had, er, undergone a replacement.”

            “The starring role . . . now wait just a minute, what are you getting at and why are you looking at me with that weird expression?”

            “Oh dear. What I'm trying to say is the latest version of the story has you in the starring role.”

           

            I think I may have fainted a little.  Theo kept talking for a few minutes but I only heard a rushing in my ears.  When I came to my senses I was able to question her precisely regarding the identity of the orator of the story and, most critically, who was in the audience.  I demanded to know why Theo hadn’t stepped in and set the record straight on my behalf (she only shrugged and said that everyone seemed to be enjoying it so much that she hated to interrupt).

         When I learned that the audience included our brother’s fairly-new-to-our-family wife I jerked straight up in bed, demanding my lap top be brought so that an email to my sister-in-law could be dispatched immediately.

            “On second thought,” I said, “I don’t need to write an email.  I’ve decided to do one better.  I’ll write a blog about it; it’ll reach more people that way.  Who knows how long that story has been circulating in its present format?”

            So here is the story of The Gas Leak Fart. Some details have been changed to protect the identity of the farter, though I would like him/her to know that allowing the story to be spread at my expense when they might have stepped up and set the record straight is not something I’m prepared to forgive in a hurry.

            On a cold December evening some years ago a group of people met as they did every Tuesday in a community hall off a lonely country road in Alberta.  They had come to learn French and the instructor was an elegant little Frenchwoman named Cecile.

            My dear blood relation, whom for the purposes of this story I shall call Gassy, was in attendance that night and eager to learn more of the romantic language he admired so much.  He was keen to better himself and had enrolled in the class with the belief that a little French would add poise and a certain je ne sais quoi to his character.

            It was – 25 degrees Celsius that night and the old, wood-floor community hall billowed heat through vents from the forced air furnace in the basement.

            It was cosy inside and the students chatted and laughed to each other as they took their seats and waited for Madame Cecile to begin the lesson.

            But poor Gassy was distracted by a faint rumbling and gurgling in his abdominal region. A spasm of pain caused him to wince and for his friend to ask if everything was all right.

            “Oh, I’m fine,” Gassy said, “I think I just ate too much at dinner.”

            He had eaten too much, that was true, but what he didn’t tell his friend was that he’d devoured half a bag of assorted dried fruit after dinner. 

            Madame Cecile began the lesson and Gassy focused his attention on learning how to ask for cheese in a shop.

            The shifting movements in his gut increased alarmingly and Gassy bitterly reflected that it was all his mother’s fault: she never allowed candy in the house and so an after-dinner sweet craving had led him in desperation to the bag of dried fruit.

            He began to feel hot and looked around the room to see if anyone else looked hot, too.  He might ask Madame Cecile if they could turn the heat down.

            He felt he had to get up and move around to settle his abdomen and had just decided to excuse himself when Madame Cecile announced that she had a nice treat for them all. They were going to try some traditional French folk dancing in the empty side of the hall where she had a stereo set up.

            Gassy was enormously relieved.  A little moving around was just what his tempestuous belly needed to sort itself out.  Sitting still in a hard chair was no good when one was trying to accommodate rapidly re-hydrating fruit. 

            The students assembled in front of the little stereo and Madame Cecile, very straight and correct in her posture, demonstrated the first steps of the dance. She turned on the music and the students began, clumsily, to try the steps.

            Gassy flinched as another cramp seized his abdomen.  He imagined the prunes and apricots swelling and pushing against his intestinal wall and knew that something was going to have to give soon. 

         And a few moments later he felt movement in the lowest portions of his interior, warning him that the gas build up was getting close to blowing the pressure relief valve.

            An evening French class wasn’t the ideal place to expel excess gas but at least the hall was very big and had a high ceiling.  The odor was sure to be lost in the voluminous interior of the building.

            He decided to hold it in until he could move to the fringes of the group and inconspicuously point himself away from the others. Of course, this was the sort of reasoning that had got Gassy into trouble before.  Anyone with dried fruit experience should know that you don’t waste time once the pressure gauge needle is in the red zone. 

            Just then Madame Cecile called the class to a halt while she demonstrated the dance again, adding a few more steps this time.  One of the students kept asking Madame Cecile questions while Gassy shifted his weight from foot and foot and groaned, “Come on, oh come on.”  

            At last the students were on the move again, shuffling in lines from left to right and Gassy found a perfect opportunity to ‘crop-dust’ -- releasing gas in a swathe across the back of the hall as the music and clattering of feet safely covered any noises.  Not that there was any appreciable noise; Gassy could tell that this flatulence was of the silent but deadly variety. 

            Gassy felt immediately better after the release and hopped nimbly over the wooden floor, putting maximum distance between himself and the drop zone.  He doubted the others would even notice the smell but he was a firm believer that discretion is the better part of valour.

            He had just reached the other side of the group and was preparing to concentrate on the dance steps when the smell hit him.  It was an eye-watering, sulphurous stench of singular robustness.  For a few seconds he was genuinely confused.  The potency of the odour at such a distance from the drop zone was incredible.  Maybe it wasn’t his fart.  Maybe it was a tragic coincidence and someone on the ‘safe’ side of the room had slipped a juicy one out just as Gassy crossed over.  But tempting as it was to hope, Gassy knew it wasn’t true.  He recognised his own flatus as surely as a mother recognises her own child.

            It didn’t take long for the rest of the group to react to the smell.  One by one they drew to a standstill and turned their heads this way and that, some in confusion, others voicing immediate accusations to their friends beside them.  

            Gassy noticed that Madame Cecile had stopped dancing, too, and was sniffing the air with an expression of concern on her face.  He watched in horror as she marched over to  the tape player and turned it off, clapping her hands to silence the chattering students.

            “Class,” she said, “I don’t want anyone to panic but I suspect there is a gas leak in this building. I may need to call the gas company.”

            There was an excited babble of voices.  Gassy heard a man say they’d better not dance anymore because he’d heard of gas explosions being caused by the friction under a person’s shoe.

            Then a girl said, “Um, not to be rude or anything but it kind of smells like a fart to me.”

            “Me too,” said someone else.

            “No way,” said a young woman who was always showing up late to class. “No fart smells that strong and I ought to know.”

            “It smells more like sulphur than flatulence to me,” said Madame Cecile, “and I’m really not comfortable carrying on here until I’ve spoken to the gas company.  Please return quietly to the tables and wait there while I go into the back room to use the telephone.”

            The students did as they were told, Gassy’s emotions in a ragged state.  He knew that the right thing to do would be to follow Madame Cecile to the back room and once there, quietly explain the situation.  But as his eyes followed her trim little figure and perfectly coiffed hair moving away down the hall he knew he could never do it.

            It seemed to take a long time.  Gassy tried to join in the debate going on around him about whether it was a fart or a natural gas leak but couldn’t seem to drag his attention away from the back room where Madame Cecile was speaking to the gas company.

            At last she appeared in the doorway and stood quite still a moment before lifting her chin and walking purposefully back to her students. Everyone stopped speaking and looked at her expectantly.

            “Class, I have spoken to the gas company and they have assured me that there cannot possibly be a gas leak in this building.” she said.

            “How can they know that just over the phone?” someone asked.

            “Because,” Madame Cecile said with an almost imperceptible shudder, “they have informed me that there is no natural gas service in this area.”

           

                       

           

            

From Newfoundland

This from last week:

I’ve been in Canada with the kids for six weeks now, holidaying with assorted family on both coasts, and there’s so much blog-worthy material going on that I say to M almost every night: “You know, somewhere in Hollywood there’s a sit-com producer who would pay top dollar for a script of what’s just gone on around our house today.”

“Put it in your blog,” M says, never abandoning the hope that I’ll write a best-selling book one day which will facilitate his prompt and permanent retirement from work.

“But that’s just it,” I say. “I can’t.  Not really.  The funny things always have to do with someone’s particular way of being tiresome.  Or a bodily-function mishap.  These are family members I’m writing about.  Some of them read the blog and they may not like to find a story posted on the internet describing their epic, toilet-plugging log which even the plunger couldn’t shift. Not everyone is as enlightened and self-sacrificing as me, you know.  I consider it a moral obligation to share humour with others no matter what the damage to one’s own pride.  Remember when I blew out the zipper of my jeans while bending down to get a can of tomato soup in Superstore?  They were jeans that hadn’t fit me for months and I had no business wearing them.  Blowing out the zipper was pretty embarrassing and I would rather have not told anyone about it but I came straight home and told you, and I told Theo the next time I saw her, too. For the laugh, you see.”

“You might try blogging more than once every three months,” M says, “if you’re really so committed to sharing the humour.”

            "Well," I say,  “it’s not easy being green,"  my motto being it's always better to say something than nothing.  M sighs and goes back to his laptop while I turn to a nearby lamp and mutter, “Well, he may have a point.  I guess I’ll do what I always end up doing.  I’ll write what I think I can get away with.”

                                    *            *            *            *

I told my parents-in-law it would be cold when they first got here to Newfoundland.  Every year we've come it’s been strictly jacket-weather through to the end of June.  After that it generally warms, but only a little.  And it rains more days than not.  But this year Newfoundland has been having some kind of freakishly cold summer and my mother-in-law is convinced that I misled her about what weather to expect. 

While packing to come she asked me repeatedly how warm it would be.  Well, as any Canadian knows, even in a so-called ‘normal’ season you can’t predict what the weather is going to be like.  I once believed that Alberta weather was the most spastically unpredictable I would ever encounter but then I came to Newfoundland. 

All I could tell my mother-in-law was to come prepared for any weather, warm or cool. She found that answer unsatisfactory in the extreme, and packed my suggested selection of clothing items with evident reluctance .  When she and my father-in-law arrived to blowing rain and temperatures in the single digits, my ill-informed packing recommendations took the brunt of her dismay.  

“Why did you tell me to pack t-shirts?” she asks me at least once a day.  “It’s been far too cold for t-shirts the whole time we've been here.  You told us that Newfoundland is warm in the summer.”

“I didn’t know it was going to be this cold,” I explain with a little less patience each day.  “Didn’t you hear the people up the road talking about what an unusually cold summer this is? Everyone is talking about.  The girl at the library was just saying it when we were in there an hour ago.  They’re talking about it on the news.”

“But you told me it would be quite warm much of the time,” my mother-in-law says.  “It’s a good thing we packed those extra sweaters at the last minute.”

“But I didn’t know.” I say, gritting my teeth. “No one did.”

“It would have been nice to know ahead of time,” she continues.  “I would have packed more warm things.  But never mind, I enjoy the cool weather.”

"But -- oh, for crying out loud," I say, and go bang my forehead on a frying pan for a few refreshing minutes.

She does enjoy the cool weather, too.  It’s been around 35 or 40 degrees in Beirut this week so nobody in this house is shedding tears of grief about missing out on that. 

Still, M could use with a bit more of the sun’s warming rays, I think.  As a Stephen King-like fog enveloped our house again last night he was showing signs of strain.  When he discovered that I’d set the living room thermostat to 11 degrees he announced testily that it was “like living under a dictatorship”.  

I had the thermostat set so low for a reason.  I didn’t want the house to catch fire.  A few nights ago Dude, who sleeps on a day-bed in the living room, was kept awake half the night by a couple of beetles that lurk in the baseboard heaters by day and lurch out at night to fly drunkenly around the room, smacking into walls and blundering onto Dude’s bed. Having no bug killer of any kind in the house, Dude and I had experimentally doused the baseboard heaters with OFF Deep Woods and then covered them up with spare blankets.  The idea was that the OFF would either kill the bugs or at the very least put them in a bad mood so they wouldn’t feel like firing up the propellers for a few days.  The blankets were added to make it challenging for them to find their way out through the slits in the baseboards, should the effects of the OFF prove negligible.

It seemed to work. The next day Dude reported zero airspace activity during the night.  I said that we may as well leave the blankets in place for the time being, since we’d been having a relatively warm spell of weather for those couple of days and didn’t need the heaters on.  We would need to be sure to remove the blankets, I noted to myself, before ever turning the heaters on.  The blankets were made of acrylic and though I know a baseboard heater doesn’t get as hot as, say, molten lava, I didn’t think it was a good idea to turn the heat on underneath them.

But while I was off on a walk this afternoon M turned the living room thermostat way up and sat down to watch some tv.  When I got back from the walk I came in the door and reeled from the dry, stuffy wall of heat.  I found M lying glassy-eyed on the couch.  The thermometer read 27 degrees and the air held a familiar, astringent smell. 

“What’s going on?” I said. “Why is it so hot in here and what’s that smell?”

“Is it hot in here?” M replied drowsily.  “I don’t know.  It feels fine to me.”

“What’s wrong with you and what is that smell?”

“Smell?”  M looked mystified and stared thoughtfully into space.  “Oh, that would be the OFF Deep Woods.  Once the baseboards heated up it started to permeate the room in a pretty serious way.  It was overpowering at first but you get used to it.”

“Used to it?  I think it’s addled your brains. And do you realize it’s 27 degrees in here?”

“Isn’t it great?” M said happily. “I feel so nice and warm.”

It was then I noticed that the blankets hadn’t been removed from the baseboard heaters. I went over to one and bent down: the blanket was roasting hot.  I looked over at M in consternation. “Why didn’t you take the blankets off?”

He glanced over, shrugged, and turned back to the tv.

“I had been rather hoping to avoid burning the place down,” I said.

There was no response from M.

I stepped in front of him. “You could have started a fire.”

“Hmm?” He dragged his gaze up to my face.

“I said--” I began, but then looked at him lying there with flushed cheeks, feet jammed cosily between the couch cushions, sedated – possibly permanently -- from the OFF fumes.

“Any room on that couch for me?”

                                    *            *            *

Newfoundlanders have a unique and charming accent. I came here prepared to enjoy the sweet lilt and endearing expressions which discombobulate the new arrival but I didn’t expect to sometimes find myself having a conversation with a person I couldn't understand.  I mean, not understand at all.  Newfoundland accents come in all sizes and strengths: some people seem to have almost no accent, most have a lovely old-world accent, and a few just make sounds like a fitful hand blender. And I can never just say, 'Look, I'm awfully sorry but I don't speak Hand Blender', because although there must be some disagreeable Newfoundlanders, I haven't met one yet.  They are all lovely. So I nod and I smile and and say 'Oh, mmm, yeah.' And I’m pretty sure there have been times when what the smiling person behind the counter has asked me is how I’m enjoying Newfoundland and I've replied that I never mix mustard and mayo but will take some of those black olives.

One summer two local men came to fix a leak in our roof.  They were related to each other – cousins or something – and from the same little village up the road.  They had never lived or worked outside of the area.  And yet one of them had a much stronger accent than the other.  His accent was so strong, in fact, that I couldn’t understand much of what he said.  Yet I could understand his cousin almost perfectly. 

It was wretchedly embarrassing.  They were two of the nicest fellows you could meet and they whistled and sang most of the time they worked, which was starkly different from the way people in Alberta work.  I kept waiting for the blasts of frustrated swearing, the sullen silences which follow, the bitter whining.  But these two men were soft-spoken, patient and cheerful every minute they spent at our house. 

The only hitch was that most of our exchanges were painful ones, with the one man saying something like, “Urt rit hosey sides, see?” and me goggling at him with a desperate expression and having no choice but to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”  Then both men would laugh good-naturedly, reassure me that it wasn’t my fault because he 'speaks too quickly, everybody says so', and the other one would translate for me.

Funnily enough the man with the stronger accent was perfectly clear when he sang. He liked to sing and had a nice voice but lyrics weren’t his strong suit and he’d generally run out of words after a single line and have to start at the top again.  He particularly liked The Sound of Silence.  Several times a day I could hear him singing, “Hello darkness, my old friend,” while cheerfully banging away with the hammer.  There would be a short interval and then, “Hello darkness, my old friend,” again, and I would fight a silent, inner battle against the urge to swing open the door, stick my head through, and bray out, “I've come to talk to you again.”

*****

More days have passed.

Yesterday Noonie and I stopped off to look at a very old graveyard which had recently been cleared of years’ worth of  overgrown foliage.  Bushes and trees had all but obliterated the area and very few of the headstones still stood but I had heard there was a pirates’ graveyard near here and wondered if this could be it.  The improbability of a pirate being given a headstone made from solid granite and for the words on that headstone to survive four hundred years in the rain and wind of coastal Newfoundland didn’t occur to me.

It soon did.  As we stumbled over thousands of hacked-off stumps of bushes to the closest group of headstones I saw that very few of them bore legible writing.  And the ones which did were dated within the last one hundred or so years.  To look at them leaning at crazy angles, mouldy-looking faces worn almost smooth, you’d think they’d been standing half a millennium. 

We stood reading the better-preserved headstones, thinking like you always do at these times how unbelievably lucky we are to live when and where we do, trying to imagine what people suffered burying all three of their children within the space of a few years.

And then, selfishly, shallowly, your thoughts settle back on yourself  and you think:  Geez, I’d be considered, like, old, back then.

I heard a voice at my side and started from my thoughts.  A man stood a few feet away, apparently having materialized from thin air, and worse, having spoken in an accent I couldn't understand.

“Uh.” I said, nodding, wondering what he wanted and if he had an axe hidden behind his back.  We were the only people there and it was a little creepy the way he had just crept up on me.  The cemetery was hemmed in on three sides by impenetrable, stubby spruce forest and only the little-used road on the open side.

He spoke again, and with a nearly imperceptible flick of his chin indicated the grave in front of me.  After half a moment I realised with relief that I understood what he had said, at least the essence of it.  He’d said that the man whose name appeared faintly on the dark-stained headstone before us had had four wives. 

I thought, that’s all very well, but you can’t just sneak up on women you’ve never met before in deserted, half-hidden graveyards and announce that some dead guy had four wives.

I glanced nervously around for Noonie but she was a good distance away, looking at some graves near the forest’s edge. 

The man said something else.  I didn’t understand a word of it and shot him a look which was meant to convey the ‘I don’t wish to be impolite but could you kindly shove off?’ sentiment.  Whilst shooting the look I raked him up and down and harvested everything I could from the 2-second visual pan: another look at his face, what kind of clothes he was wearing, his physical condition and whether or not I could take him in a butt-kicking contest if it came to it.

He was older than I first thought, in clean and well-pressed clothes.  Definitely married, I thought, beginning to relax.  But a glimpse of his open mouth revealed a sinister blackness where teeth ought to have been.

He said some more things, most of which I didn’t understand.  It quickly became apparent that he knew the graveyard forwards and backwards and was proud of his knowledge.  He pointed out all the headstones, told me their names and a detail or two which I usually couldn't catch, and I realised that what I had here was a nice, older man with a lot of time on his hands and an innocent wish to be admired in however small a way.

I tried to enter into the conversation but since I couldn’t grasp much of what he said it was difficult.  It was unfortunate because I really wanted to know if the multi-wife man had been married to all four simultaneously or one after another.   

A few minutes later when I glanced again at my companion I saw a full set of teeth in his mouth.  I tried not to stare.  How and when had they got there?  Where were they when I looked at him the first time?

Eventually I ambled off when it was polite to do so, darting glances back at the man now and again to see if he was following me.  Well no, not really to see if he was following me.  I could tell he was harmless.  It's just that grave-spotting seemed a strange way to fill one's golden years.

As we were getting into our car a truck passed by on the road and the man and woman inside — total strangers to us — smiled and waved. And I can tell you that there is nothing unusual about that around here.  It warmed my heart and I didn't even feel annoyed to find a huge, indigo-coloured (what the heck do they eat?) gull poo on my windshield.

A Good Evening in Beirut

Well, all right, here’s something pro-Lebanese:

Having grown up in Canada, surrounded by decent and fine Canadian boys, I chose a Lebanese guy to be my husband. It was certainly not a case of there being no Canadian fellows good enough — it was simply that M was the guy for me.

Twenty years ago when I first clapped eyes on his comely form it didn’t take me long to realize he was the finest person I’d ever met. You may say that it wasn’t because he was Lebanese that I fell in love with him and that would be partly true, but only partly.   M’s Lebanese-ness is an integral part of who he is — a huge, essential part of who he is. He wouldn’t be M without it. 

Yesterday was our wedding anniversary.  Naturally I forgot about it.  I always forget.  M used to, too, so neither of us had to feel bad, but lately and inexplicably he has been getting rather good at remembering.  Either he has programmed all our special days into his phone or his memory is actually improving at the same rate mine is deteriorating. 

He had made dinner reservations at an undisclosed location and told me I was to take a nap in the afternoon so that I wouldn’t be “all tired and grumpy” by nine o’clock. Oh, romantic talk.

Ten minutes before we needed to leave the house I was still trying to book a plane ticket online for my mom.  I had entered all the contact details, credit card information, head circumference and toilet paper preference when, on the final page, it said my session had timed out. 

I could easily have scrapped the whole thing and done it the next day but instead I feverishly filled in all the fields again and booked the ticket, possibly in the name of a Mrs. Bill Frying Pan travelling to Victoria Falls in Africa rather than Victoria, BC, but anyway, Mom will let me know how it all turns out.

In the space of about two minutes I stuffed myself into some clothes, applied lipstick well over the lines, and told M I was ready to go.  We descended the seven floors in our bumpy, rickety, gold-painted elevator while I fanned myself and tried to cool down.

“Why’d I wear a jacket?” I gasped. “It’s too warm for a jacket.”

“Take it off,” said M.

“Can’t,” I said. “The top underneath is indecently tight.  I can only wear it under a jacket.”

The elevator jolted to a halt on the ground floor and we stepped out into a warm and sultry evening.  A heavy sky hovered.

We drove into the neighbourhood of Ashrafieh — tiny streets with a lot of the traditional architecture — and pulled up outside an old villa which had been converted into a restaurant.  There are a lot of these in Ashrifiyeh and they are all without exception wonderful.  Beirut has so many great restaurants that you couldn’t eat your way through them in a year (though it’d be awfully fun to try).  The quality of the venues and food amazes me.  When we are in Calgary and go out to eat it’s usually Earl’s or Montana’s or something like that.  Those places serve good food, don’t get me wrong, but no one would wear sweatpants to a place in Ashrafieh. 

The restaurant was called Stove, which struck me as an endearingly homespun name for such a stylish place.  We were seated, as per M’s request, in the garden.  Orange trees grew, soft lights glowed, laughter floated out from the kitchen.  

M  expressed admiration for my new trousers.  Or maybe just the fact that I’d got new trousers. I told him that speaking of trousers, something funny had happened earlier in the day. His mom had come to tell me that she’d found a pair of jeans that would be perfect for me in a shop up the street. She wanted to buy them for me and suggested we go that very minute to do so. Or if I was too busy she’d go by herself and get them for me. She was excited, almost aggressive, in her bid to convince me. It was completely bizarre.   Why on earth was she so intent on buying me a pair of jeans? But when I demurred she changed tack and her motives were revealed. The jeans she wanted to get me were tight-fitting; none of my present pairs are.  There were fake diamonds on the pockets, too. I told her, wearily, that she must know by now that I don’t wear tight jeans, especially ones with fake diamonds on the pockets, and that no good could come of trying to encase my thighs in stretchy material.  But she was more than ready for my protests and rallied energetically.  You live in Lebanon now, she said: dress like a Lebanese woman.  Fix yourself up.  You can wear your baggy pants in Canada but here in Lebanon you have to be a little sexy. Your husband is out-dressing you by a long shot and that could be problematic.

M laughed when I got to that bit about him dressing better than me.  He had been studying the menu and I now picked up mine to do the same.  It was all in French but I was used to that.  I could manage okay, and M helped me out, but there must have been something strained in my demeanour because without our asking the waiter came by with a menu written in English.

Now see, along with everything else about me, my taste in food hasn’t adapted to the swish and well-heeled Beirut life.  I like pasta, and stir-fries, club sandwiches and curly fries.  When I see frogs legs on a menu I have to bite my tongue to keep from blurting out, “Oh, man, that is so gross!”  My red-neck qualities must be reined in at times and fancy restaurants are one of them.

I hadn’t planned on ever eating scallops again after looking them up on Wikipedia last year to find out, precisely, what manner of sea creature they were. I don’t know what I had expected, to be honest.  I guess I had hoped to learn that scallops are a kind of living potato, with no discernable body parts. But it was not to be. There was a vivid photo of a scallop and in a line on its upper edge glittered dozens of tiny, malevolent eyes and below them, a mouthful of hairy cilia. I took one long, shivering look and said to myself, alrighty then, no more scallops for me.

But there wasn’t much on the Stove menu that appealed to me.  It was real French cuisine, probably about as fine a menu as you could lay your hands on, but the red-neck in me squirmed and whimpered at the list of pond-dwelling creatures. There were steaks -- certainly the safest bet -- but I wasn’t up to eating a big chunk of red meat at ten o’clock at night. I thought a seafood sampler sounded good until the waiter said everything in it was raw.  I kept combing over and over the menu till M asked if I was having trouble finding something I liked.  I didn’t want to tell him that I was.  It was such a beautiful restaurant and I was sure the food was fabulous.  It was my problem that I had low-class taste and I wasn’t going to let it taint our evening.

The words ‘truffle sauce’ beside the scallop dish kept catching my eye.  Oh, how I love truffles.  I guess that shows hope for me, eh? Well, you would think.  Anyway, the minutes were ticking by and I could find nothing else I fancied so I ordered the scallops.

They were magnificent.  I mean, you have to get over the texture, that’s for sure, and avoid any thoughts of rows of eyes, but I did and the taste was superb.

It had begun to rain, very softly, and M pulled his chair in closer to mine to get farther under the cotton umbrella.

The waiter, smiling good-naturedly as he offered to help M with his chair, said, “Hayk cosy akhtar.”

He was saying that it was more cosy this way, having our chairs pulled up close together, but it was the use of the English word ‘cosy’ in the otherwise Arabic sentence that was so cute.

That happens constantly in Beirut, and I suppose in much of the world (though not, it may be noted, in Alberta).  People slip in words from another language into their otherwise native-tongued remark.  Here it is English and French words, so much so that you may not know a word of Arabic but pick up a general sense of the conversation happening in front of you by the islands of recognized sounds.  It’s a slippery slope, though, and you have to resist the urge to connect the isolated English words into anything but the most likely and mundane thread.  Take it from me, I’ve made the mistake about a thousand times.  It doesn’t happen as much anymore, since I’ve picked up more Arabic, but I recall listening to M and his friends talking and, from a few English words that jumped out at me, getting the most ridiculous ideas.  “What, your brother has been jailed for stealing clothes pegs? Queen Elizabeth choked on a Brussel sprout but was saved by a passing long-handled mop?” 

We had a selection of fruity sorbets for dessert: coconut, mango, raspberry. 

Stepping out into the tiny, cobbled street afterward M handed the valet his ticket.

“This has been a swell evening,” I said.  “I’d like to write about it in my blog.  You know, to show that I’m not anti-Lebanese.”

“Good idea.  You should.”

“Except that it won’t be funny,” I said.  “There’s still time, of course.  A naked man could suddenly streak through the street and then I could write about that.”

No naked man appeared.  Our car pulled up in front of us, the valet having merely gone twenty feet to the other side of the street to fetch it from the parking lot there.

“Did you see where he had parked the car?"  I said as we got in. "It was across the street. What the heck did we need valet parking for?”  

“Because this is Lebanon,” M said, and grinned.

Anti-Lebanese?

Yesterday M said to me, “I read your latest blog today.”

“Oh yeah?” I said.  He had a look on his face that wasn’t quite right.

“It was good, don’t get me wrong, it was just a little…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I think some people might feel that it’s a bit anti-Lebanese.”

Huh? Anti-Lebanese?

But M wouldn’t elaborate. See, this is what he does.  He gives me the honest feedback that I badly need and then leaves me to figure out the rest.

Nobody who knows me could harbour any illusions as to my fondness for Lebanon but in my defence I’ve always tried to be honest and fair about it. The things that I dislike here have nothing to do with the essence of Lebanese people or culture. The things that I dislike here are the same things the Lebanese people themselves dislike.

But maybe it’s about making fun of your own stuff versus making fun of someone else’s.  You know, like a Chinese-Canadian comedian could poke fun at Chinese-Canadians.  Would he be anti-Chinese for doing so?  Of course not. But if he was Ukrainian-Canadian and making those same jokes he’d be in trouble.  

But now where does that leave me?  Can I only make fun of Canadian-Lebanese people, which is what I suppose I am when I live in Lebanon?  But I only know about two other Canadian-Lebanese people. Surely I can’t be expected to harvest enough material for a blog from the three of us.

 I guess I could try to talk more about the good things in Lebanon but I can’t see that it will make for amusing reading.  I’ll give it a shot, that’s the most I can promise. 

Hips and How You'd Better Show Them Or Else

Ah, late May and summer is in the air.  Bikinis are in all the shop windows and though I can pretend not to see them with the same ease I pretend not to see the weigh scale at home I can’t get out of having to take my hip measurements.

A dear friend in Canada will be walking down the aisle in July and I’m going to be a bridesmaid. Though my friend – bless her vintage soul – has chosen 1950’s-style skirts and tops in varying shades for the bridesmaids’ attire rather than the traditional matching pastel gowns, I am still going to need to be fitted up for the skirt.

By the fantastic goodness of her heart it is my sis Theo who will be making my skirt. No one but she need ever see my measurements and I kept that thought running through my head like a mantra this morning as I bore flesh and wielded the measuring tape. It was going to take courage to read the numbers on that tape when wrapped around my hips like string on a standing roast.

Finding my ‘natural’ waist turned out to be impossible.  The tape kept sliding upward towards my armpits.  I was pretty sure my natural waist was lower than that so I just picked a latitude somewhere between ribs and navel and held the tape in place long enough to get a reading.

I managed to take all the required measurements without fainting but by the end I had heart palpitations and a nervous tremor in my hands. The numbers I’d written on the paper were terrifying to behold.  I thought about converting them into centimetres to see if that would make them less imposing but of course centimetres are smaller and therefore you need more of them.  In centimetres the list looked like the heights of a class of junior high kids. Would it be weird to send the numbers converted into kilometres? Everything would be to the right of the decimal, as if I was the size of a fly.  But Theo wouldn’t appreciate that, I thought, and went with the inches.

                                                          *  *

Thinking about my hips and the bikinis in the shop windows reminded me of something odd that happened to me the first year we lived in Lebanon.  I had taken the kids to one of the beach resorts just outside Beirut for a day of swimming. It was a fairly upscale resort, with expensive entry fee and separate ‘VIP’ pool which you had to pay an additional fee to enter (I didn’t, of course, and when I walked past it looked like no one else had opted to do so, either).

The beach and pools were beautiful and well worth the price of entry.  Noonie and Dude swam and played in the sand and ate ice-cream.  I would have liked to have had a friend along to chat to but the weather was lovely and I read my book contentedly.

I didn’t fit the mould of the typical guest there that day.  I was used to that, however.  I always felt like Wanda Walmart at these places.  I didn’t shine nearly enough – or at least, not in the right places. My sunglasses were the only pair on the beach not encrusted with fake diamonds and  my swimsuit was a tankini top and shorts-style bottom.  My sandals were Timberland and flat.

Later in the afternoon when I finally felt hot enough to shift my carcass into the pool for a dip I heaved up off the lounger and wove my wave through the pert, bronzed bodies and sequined bikinis to the edge of the pool.  I was just lowering myself into the cool blue water when a lifeguard hastened up to me and said something in Arabic.  I didn’t understand him.  I looked quickly towards my kids, playing happily nearby.  They were fine.  What was it?  The young man knew just a little English and, indicating my swimsuit, said that I couldn’t enter the pool.

I climbed back out of the pool and told the guy I didn’t understand.  He was very polite and looked embarrassed to be causing a problem but he didn't seem able to explain.  He asked me to come with him and I followed him around the pool to a door in the side of the building. 

Inside, behind what was obviously a manager’s desk, sat a girl in her twenties, talking on the phone.  The lifeguard spoke to her in Arabic and she nodded.  Turning to me, unsmiling, she said, “I’m sorry but you cannot swim in those clothes.  Only swimming suits are allowed in the pool.”

I was stunned. “But this is a swimming suit.” 

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “I’m very sorry but you can’t enter the pool in that.”

“It is a Nike swimming suit,” I said, a little louder, and undoubtedly getting red in the cheeks. “I bought it in Canada at a swimming suit store.  It is a swimming suit.” 

She regarded me with a look that clearly said she didn’t believe me.  I didn’t know what to do to prove my swimming suit’s authenticity.  It wasn’t a situation I had ever anticipated finding myself in and I’m more what you’d call a steady thinker than a quick one.  Mainly, though, I was too shocked and angry to do much more than glare.

When she said nothing further I lifted my chin.  “Would you care to explain to me what exactly the problem with my suit is?”

She wasn’t going to be honest about it.  Her body language made that clear right away.  She dropped her eyes and said something about it being unsafe.

“What?  Unsafe?” I said loudly and, I hope, rudely.

“Women can’t wear shorts, you see,” she mumbled.

“No, I’m sorry but I don’t see.”   

“The problem is the length.  The short is not safe like the regular swimming suit.”

I stared down at my suit bottom.  The shorts were the short kind, not the board kind that go to the knee.  It was incomprehensible.  I felt like I was in a Candid Camera skit.

“His shorts are way longer than mine,” I said, pointing to the lifeguard.  “So are every other pair worn by a man at this beach today.”

She shrugged. “They are mans.” 

“This is ridiculous,” I said, standing up. I wanted to shout but it came out more as a cracked, pitchy whine. “I’m never coming back to this place, I want you to know that, and I’m telling all my friends about it and they won’t come here, either.  They’re all foreigners and they won’t come here.”

I added the last bit about them all being foreigners because the Lebanese usually love to have foreigners at their clubs and restaurants.  I guess they see it as bringing a cosmopolitan air to the place -- though frankly you can’t get more cosmopolitan than the average young, educated Lebanese.  But that was beside the point.  I wanted to threaten.  In truth I didn’t know that many people and only had a small group of friends.  They were all foreigners, that much was true, but I doubted they would blacklist this beach club just because I asked them to.

The girl sighed and got up from her chair. “Okay, I will look at your swimming suit.”

She came around from behind the desk and to my disbelieving eyes reached out a hand and pinched a fold of my shorts between thumb and fingers and began to rub it around as if she were a merchant selecting a bolt of silk.

“Can I see the tag please?”

“The tag?  What?  It’s inside the suit, I don’t think I can –-“

But she indicated with an impatient gesture that I should show her the tag.  I don’t know why I obliged.  I should have told her to go stuff herself but I guess I felt the hot glow of a judicious light and just wanted to hear her acknowledge that it was a proper bl**dy bathing suit.

I turned so my back was facing away from the lifeguard, standing there with a gormless look on his face, and reached in and pulled up the back of the shorts with the tag on it.  The girl bent and read it. 

“Okay.  You can swim,” she said.

I could tell that she had already decided to let me swim before she looked at the tag.  What could the tag tell her, anyway?  Swimming suits don’t say ‘swimming suit’ on their tags. I’m pretty sure it was the threat about telling all my ‘foreigner’ friends not to swim there that convinced her.  Ridiculous but most probable.

I walked out of the office followed by the lifeguard, poor sap, and grabbed up our beach bag and towels from the pool lounger, calling to the kids. I took them down to the sand for the remainder of the day.  I was burning with anger and almost light-headed in my desire for vengeance.  I wouldn’t have gone into their wretched pool if my hair had been on fire. My day was ruined and though I didn’t ask my friends to blacklist the place I never went back there again.

Later that day in the rather more amused than sympathetic company of M I told the tale.

“Well, I think I can answer as to why they didn’t want you swimming in shorts,” he said.

“What, really?  You’ve heard of that happening before?”

“Oh yes.  Places like that work very hard to nourish a party atmosphere.  They don’t want women showing up in modest clothing and spoiling the mood of depravity. Though it’s hard to believe they interpreted your swim suit as too modest.”

"Well they did."

"Yeah, so it would seem," he said, turning on the tv and leaving me to my own smouldering reflections.

After that I heard a few stories from friends of seeing Saudi or Emirati women here on holiday wearing their full-body swimming suits to the beach and being told they were not allowed to swim.  And it wasn’t just at the club I went to the day I got a dressing down (if you will). Apparently all the upscale clubs have more or less the same policy and my being a white westerner probably spared me being told off at the other clubs.

Quite something, eh?  In a way, it tells you all you need to know about one side of Lebanon. The other side, like my mother-in-law and my driver’s wife and daughter are out in their headscarves and long sweaters that cover their bottoms, haggling over the price of cabbages under  road-side tents.

Though even these women have fake-diamond encrusted sunglasses.  Pardon me but they’re still Lebanese.

Home: A Man's Sanctuary

Poor M.  He works long hours at a job with a lot of responsibilities and he treasures the hours he gets to spend at home with his loving wife and children. Our home is a sanctuary of peace and harmony in which he can relax, put his feet up, and let his troubles melt away.

Um…

Actually, it’s not quite like that.

This morning as he sat on the couch blowing his nose and weakly popping a cold and sinus tablet out of its packet to treat the cold he’s been stricken with all week, I suggested that later on we go for a drive outside the city to look at houses.

He looked at me steadily while one hand slowly lowered a tube of nasal spray. “Look at houses?  What for?”

“To see if there is one we might want to buy, of course.”  I blew out my breath impatiently. “Remember? We talked about this before.  We both agreed it would be nice to have some to get away to on weekends, somewhere out of the noise and pollution of Beirut.”

“Yeah, I remember that.  But I don’t remember agreeing to buy a house just to go stay in on weekends.”

“Well, it wouldn’t have to be a fancy, expensive house. You know me, I don’t even want fancy.  Just a cottage-type of thing with a nice garden area. Something with some trees and a bit of nature. And maybe it wouldn’t be just for weekends. Maybe we could live there permanently.”

M stared at me. “Do you know how much houses near Beirut with private gardens cost?  The cheapest one is a million dollars.  And there are no cottages in Lebanon, only villas. Not to mention the drive in to the city.  Do you really want the kids to sit for an hour in the car each morning and afternoon as they go to and from school?”

“Well, all I know is that I’ve got to get out of here,” I burst out, gesturing around me at the room which was filled with the ceaseless honking of car horns from the street below. “The kids need to get out of here most of all.  They need somewhere they can stretch their legs, be outside a bit.”

“You’re not going to find a North American style backyard anywhere in Lebanon,” M said. “People here have more important things to worry about.”

“More important things to worry about? What on earth are you talking about?”

“People here have had wars and getting enough to eat to worry about.”

“Oh, right, and for how many decades will that excuse cover every single thing wrong with this country? When people litter all over the Ramlet El Baida beach, it’s understandable because there has been war in the country?  And there are a lot of Lebanese who don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from but they don’t strive to beautify their country. They don't even seem to care.  As long as the inside of their house is posh and well-disinfected with Dettol, they feel complete.  Look at your parents.  They have a piece of land in the ancestral village and what have they done with it but bury half of it under a great, bulky, misshapen house and the other half under concrete for a parking area.”

“What are you talking about? There’s a garden there, a big one.”

“That’s not the kind of garden I’m talking about. You can’t even walk on that bumpy, overgrown ground, or find a place to sit.  What’s the use of that?”

“Well, my grandparents didn’t design it for someone to sit in all afternoon reading a book.  They had work to do. Why do you think all the trees in the garden are fruit trees?  They didn’t plant them for decoration.”

“Well, That’s neither here nor there. I’m just saying I want a bit of green space I can actually walk in.  I’m not asking for the moon.  I don’t want a fancy house, just a bit of garden where I can hear myself think and the kids can remember what trees and soil look like.”

M waved the tube of nasal spray impatiently.  “You have to accept Lebanon for what it is.  There are no parks here.  But there are other things to enjoy. When in Rome and all that.”

But I was in no mood to listen to reason.

I don’t know if people who have grown up in a city, especially a dense, noisy city, can relate to this but I simply have never been able to adjust to living in such a place. I can’t bear that our kids are growing up without the incredible nature that I grew up with.

These feelings build and build and though I keep them under wraps most of the time there are moments, like this, in which the pressure valve blows and the panicky urge to GET OUT OF BEIRUT AND PREFERABLY LEBANON AND AS FAR AS THAT GOES THE ENTIRE MIDDLE EAST PERMANENTLY overwhelms me. And M, sitting in front of the telly enjoying the first quiet hours of his week, gets the brunt of my outburst right between the eyes.

“I just can’t stand it, I can’t! I have to get out of this stinky, concrete cage.  We owe it to the kids to get them out of it. They’re missing out on so much.  They’re missing out on life!”

M sighed. “I don’t think it’s as bad as all that.”

I continued to vent for a quarter of an hour or so.  The theme of my rant remained the same.  There wasn’t much M could say in reply.  He has heard it all before a hundred times.

Eventually I lost my steam and ground to an unsteady halt. The atmosphere in the room was sour.  We both wore frowns.

Suddenly the kids burst through from the corridor, yelling and screeching.  Noonie was chasing Dude with a wooden slat from a set of venetian blinds.  Dude was laughing as he ran and saying that he had only been trying to help when he pointed out that if she kept eating chocolate pudding the way she was she would get a fat bum.

Noonie had murder in her eyes.  As they made a loop around the kitchen island and galloped back past us, Noonie shouting that he was a dead man, I looked at M.

He was sitting in exactly the same position as he had been throughout our conversation.  He had a fleece blanket pulled up over him, a box of kleenex on his lap and the tube of nasal spray in one hand.

As the sound of the kids settling their dispute in the ‘natural’ way abruptly cut out behind a bedroom door, M looked over at me.  I think he knew I didn’t mean to go nuts, that it just overcomes me sometimes, like a malarial fever.

“We could go for a picnic,” he suggested.

From the street below, the car horns rose in angry, waspish crescendo. That would be due to a 'service' taxi blocking two lanes of traffic as he stopped to talk to a potential passenger.

“A picnic would be nice,” I said.

The car horns died down to the normal, steady burble of toots and peeps. The stopped taxi must have moved off.

In the relative quiet I could hear a muted thumping sound from the bedroom and a soft hiss as M squeezed the nasal spray into one nostril.

“A picnic would be really nice.”

Getting Political

It's hard to avoid mentioning politics in Lebanon.  Politics is life here.  The Lebanese watch the news (all fourteen or so local channels, staggered to afford maximum viewing possibilities) with a dedication that astounds me.  When there has been some surge in unrest or a violent event I see why they turn on their tellies, of course.  They have a certain interest in knowing whether it's business as usual in the city that day or whether they should be throwing some clothes and food into the trunk of the car and getting out of Beirut till the trouble blows over.

But they don't just watch the news to get the facts, that's the catch.  When there is no news on, they watch political talk shows.  And believe me when I say that no one can talk like a Lebanese politician.  They simply never run out of things to say.  They talk and talk and every time I pass in front of a Lebanese tv I see one of the dozen or so central politicians on there, talking almost without pause, for hours.  It makes my brain shrivel up.

I've tried to take a stand.  I make jokes to my in-laws that so-and-so made that exact speech seven years ago and is simply recycling it. Or that I have reason to suspect the leader of such-and-such a party actually died in the mid-nineties and they've been playing old recorded interviews ever since.

The in-laws are not amused.

 When M interrupts me in the middle of a riveting recollection of how I spent my day to say, "Sorry, but I just want to watch the start of the news," I respond with my habitual good humour.

"Oh, sure, I understand.  They've got that party leader on tonight and it's rumoured he's going to say something.  Good heavens, turn up the volume, I don't want to miss a thing."

Then I go into the kitchen and light myself on fire.

That's about the shape of things around here.  I find watching the skin form on a pudding more interesting than following politics. And Canadian politics are the driest of any. It's the feeling of impotency that is behind my apathy, I suppose.  I care deeply about my country, even though I don't live there anymore, but how I can I possibly know which person will run it best?  From the words they say?

We may as well judge prospective prime ministers by their hair.  Just look at Stephen Harper's masterful do.  It's positively other-worldly.  I have never seen anyone with hair so solid-looking, so bonded into a single, unbreachable unit.  It reminds me of nothing so much as the hair on the 1970's Ken doll who, sadly, had only a painted outcropping on his skull to serve as hair, whereas Barbie had a full, luscious mane of genuine nylon filaments.  Harper's hair looks like it was popped out of a mould in one piece, as if he could peel it off his head and substitute a helmet in its place, if he wanted to, like the little Lego men who can wear hair or a knight's helmet but not both at the same time.

No one could fail to be impressed by Harper's hair but I can never look upon it without a feeling of disquiet stealing over me.  Why doesn't his hair move around like ordinary hair?  What's he hiding under there?

Unfortunately, no one seems to want my opinion when it comes to such matters.  My strengths as a political analyst have largely gone unappreciated.  But that's okay with me. As I said, I have better things to do with my time than think about politics. I've got some towels drying on the line right now that I could go and watch.

Right House, Wrong Day

Showing up on the wrong day for a party at someone’s house isn’t merely embarrassing. It’s a hideous mixture of shock, shame and horror -- unique among embarrassing moments in that you can’t rush home, shut the door, and try to forget it ever happened. It involves people you know.

First you must pretend to be amused by your own stupid mistake. You must laugh heartily and ruefully shake your head and after a few moments pretend to have quite gotten over it. The truth is your face will burn at the recollection for days and even the hope of looking forward to a time when it can all be forgotten is denied you. Because you know that your dear friends and loved ones will remind you about this day for years to come. Maybe even for the rest of your life.

Let’s compare such an event with the ‘anonymous’ embarrassing incident. If I thrust a mental hand into my Embarrassing Memories Box I immediately come up with the time I fell down the stairs outside my apartment in Calgary. I don’t know why that particular memory was the first to be found – goodness knows there are dozens to choose from – but it will serve the purpose here.

My apartment was on the second floor of a fairly shabby building. The stairs were external and wooden, the minimalistic sort with nothing but air between each riser. On that morning I emerged from the second story door and began to descend when my heel caught on something and I lost my balance. I was wearing high heels and a dress. I was in the middle of my intense but short-lived glamour phase and never left the house — even for a morning in the fruit-fly lab with the weird smell and dozens of tiny flies buzzing around my head — without heels, full make-up and jewellery.

It was a cold day in October, no snow yet but a hard frost covering everything. I don’t remember if there was frost on the steps themselves but it seems likely. What remains vivid in my mind is the horrified shock of finding myself tipping face first down the stairs, the awful hardness of the stairs as I landed on them, and how I threw out my arms to try to catch hold of something.

Loud thumping accompanied my fall. It had been an absolutely still, silent morning and the sounds bounced around the parking lot and reverberated up the alley. Luckily the old wooden staircase creaked and heaved under my crashing form and absorbed a lot more force than a more solidly built structure would have done.

I didn’t fall all that far. It was more of a dive, sprawl and slither. When I came to a stop I found most of my body surface area in direct contact with the stairs so I suppose the instinctive effort to splay myself out brought me to a halt much more effectively than say, curling into a ball and bouncing all the way to the bottom.

What I must have looked like in that position, however, occurred to me within milliseconds of my coming to rest. My mind, shocked but doing its best to get on, observed that the hideous and wholly unprovoked event seemed to have ceased as suddenly as it had begun and immediately I considered my position, draped sideways across the stairs in a dress, with books and pens and tubes of make-up scattered down the steps.

I pulled myself quickly to my feet. There were throbs of pain from many quarters and I saw a long, red scrape just starting to bead with blood on my leg through a tear in my nylons but I managed to pick my things up and put them back into the bag with nonchalance. My shoes had remained on my feet throughout the ordeal and hadn’t even broken a heel.

My soul purpose in life for those two or three minutes immediately following the fall was to demonstrate to anyone who might be watching my absolute indifference to the accident, to appear to care not a bit that I had just fallen face-first down a flight of stairs.

I’m pretty sure a number of people did see me fall but I didn’t look around to take stock. The not looking around was a critical part of my nonchalance, you see. To look around would be to admit something unusual had occurred. And of course, by never knowing for certain that anyone had seen me I could always cling to the faint hope that they had not.

Certainly no one was in the immediate vicinity of the stairs — a fact which almost brought tears of gratitude to my eyes — and I hobbled to my car with all the dignity I could summon.

Later in the quiet privacy of the university library I examined my bruises and scrapes. I had sustained no major physical damage, though the shock took many hours to wear off and I can tell you that I took care to hold the handrail of stairs after that. The point is that no one I knew had seen me fall, which made it infinitely easier to put behind me than say, the time M and I showed up on the wrong day for a barbeque.

That was in Saudi, the first year or so of our marriage, and the people hosting the barbeque were not close friends of ours. In fact, we’d never even met the husband. The wife, Francis, was a friend of my neighbour’s.

One day Francis rang and said that she and her husband were having a barbeque and would be glad if M and I could come.

On what I thought was the right day I made a cake to take with us, then we showered and dressed in good time and rang Francis’s doorbell bang on the dot at 6 o’clock.

As we stood on the doorstep waiting for someone to come M looked around at the absence of vehicles and commented that it didn’t look like anyone was there yet, and that he hated to be the first ones there when we barely knew anyone.

I shushed him, saying that only in Lebanon were people expected to come late to someone’s house and that by North American standards we were doing the polite thing by arriving on time.

The door open and Francis was there, smiling. If she was surprised to see us she didn't show it. I handed her my cake in its tupperware cake box and she cheerfully invited us inside, leading us through to the living room. The kitchen was open to the living room and we saw that Francis was in the middle of cleaning fresh lobsters. She told us that she was preparing them for the barbeque.

Francis’s husband came in from the other room where he'd been watching tv, and she introduced us to him, and a few more minutes of chitchat followed. Then M said something about being the first guests to arrive and Francis looked at him quizzically and a moment later it all came out. The barbeque was the next day.

It doesn’t sound so bad, writing it down here today, but you have to remember that we didn’t know these people well. Why Francis hadn’t immediately said that we’d got the wrong day made more sense as I got to know her better in the following weeks. She was from the American South, from a small town, and was so friendly and hospitable, so accustomed to people dropping by to visit at any time that I honestly don’t think she was surprised by us coming by unannounced, and certainly wouldn’t have dreamt of saying anything if she was.

But I was mortified. M was beyond mortification and in danger of heart failure. When I looked at him I saw that his entire head had turned red, something I’ve only seen happen to him a few times in all the years I’ve known him. I was too horrified myself to dwell on that, however. We apologized, earnestly, many times, and Francis was as good about it as any human being could be, but there was something about suddenly realizing that we were essentially sitting uninvited in the middle of these people’s home while they were getting ready for their dinner that no kindness could alleviate. We blurted out a final apology and fled.

You might wonder if we went to the barbeque the next day. We did, and it was all right, but you can be sure that the embarrassment from the day before cast a pall. The tale was retold a number of times, and though no one was unkind about it I’d be lying if I said the laughter didn’t cut deep.

That wasn’t the first time I’d done something like that, nor was it to be the last. Last week while we were in Dubai I was going to meet with some friends from my writers’ group. I had emailed them a few weeks before my trip with the dates I would be there to make sure I wouldn’t miss seeing anyone.

Every other social call during the six days I was in Dubai was spontaneous. The writers’ group coffee morning was the only thing I had planned in advance and the meeting’s details were fixed in my mind: second last full day of the trip, 11:00 am, Colleen’s house. There was no need to write it down.

But the dates of our trip to Dubai had undergone a 24-hour shift since the initial planning phase. I had decided we would spend one week there, leaving Beirut on a Thursday and returning on a Thursday. For one reason or another at some point we decided to shift the whole trip one day earlier, so we were leaving on a Wednesday and returning on a Wednesday. Somehow – and I implore you now to remember the trouble I’ve had with the little men inside my head who control the inflow and outflow of information – I got it muddled. I thought we were leaving on Thursday.

I turned up at Colleen’s house exactly at 11:00 on the second-last full day of the trip. Except that it wasn’t. It was the last full day of the trip and the meeting had been the day before.

Like the time at Francis’ I had brought a cake with me, and I was pleased with the cake and this somehow made it worse. While Colleen grinned at me over the threshold and said, “Where were you yesterday, then?” I could only stare at her in dumb incomprehension.  I handed the cake over. It’s as if some instinct in my body takes over at times like this, an instinct that says even if you understand nothing about what is happening and time seems to have coiled in on itself, hand the person in front of you a cake.

I don’t know what I said in reply or how many minutes it took to understand that the meeting had taken place the day before. It was a nasty moment, full of ugly sensations that churned in my stomach. I simply couldn’t believe I’d got the day wrong.

Colleen made me tea and was as lovely and gracious about my blunder as Francis had been. It soon came to light that no one from the group could have reached me  because no one had the number of the phone I was carrying.  I had recently misplaced my own sim card (just never mind about that) and was using M’s.

Colleen and I had a great chat. I was really glad to have the chance to visit with her but I am bound to confess that I couldn’t enjoy it the way I would have ordinarily done. I was just too embarrassed.