The Matriarch

            Yesterday we went to see M’s grandmother, or Big Tayta as we call her (“Tayta” meaning grandmother in Arabic). She’s almost ninety years old but has a core of solid iron. She is such a bright spark of a person that every time I see her I think she seems somehow more alive than everyone else in the room.

            She’s had a busy life, full of hard work. At the age of sixteen she married M’s grandfather who was himself only fourteen years old and, apparently, quite the hottie of the village.  I’ve never quite been able to picture the two teenagers setting up house together, discussing mortgage payments and saving up for a car.  Our son Dude is now almost the age his great-grandfather was when he married but with no gravity-defying stretch of the imagination can I imagine Dude getting married next year.  His idea of a good time is splattering virtual guts on Black Ops 2 or, if no video game console is available, bouncing a ball off the ceiling for as long as takes to drive his mother to the cooking sherry.  This is a person who would have to ask his father how to knot his tie at his own wedding.

            Big Tayta had her first child two years after marrying. That was my father-in-law.  Following his birth there were two sets of identical twins who died in infancy, all of them from diarrheal illnesses.  One pair were boys, and lived eight or nine months, and the other were girls who lived about a year. Nine other births followed and up until last year all of these ten children were alive and well.

            As the eldest of those children, my father-in-law had a lot of responsibility placed on his shoulders. It continues today. He feels compelled to look after all his younger brothers and sisters (though they are all competent, self-sufficient adults) and his mother, too. It is his responsibilities towards her that affect him most because in this culture the eldest son specifically is charged with the care of his parents.

            When M’s grandfather died late last winter Big Tayta found herself alone after seventy-one years of marriage.  Instead of moving in with one of her children she chose to remain alone with a live-in employee, a Bangladeshi girl named Shaheena who cleans, cooks and nurses the old woman. Shaheena also nursed M’s grandfather until his death and he required pretty serious care towards the end. I think Shaheena must be a saint, but that is a story for another day.

            As we drove out to Big Tayta’s apartment I wondered what kind of state we would find her in.  I hadn’t seen her since the funeral of her husband and that funeral, hard as it would have been anyway, was the third in a row for her.  A month before that she had lost a son, and before that, tragically, a grandson. M’s dad had said she was showing signs of dementia lately, a sad development in one who had always been as shrewd as a fox.

            Half-way along the road to Big Tayta's my father-in-law’s phone rang.  It was my mother-in-law calling to tell him that he had forgotten the pot of wheat stew he had been going to take to his mother.  The wheat stew had been the reason we were going in the first place.  M and his dad took a moment to discuss whether or not to turn around and go back and get it.  

            We didn’t turn around. “There’s a chicken place up ahead,” M’s dad said. “I’ll run in and buy her a barbequed chicken.  She likes barbecued chicken.”

            We pulled abruptly off the highway – there is no service road – into the small, busy parking lot of the take-away chicken restaurant where cars were double and triple parked and an attendant waved and shouted directions.  M’s dad went in and emerged four minutes later with several paper bags which he put in the back of the car.  As the smell of chicken filled the interior M manoeuvred us around so we were poised on the edge of the highway and, pausing to choose the right moment, stomped on the gas pedal and shot out into traffic. 

            After parking outside Big Tayta’s building we walked past the Syrian natoor (caretaker) sitting outside with his wife and five or six children.  The children were all boys and – I did a double take – like chronologically arranged photos of the same child growing older.

            One of the older boys followed us to the elevator and told us to wait a moment.  He ran off.  My father-in-law explained that the building does not have its own generator but shares one with two other buildings, and that the boy had gone to switch the power over so that we could use the elevator. In a moment the lights in the elevator came on and we squeezed inside. 

            On the sixth floor we spilled out onto the landing and rang the doorbell. Shaheena opened the door, wiping her hands on an apron, and smilingly shook hands with each of us in turn.  She told us that Big Tayta was resting in bed and then, excusing herself, dashed into the kitchen where we could hear and smell onions sizzling energetically in a pan. M wanted to go out onto the balcony straight away to escape the cooking smells so we made our way through the salon to the sliding doors while my father-in-law went in to see if his mother was asleep.

            We had just sat down on the balcony, arranging our chairs under the subdued November sun and commenting to one another on the fine sea view, when from deep within the apartment came an angry outburst.  It was Big Tayta’s voice: loud, harsh and furious.

            “What’s happening?” I said, startled.

            “I think,” said M with a pained look, “she’s giving my dad heck.”

            “What for?”           

            “For not coming to see her more frequently.”

            “But he comes pretty often.”

            “Not enough to suit her, apparently.”

            “Will she yell at you like that?”

            “I don’t think so,” M smiled. “It seems she reserves the yelling for her children.  Grandchildren are off the hook.”             

            The tirade from within continued as the kids and I exchanged expressions of disbelief.  Though I couldn’t make out the words, the tone was unambiguously wrathful.

            “Imagine being seventy years old and still getting in trouble by your mother,” I mused.

            After a few minutes my father-in-law appeared at the balcony doors looking frazzled. “Okay, you can come and see her now,” he said.

            We followed him into the bedroom. It was, like the rest of the house, barely furnished. There were no rugs on the tiled floor or even a light fixture over the bare bulb which hung down on a wire from the ceiling.  The apartment actually belongs to one of my father-in-law’s brothers who has lived abroad for many years. When the parents began to age and were moved to Beirut from their own home in the ancestral village they were “temporarily” housed at this brother’s new and vacant flat.  Years later the flat, apart from the kitchen and a tv room, still looks as if no one lives there.

            The metal shutters were down and in the dimness we saw Big Tayta lying on her side in a small bed.  She looked up at us as we came in and I saw immediately in her eyes the sharp intelligence that had always been there.

            She greeted us and asked M to help her sit up and turn on the light.  He gave her his hand and propped her up with cushions.  She is not a frail, wispy sort of grandmother but tall and big-boned with a legendary appetite.

            As soon as she was sitting comfortably she picked up where she had left off with my father-in-law, demanding to know what she had done to deserve such neglect by her children. She turned to M and me.

            “How many children ought I to have had to ensure that I would be looked in on enough?” she asked. “I had ten but apparently it’s not enough. Maybe I should have had only two, like you. Maybe two would visit me more often than ten.”

             I could hardly believe the old woman could be so sarcastic or so shamelessly exploitive.  I had to hold back a guffaw. There  was no evidence whatsoever of dementia in the two bright eyes which fixed on me and I composed my face immediately into an expression of gentle sympathy.  

            M tried to placate her. “Come on, what is this talk?” he said. “All your children come to see you all the time.”

            Shaheena, who had arrived in the doorway, nodded vigorously.  “Yes, yes, they are coming every day, sir.  Always one of her children coming to see her every day.”

            “There, you see?” said my father-in-law with a foolishly premature note of triumph in his voice.  “What are you complaining about?  One of us comes every day.”

            “You don’t come every day,” returned his mother, quick as a cat. “What have you got going on in your life that’s so important you can’t drive a quarter of an hour to see your own mother?”

            My father-in-law didn’t answer but his false bravado visibly crumbled.  He rubbed both hands up and down his brow with great force, as if he was trying to reshape his facial bones.

            Big Tayta pressed home her attack. “All day long I’m here all alone, I can’t sleep at night, I’m in despair.  I lost a husband, a son, and a grandson this year. Why did they have to die? It’s too much for me to bear.  It’s too much for anyone to bear. Probably I don’t have long to live myself.”

            Then she started to cry.  Or at least she made noises like she was crying but I didn’t see any tears.

            M murmured some unintelligible words of comfort to her but nobody else said anything.  We all just sat there looking at her. I learned a long time ago that when a Lebanese woman cries she does not wish to be left alone.  She not only doesn’t mind if you stare at her while she cries, she actually seems to appreciate it as a sign of your concern. So we stared while she wailed and moaned.  Then she piped down a bit and started talking about everyday things and small bits of news in the family. Presently she made herself sad again and wailed some more, eventually recovered, and started the cycle over again.

            Some time ago I had asked M why Big Tayta chooses to live alone when she could move in with one of her children. Unlike in present-day Canada, it’s the normal course of things in Lebanon for an elderly parent to move in with a child. M said that all of her children had invited her to live with them but that she didn’t want to. At the time that answer didn’t make sense to me and I felt I was missing a crucial piece of information.  But seeing her like an empress in (what amounted to) her own place, playing her home court advantage to the fullest, I began to understand.  If she went to live with one of her children she would have to live by their rules.  She would no longer be top dog.

            My father-in-law suddenly pointed to a pile of clothes and towels on the desk beside the bed and said, “What’s that?” 

            It looked like a folded load of laundry to me but Big Tayta said that they were her things to take to the new house.

            “What new house?”

            “The new house your sisters said I was going to move into. They took me and showed me a new apartment and said that your brother had bought it and that I was going to live there.”

            I looked carefully at her, wondering if this was the dementia showing itself. 

            “I know they took you to look at his new apartment,” said my father-in-law, “but they wouldn’t have told you that you were going to live there.  That was never an idea.”

            “Well, that’s what they told me,” she said, sounding and looking about as lucid as a person can. “Anyway, I don’t want to live there, I want to go back to the village.”

            “You can’t go back to the village,” my father-in-law said tiredly. “It’s freezing cold in that house in winter and there’s no one there to help you.” He paused and regarded her. “You wouldn’t think about trying to go there on your own, would you?”

            “Of course not. Why would you say that?”

            “I say that because they told me that you threatened to take your suitcase and go down to the highway and catch a taxi to the village.”

            “Rubbish, I never said that.”

            My father-in-law began rubbing his face again.  I pitied him. He looked like he could have used with a shot of whiskey.

            I understood another thing then, too.  M had told me that Big Tayta deliberately caused misunderstandings between her children to increase concern and frequency of visits to her. She wasn’t confused at all about going to live in the new apartment any more than she really intended to take a taxi to the village.

            M began to take his leave of Big Tayta and the rest of us stood up to go.  We all bent and kissed her, one by one, and it seemed to me that her notoriously wet kisses were dryer than usual.  Well, the kids would be grateful for that.

            She began to get up out of the bed and M and his dad protested that she should sit back down again. 

            “No, no, I want to get up,” she said. “I’m hungry, I want to try some of that chicken.”

            So the men took her arms and she shuffled along the corridor with us.  Shaheena came to the door to see us out and I saw M slip her a bit of money. She doesn’t get a large salary. “Good bye,” she said with her sweet smile. 

            The power to the elevator was out again, and as we turned to go down the stairs we caught a last glimpse of the two woman as the door closed.  Behind Shaheena, looming like a indomitable queen, Big Tayta called out a sarcastic parting shot.  “Come back and see me again next year!”

           

           

           

            

Robin Gibb

You might have to squint pretty carefully but this is a picture of the shanty-town near our apartment.  The squatters there have to use whatever materials they can get their hands on to create shelters for themselves.  Plasticised billboard coverings are often used. I looked out one morning and saw the face of Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees looking back at me.

On a Plane to Lebanon

         One little nugget I’ve been saving up for you is something I witnessed on the plane while travelling back from Canada in August.  I have to paint the whole scene in order for you to enjoy the full effect.  Noonie and I were in Heathrow airport, passing a headachey and scratchy-eyed five hours after the all-night flight from Vancouver.  Finally it was time to go the gate for our connecting flight to Beirut. Well, you know what finding your gate at Heathrow is like.  They don’t post the gate number until about five minutes before the plane is supposed to take off and you have to somehow traverse four miles of dingy corridors in that time or face the very real prospect of  missing the plane. Your carry-on bag, which was a neat, tightly-zipped single piece when you left the house seventeen hours ago, has degraded into multiple, impossible-to-carry items.  You can no longer fit your sweater inside the bag and have tied it around your waist where it drops and catches under your feet every few steps.  The bag of snacks has likewise mysteriously expanded and bulges threateningly from a side pocket which will no longer close.  Water bottles pull down your pockets.  Headphone wires dangle.  You’ve got a hot pretzel in one hand and a bunch of one pound coins in the other because that’s the only kind of change the pretzel guy would give you.  And all the while you’re barking at your child(ren), “Hurry up!  We don't have a minute to spare!  When and only when we get to the gate you can use the toilet, eat the pretzel and extract the wasp from your undershorts.  Until we arrive at said gate everything else ceases to matter. Anybody who can’t keep up will be considered missing in action and must find his or her own ride back to Beirut.  That includes you in the diapers. Move!  Move!  Move!”

            Because the thing about Heathrow is, you might reach your gate in five minutes but on the other hand it might take you thirty.  You just don’t know unless you travel there often enough to commit the gate numbers and their general whereabouts to memory.  I never remember.  I just know that once we walked so far that I thought we’d crossed over into France and refused to believe that the sewage treatment plant in the distance wasn’t the English Channel.

            So there we were, Noonie and I, panting and sweaty and dishevelled, arriving at our gate in rather better time than I had dared hope.  The plane had begun boarding early, which was a rare treat in my experience with Middle East Airlines.  We shuffled down the loading bridge and into the plane, wheeling our bags back to economy class while cracking the kneecaps of all aisle seat dwellers foolish enough to let their legs fall apart an extra quarter inch.  We had two seats by themselves and the overhead bins above our spot were completely empty, also something of a rarity.  I arranged and rearranged our belongings in the bin with giddy delight, trying out different positions of the bags and saying now and again to Noonie, “Well, would you look at that. There’s enough extra room in here for some good-sized item or other: a dachshund in a crate, a hibachi, a Kirkland pack of toilet paper. It seems a shame we have nothing else to put in.”

            Most of the empty seats around us never did get filled.  The crew shut the doors and we taxied off with about half the economy class seats vacant.  When we reached cruising altitude and the flight crew stirred to life with a clatter from the back our flight attendant, leaning over to give us the dinner menus, caught our attention.

            It was her makeup and her accent.  She spoke with a real Lebanese accent but she was of African descent.  Well, I don’t mean to give you the impression that I have been living under a rock but Lebanon is still a pretty homogenous place.  I just haven’t seen many people with her features and colouring speaking with a Lebanese accent. There was, as I say, her makeup as well.  It had been applied so thickly that it was that you felt you were looking at, not the girl buried beneath.  It wasn’t clumsily done; she had clearly spent a lot of time carefully dabbing and sculpting, but the effect was better suited to the stage of live theatre than the close confines of an airplane cabin.  Her eyes in particular were startling because besides the great, mascara-laden lashes and surrounding black shadow she had those kind of unnatural coloured contact lenses which make the irises look creepy and brittle, as if they had no depth.  But her eyebrows really set the whole picture off.  She had evidently gone right over them with her foundation before powdering them in (ladies, you know what that means– Santa Claus eyebrows) and had added a generous top layer of sparkly, toffee-coloured eyebrow pencil. They didn’t look like eyebrows so much as two strips of pasted-on fur.

            I tried not to stare and could see Noonie out of the corner of my eye fighting the same impulse.  The woman under the makeup was neither warm nor helpful but whoever expects such things from a flight attendant?  Sometimes you luck out and get a really nice one, and in such cases I usually have to fight the urge to hug them around the middle and thank them with weeping eyes for not being a horrible, rude, tyrannical ogre, but most of the time I just hope for disinterested efficiency. 

            We hadn’t been cruising long – the drinks cart had just come around and the ads were still playing on the tv – when over the drone of the engines I heard a raised voice.  I looked up and about six rows ahead of us I could see our attendant with a very angry look on her face looking down at someone sitting in an aisle seat.  She said something to the person in the seat, then a shrill female voice answered, “You dare to call me crazy?  You’re crazy!”

            The flight attendant shouted back, “You are the one who is crazy!”  They raised their voices even more and began to hurl insults back and forth while I strained to catch the words and understand them.  Then the seated woman shrieked hysterically, “Don’t touch me!”

            Everyone in our section of the plane had stopped what they were doing to watch.  Some stood up for a better look.  Another flight attendant now joined the first one and was trying to calm both her and the angry passenger, and very soon the cabin crew manager was there, too.

            Fur-Brow wasn’t taking any flak from anyone, apparently.  To my astonishment she not only refused to back down but seemed to be building up to something physical.  I sat up as straight as I could in my seat, the menu with its choice of chicken or ravioli falling forgotten to the floor.  To my indescribable frustration I couldn’t catch even the smallest glimpse of the lunatic shrieking in the seat but from what she was saying I decided she was the kind of person who spent her life blaming others for everything that went wrong.  But it was worse than that.  She didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with behaving so rudely or aggressively and that a flight attendant – especially a black flight attendant – could be abused without consequence.

            The passenger then shouted something I didn’t understand – dang it, I wish my Arabic wasn’t full of holes like swiss cheese – and mutters of protest rippled through the plane.  One man called out, “Shame on you!” and several other people echoed, “For shame, for shame!”

            I whipped my head around to Noonie. “What did she say to her?  Are they saying ‘shame’ to her or the flight attendant?”

            “I couldn’t understand what she said either, Mom, but it was something bad.  They are saying ‘shame’ to her, not to the attendant.”

            Things seemed ripe for cataclysm right about then and the other flight attendants clearly thought so, too, because they took hold of their colleague’s arms and began to drag her away toward the back of the plane.  She was a tall girl with rangy, powerful-looking limbs.  I hadn’t noticed it before but her superior physique manifested itself as the other attendants tried to get her moving.  It was a struggle. She was flinging insults and accusations back at the passenger just as fast as they were coming to her and she seemed determined to finish the job.

            But eventually the attendants did succeed in getting her away and they hustled her down to the little back area where the rest of the crew got busy heating up dinners.  Fur-Brow didn’t serve us nor make any appearance during dinner.  Meanwhile, the crew manager spent what seemed like about an hour talking to the fruitcake six rows up.  I couldn’t imagine what he was saying to her; he gestured a lot, but calmly, and his expression was impassive.

            Sometime after dinner a reconciliation between the two warring parties was staged, apparently by the cabin crew.  Fur-Brow was brought – with a very sulky look on her face -- back up the aisle and presented to Fruitcake who still sat queen-like in her high-backed chair, invisible to all the deserving eyes of rows 25 and up. Fur-Brow had barely arrived at Fruitcake’s elbow when tempers exploded again.  For the second time I thought it was going to come to blows.  A young man sitting behind us thought so, too; we saw him hold up his phone to videotape the scene.

            The attendants didn’t waste a moment dragging Fur-Brow out of there this time.  They got her moving away from Fruitcake but she shook them off as they went past our row and, pulling herself up to her full height, spun around and shouted, “Whore!”

            There was a collective gasp through our section of the plane. Someone gave a low whistle. Fur-Brow was hustled away and passengers who had scrambled to their feet sat down again.

            “See, now, this is a perfect example of why Lebanese people often express the belief that Canada is boring,” I said to Noonie. “Air Canada flight attendants, though undoubtedly wishing it at times, don’t call passengers whores.”

            The show was almost over, but not quite.  Presently a man of about forty in a striped shirt and jeans came down the aisle from farther up in the plane and began to berate Fruitcake.  I couldn’t hear what he was saying but I caught his tone and in true Lebanese style his hand gestures told us much. He gave Fruity a dressing-down which I think everyone in our section of the plane enjoyed to the fullest extent.  He kept it up until the cabin crew manager came and shooed him away. 

            At some later point during the flight I looked up to see Fruitcake getting up from her seat and following the crew manager.  It was about time we got to see her.  She was younger than I had guessed – about thirty – and unremarkable in appearance except for the very ugly expression on her face.  She had regular features and figure but her mouth was twisted in a peculiar mix of embarrassment and defiance, and her eyes were shifty.  But she certainly wasn’t mentally unbalanced, that was immediately evident.  You could see from the expression in those darting eyes that she was fully aware of being in the wrong; yet she wasn’t prepared to apologize for it or even allow herself to look a bit ashamed.

            Fur-Brow must have been judged by the crew manager to be too much of a loose cannon because we didn’t see her again for the rest of the flight.  That is to say, she didn’t leave the back of the plane again but I did see her once when I went to use the toilet.  She was standing in a fierce, proud posture with her back to the other attendants while they supplicated her to calm down and forget the whole thing.

            When we landed in Beirut the flight crew did an unprecedented thing and actually enforced the rule about passengers remaining seated until the seatbelt sign goes off.  Everyone who’s ever flown into Lebanon knows that it’s a wild cattle stampede the moment the plane slows down after landing.  Everyone leaps out of their seat no matter if the gate is still a ten-minute taxi away and starts hauling out their bags from the overhead bins and clogging up the aisles.  If you don’t jump up with them you’ll be trapped in your seat until the plane has completely unloaded.  This was the very first time and -- I must be realistic – probably the last time I saw the flight crew put a stop to the anarchy.  Man was it satisfying to watch them force even the people feigning deafness back into their seats: “Sir.  Sir! You must sit down until the seatbelt sign goes off.”

            For a few beautiful minutes I thought Middle East Airlines had instigated a zero-tolerance policy as part of a new campaign to force its passengers to behave like civilized beings instead of chimpanzees night-raiding a fruit warehouse. But once we had docked at the loading bridge and the doors were opened and we were still not permitted to get out of our seats I knew there was something else going on.  I wondered if there was someone up in first or business class who needed a doctor.  Maybe they were being hauled off on a stretcher or something.  And then I saw three police officers coming down the aisle of the hushed cabin.  Even at that point it didn’t occur to me that they were coming for the Fruitcake.  But they were, oh yes.  They collected her from her seat and escorted her off the plane and the rest of us were allowed, with much excited chatter, to disembark.

            We kept catching glimpses of Fruity as we walked through the terminal, waited at immigration and collected our checked bags.  While waiting for our turn at immigration Noonie saw the policemen take Fruity into a room and shut the door behind them.  Later we saw her near the baggage carousel, the policemen still walking along beside her,  arm in arm with a man who could only have been her husband.  I was surprised to see that she had a husband (did she shriek at him when he forgot to put the milk back in the fridge?) and that he looked like a normal guy.  She was talking animatedly to him and I wondered what version of the truth he was getting.

            When we came out and found M waiting for us he said he had seen policemen going inside and thought it had had something to do with two middle-aged women having a screaming match at each other in the passenger greeting area.  We said, “What? Middle-aged? No, they couldn’t be-- Was one of them a flight attendant?”  No, no, neither was a flight attendant and when M went on to give a detailed description of the women it was clear that they were completely different people than Fruity and Fur. His two had begun arguing over some insignificant thing or other and it just escalated until they were pushing each other and exchanging insults.  Once of them apparently kept yelling at the other, “Don’t you know who I am?  If you knew who I was you wouldn’t dare to speak to me that way!”

          “So who was she?” we asked M but he just shrugged.

         We then gave M a brief rundown of the altercation on the plane between Fruity and Fur.

            “So, a bit of excitement for you then,” said M as we pushed our trolley out into the warm Beirut night. “Now doesn’t Canada seem dull in comparison?”

            All around us was chaos.  People were yelling, cars were triple and quadruple-parked outside the terminal doors, car horns blasted.  I could imagine half a dozen more screaming matches happening right there in front of the terminal that evening. I thought of the farmland we'd driven through in Canada on the way to the airport, the green fields and grazing cattle. I thought, too, of the long line of people queued up at the Tim Horton's inside the terminal where I stopped to buy us a sandwich and how no one tried to push ahead or even raise a voice. 

            Canada dull?

            Hmm...

            

                       

           

           

           

                       

           

           

Beautiful Lebanese Sandstone Building

Side building -- the rectory, I suppose -- of Saint George Maronite Cathedral in downtown Beirut

Guns and Grenades in Beirut

            Three weeks ago was the scariest night of my life.  But as I write this I feel helpless dismay wash over me because I know I won’t be able to convey the fear to you. It’s really not much of a story. 

            Everyone can relate to the ‘almost-terrible-event’ phenomenon. You survive a very frightening experience that resulted in no harm whatsoever coming to you but which has badly shaken you. You're desperate to share the experience with your family and friends.  The trouble is, since nothing actually happened to you, the story doesn’t amount to much.  No one is terribly impressed.            

           “You almost had a head-on collision with an ice-cream truck coming backwards up the break-down lane of Deerfoot Trail?  Whoa. That would have been bad.  You’d have been killed for sure.  Say, did you remember to pick up a tube of caulking for the bathtub?”

            The whole thing makes you feel like you’ve been spliced in two and now temporarily reside in parallel planes of existence.  On the one plane, everything and everyone around you is palpably, assuredly familiar and right.  On the other plane, you’ve just shot a passing glance into the bright, beady eyes of Death and are faced with your own mortality, the fragility of life and the preciousness of our time on earth here together.  But your husband is going to ask about the tube of caulking.

            So, while the story I’m about to tell you is probably not going to sound like much -- in fact, for Lebanese people and anyone else on earth who has led a less sheltered life than me, it isn’t much -- it certainly terrified me. Just how scared was I? Well, my skin mites packed their bags and called taxis, and I became suddenly and fervently repentant over a childhood act of criminality in which the Lambert family of Sundre were relieved of a miniature garden rake.

            On the weekend in consideration, both our kids were leaving on school trips abroad.  Consistent with what I must assume is a school policy of choosing the worst possible flight times, both kids’ departures were in the tiny hours of the morning.  On Saturday M drove Noonie to school for the one-thirty a.m. meeting time. I shuffled onto the balcony to watch them leave and was sleepily pleased to find our neighbourhood buzzing with cozy goings-on at that late hour.  A car idling in the middle of the street had the windows open, Billy Ocean on the radio singing “No more love on the run.”  In all the buildings around us lights shone from windows. A teenaged girl sat at a desk, head bent under the light of a lamp and in a kitchen fluorescent bulbs flickered on as a man walked over to a bowl of fruit and stooping, considered it for a long moment before reaching out an arm and selecting. 

            When I got up the next day I had a text message from Noonie saying they had arrived in Doha and were boarding the plane to Colombo.  I tamped down the fretting-mother urge bubbling up inside me with some success as I went around making beds and gathering laundry, only wavering briefly when I discovered on Noonie’s bed the towel she was meant to take with her.  For anyone else a t-shirt might suffice as a drying implement for a six day camping trip; for Noonie, who had spent twelve hours packing for the trip with the keenest attention to items such as insect repellent, moist towelettes and dental floss, the absence of a towel would be a crippling blow.

            M left on a business trip to Dubai later that same morning and in the afternoon I took Dude down to the waterfront to skateboard with his friends. In the evening Dude had a shower, packed his bag, and turned out his light by half-past eight.  I was to wake him up at three a.m. for my father-in-law to drive him to the school. I didn’t know why M had insisted that his dad drive him to the school.  I had picked him up from his overseas school trip the previous year when they got to the school in the dead hours of the night.  But I didn’t protest too much.  Someone else is going to drive my kid to school at three a.m.? Fantastic.

            Earlier that day there had been a horrible incident in northern Lebanon in which two men – a prominent sheik and his bodyguard – were shot and killed at an army checkpoint. Tension followed, obviously, but what of that?  There is always tension here. 

            I set my alarm for three o’clock and went to bed. I had been asleep for about an hour when I became aware that something wasn’t right.  I was hearing noises, muffled by the metal shutters over our windows and the rushing sound of the air conditioner, but which sounded like gunfire. I didn’t react immediately, however, because there is literally always something banging or crashing in the streets around our building.  Mainly it is fireworks.  Between celebrations at the wedding hall down the street and bored children with easy access to cheap Chinese combustibles, the crack of fireworks makes me jump out of my skin about once every other day. Enclosed by concrete buildings, the street in which they detonate becomes an amplifier. But there are other loud, startling noises from every conceivable source: hammering from the wooden palette cottage-industry right behind our building; shouts of another fist-fight between the simians running the informal minibus depot; stone cutting; tires screeching; motorcycles revving violently and the double tha-thunk of the loose manhole cover in front of our building every time a car goes over it.

            Before I’d properly woken up and was still half-dreaming, I thought that it couldn’t be gunfire I was hearing because in such a case there would be other sounds, like people shouting and sirens.  But there wasn’t any sound other than the shooting and horrible, heavy whoosh-bangs of what sounded like things exploding. Besides this, the gunfire sounds were almost non-stop.  A dispute I witnessed last year in the intersection near our building, in which I’d heard the popping of gunfire, was over within one or two minutes.  But the sounds reaching my ears now were going on and on.

            Soon my mind became sufficiently perturbed to haul me up out of the depths of dream-state to consciousness. The mental alarm bell had grown louder, becoming a strident, this-is-not-a-drill kind of siren. I don’t even remember getting out of bed.  I just remember that by the time I stumbled out into the kitchen I knew what I was hearing and my heart began hammering so hard in my chest I felt sick.

        I went straight to the kitchen window, hunkered down and looked out of the corner. Outside it was very dark -- Beirut streets aren’t very well lit at the best of times -- and at first all I could see was the big intersection, usually humming with cars at any hour of the day or night, now eerily deserted but for two of the army’s APC’s (Armoured Personnel Carriers – the things that I have been up until this week incorrectly calling tanks for the highly defensible reason that that is exactly what they look like) crouched silent and still in the middle.  Then I saw a few spots of light from cell phones or cigarettes and made out the dark outlines of several men standing in the shadow of a small shop.  The horrible gunfire and low, heavy booming continued but I couldn’t see the gunmen.

            I was shaking like a leaf and almost stupefied with fear.  The thing that didn’t make any sense to me was that there wasn’t any sign of police or ambulances or soldiers (excepting whoever was huddled inside those APC’s).  There wasn’t even a sound from our building.  Where was everybody?

            Dude was still sleeping but I was far too agitated to wonder at that.  In reflection, I think it’s simply that the fireworks we hear are much, much louder than gunfire and he has grown accustomed to tuning out the noises of our neighbourhood.

            I turned on the tv to see if I could learn what was happening outside.  Of course I can’t understand the local news (in formal Arabic) and the BBC wasn’t mentioning anything.  I opened my computer to The Daily Star website and they had a little information, saying that in response to the murders earlier in the day there were ‘clashes’ involving machine guns and rocket powered grenades in the neighbourhood adjacent to ours.

            I thought about calling M in Dubai but what could he do for us?  He would only be distressed to hear my panic. It was clear to me that whatever was actually going on outside the best thing to do was stay in our apartment. Come morning if the fighting was still going on my father-in-law would advise me what we should do.

            At one point I suddenly heard footsteps rushing up the stairs outside our door and I ran, heart in throat, to engage the heavy duty lock on our door (eight metal bars which are anchored in a solid metal core).

           For the first two hours or so I was literally too frightened to think straight and did nothing else but comb the internet with shaking hands.  The fighting didn’t let up.  A couple of times when I peeked out a corner of the window and looked across the intersection I saw darting movements – someone running; another ducking behind a dumpster. There were more scrabbling footsteps heard in the stairwell and once I saw through the peephole Hamoodi, the son of our building watchman, running upstairs to the roof. It pierced through my fear that he was here alone (his father was in Syria) and that if I was scared, he must be much more so.

            At about quarter to three I called M’s dad.  He said he and my mother-in-law had been lying awake listening to the fighting and asked if I was scared. Then he said he was coming up and a few minutes later he rang the doorbell.  Although he was clearly agitated he didn’t say anything about what was happening outside but simply asked if Dude’s class trip was cancelled. I said what difference did it make if it was cancelled or not, there was shooting outside.  M’s dad insisted that we try to contact the school but I didn’t have the phone number of any teacher chaperoning the trip. I decided to send an email to Dude’s English teacher, who had always been helpful and communicative with me, in the hope that she carried a smart phone and would read it.  In the message I said that I didn’t know what was happening in the rest of Beirut but that our neighbourhood was a warzone and we couldn’t leave the building.

            My father-in-law really wanted me to try to talk to someone at the school so I called their switchboard and dialled the emergency extension number that was given in the menu.  A man answered and I asked him if the grade seven trip to Turkey was cancelled and he said yes.

            M’s dad then suggested that Dude and I to go downstairs and spend the rest of the night in their apartment but I just wanted to let Dude sleep.  Why wake him up to hear such terrifying things? Before M’s dad left he said to call him for anything and not to open my door to anyone.  He also said that I should go into Noonie’s room since it doesn’t have any windows facing the intersection, so I did that.  For another two hours I sat glued to the internet, unable to learn much about what was happening but too distraught to do anything else. During those long, frightening hours as I picked through every news site I could find and flipped through the channels on TV all I found was story after story about the death of Robin Gibb from the Bee Gee’s. 

            At about four o’clock the fighting seemed to be letting up.  And at 4:30 my cell phone rang.  It was a number my phone didn’t recognize and I picked it up thinking it must be someone from the school. 

            “Hi,” said an American voice. “Is your son coming with us today?”

            It was Dude’s English teacher.  I was utterly flabbergasted. Clearly the English teacher was thousands of miles away on another planet. “But -- how -- the trip is still on?”

            “Yes.”

            “But the fighting.  I called the school, they said the trip was cancelled.”

            “Who told you that?”

            I explained quickly, and also told her about the fighting in our neighbourhood.  She had not read my email note but said the trip was definitely on and that if we left straight away there was still time for Dude to catch up with them at the airport.

            By this time the gunfire had stopped but it was still pitch black outside and creepy as hell.  No cars were around, the streets were deserted; only APC’s occasionally rumbled noisily up the street.

            I didn’t know what to think.  I knew that M’s dad would be glued to the news and would know better than me if the violence had been well and truly stopped. I called him and told him what Dude’s teacher had said. He said that it was okay now to drive to the airport and that Dude should go.  It would be a shame for him to miss his trip, he kept saying, which sounded completely cracked to me.  Who cared about a stupid trip to Turkey when there were bullets flying around?  Not Dude, I was pretty sure.  But I trusted my father-in-law’s judgment in this situation, and though I was absolutely terrified of letting Dude go outside and get into a car there wasn’t time to dwell on it.

            I called Dude’s teacher back, said that Dude could be at the airport in fifteen minutes, and went in to wake him up.  He was in a very deep sleep (understandably, since it 4:30 in the morning) but I gently pressed his shoulder and told him that we were late and he must hurry.  He rolled out of bed and quickly pulled on his clothes while I explained that there had been trouble outside and that was why we were late but that his classmates and teachers were waiting for him at the airport.  He asked what kind of trouble and I said shooting and stuff and he said he didn’t want to go outside if there was shooting.  I said that it was over now and that his grandfather wouldn’t agree to take him out if there was still danger.  I regretted having to mention it at all to him but felt that he should know a little about what was happening.  How can he trust me if I don’t always tell him the truth?

            He must have taken his cue from M’s dad and me – both of us were acting calm on the outside, at least -- and put on his new, bright green Adidas runners we had bought the day before without further comment.  I hugged him good-bye at the door and they left.  M’s dad hadn’t wanted me to go with him – I don’t know why – but I immediately regretted not insisting on accompanying them because of course the half hour I had to wait until he got back was one of the most unbearable stress.  I couldn’t believe I had let Dude go out into such a night and had to keep telling myself that M’s dad knew what he was doing.  The biggest thing that calmed me was the fact itself of the school trip happening.  Since it hadn’t been cancelled obviously the rest of Beirut must be quiet.

            M’s dad returned with the news that everything had gone well and the teacher who had stayed in the entry of the airport to meet Dude texted me a short time later to say that they were in the plane and Dude was sitting right beside him.

            The sun came up about an hour later, bright as anything and giving every sign of a fabulous summer day ahead.  By eight o’clock people were out in numbers, cars clogged the streets; there was an email in my inbox from a local women’s group advertising a jumble sale; it was as if nothing had bl**dy happened.

             M called around nine and said he had known about the fighting but was hoping I slept through it.  He offered to come back from Dubai early but I said I was okay. I asked him how he had felt, knowing his son was being taken out and driven in a car on the airport road while the fighting was going on. He only said that everyone in Lebanon was used to this kind of fighting and that they’d seen a lot worse.

            The newspaper said that two people had been killed in the night’s fighting, and 18 others injured.  The men I had seen by the light of their cigarettes had been journalists; as had the ones I heard running up to the roof of our building -- they had been setting up cameras.

            The papers also said that fighting stopped when the army came in.  Well, that sounds comforting, doesn’t it?  But I saw the army APC’s there at least three hours before the shooting and grenades stopped. Now, I’ll admit that I know nothing about military equipment but the Lebanese army trucks and APC’s appear to me like they might have seen action during the Korean War.  They’re that old, and I’m not sure they’re grenade-proof.  And since there were rocket powered grenades flying all over the place that night the soldiers couldn’t have simply rolled their APC’s into the fray with merry abandon. Anyway, APC’s don’t even fit into the little side-streets around this neighbourhood.

            What all this means to me is that, while giving the army its due, I don’t think they can help me and my family if the faeces really hits the turbines.  Well, just think for a moment about the civil war here or the 2006 Israeli invasion.  The army was here, UN peacekeepers were here.  But they couldn’t stop the violence.

            This line of discussion is edging dangerously close to the political.  As I have determined to steer far and wide of such topics I won’t go any further.  I will just say this: I was g.d. scared that night and I’m still scared and I don’t think I can brush it off.  In fact, I think it’s wretchedly depressing that people do brush it off.

            M told me that day that if fighting broke out again the following night – it didn’t, thank heaven, though the residents of Tripoli were not so fortunate – and I judged the gunfire to be too close to our building the safest place to be was the bathroom that has no external windows.  No mention of it being time to get out of this country, that this sort of thing is perhaps a bit much.  Nope.  You grow up in a war, you brush these things off.

            @#$%

           

Lebanese Army Convoy

This is what I see from my kitchen window nearly every day.

When One Ring of the Doorbell Just Won't Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chickens Under Olive Tree

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

They Eat Green Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            "Isn't there a saying about that?"

            "Hm?"

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