I Love Tea

Here I sit, drinking my tea and watching the rain, my mind a lazy, pleasant blank. Presently I notice how stained my tea cup is getting and wonder if my teeth, too, are turning brown. I can’t say for sure when I look at them in the mirror. They don’t look as white as they used to, that’s certain, but then nothing much about my head looks like it used to.

I use whitening toothpaste sometimes. I don’t think it makes a big difference. The only thing it does for me, that I can tell, is kill off skin cells in my cheek lining which then collect into disgusting, gunky strings by morning. That white gunk is even less attractive than yellow teeth and I’m pretty sure that exterminating all those epithelial cells on a nightly basis will be shown, in about twenty years' time, to cause cancer or permanently coarsened, disfigured lips or some other undesirable situation.

But wouldn’t you agree that getting older is all about shifting priorities ? I would not have sacrificed white teeth for the pleasure of drinking strong, black tea fifteen years ago. Now I want my tea, I want it flavourful, and am quite prepared to trample on the weak and helpless in order to get at it, if things ever come to it.

Thank heaven I’ve never enjoyed coffee. The hold it has on its followers is much more powerful than that of tea. We all know people who have to plan out their day around their coffees. A few years ago I drove across the twisting, mountainous breadth of British Columbia with my coffee-addicted sister. Her quest for a decent cup dominated the whole trip. We had to note how many kilometres to the next town, and to consider what size of town it was and therefore what kind of coffee establishments it was likely to have. Then we had to factor in how much coffee she had left in her mug and plot it on a volume/time graph to estimate where we would need to stop. It was a real eye-opener for me. Though I’d always been aware of her coffee dependency — somehow, in any mental image of her, there was always a large travel-mug steaming near one of her elbows — I didn’t pay it any attention. You know how you are with things that don’t directly concern you. I don’t know, for example, what a diabetic person needs to do throughout the day because I’ve never experienced it. But after that all-day drive across the province I am convinced that Theo’s coffee addiction qualifies as a medical condition.

I remember things coming to a head as we coasted into one small town, Theo behind the wheel. Her travel mug had been empty for many miles and though she was making a heroic effort to be pleasant I could see the strain of it showing in her forehead vein. Her plan, I just assumed, was to stop at the first gas station we came to and chug some of their coffee straight out of the pot.

She didn’t even spare the gas station a passing glance. And as the first cafe rounded into view I cried “Hooray! There we are!” and smiled happily at Theo, whom I expected to be wearing an expression of profound relief. But no. She slowed down to look at the cafe as we went past but didn’t appear to have any intention of stopping.

“What – what are you doing?” I said.

“Oh, it didn’t look like it would have good coffee,” she said. Rather cavalier, I thought, for someone in fourth-stage coffee withdrawal.

“But this is a small town,” I sputtered. “There won’t be many to pick from.”

“Well, I’m not drinking the roofing tar they serve at places like that,” she said testily.

We drove along in silence. The main street turned a corner up ahead, and beyond that I could see it climbing away from the town and disappearing into the forest. We only had about two blocks left. I began to drum my fingers nervously on the armrest.

“Oh! Hey! Up ahead!” I burst out, spying another cafe.

“I see it,” came the terse reply.

Incredibly, she showed no sign of committing to this one, either. I could only sit in stunned disbelief as we cruised past.

We followed the street as it made its turn and saw that there was only one block of businesses left. Things were not looking good. Another gas station loomed on our right.

“What about just nipping in there for a cup? I mean, it’s an emergency, right? Isn’t gas station coffee better than no coffee?”

Theo turned on me. “You don’t understand. Bad coffee isn’t coffee at all, it’s poison, it’s sewer sludge, it’s not fit for human consumption. I’m not going to drink it.”

“Well,” I went on, foolishly. “You’re not going to find a Starbucks or whatever in this town.”

“We might,” she said, gripping the wheel tightly and narrowing her eyes. “A lot of tourists come through here in the summer. I’m sure there is some place that serves decent coffee.”

But we had run out of town. The shops had fallen away and it was only scattered houses around us now. Theo found a place to turn around and headed back.

Things went from bad to worse after that. Theo couldn’t believe that no one in town was prepared to brew a decent cup of coffee and she drove up and down side streets with narrow-eyed, silent purpose. We had around 14 hours of driving to do that day and so I was alarmed to note the minutes slipping by as she combed the town with increasing desperation. I continued to spout foolish ideas, including a proposal to bring our own picnic-sized coffee thermos with us in the car the next time. Theo, unwilling to waste any more of her rapidly dwindling life force on a coffee moron like myself, managed to make it clear in a few expressive words that coffee which had sat in a thermos all day wasn’t drinkable.

I can’t even remember where she eventually stopped. I know that we never did find a big coffee chain in town. I think maybe she ended up going into the nicest looking of the hotels we passed.

She returned to her normal, agreeable self within minutes of getting the coffee and the rest of the towns we passed through that day must have been more satisfying in their offerings because there were no further crises and we passed the time happily, trying to understand the rudiments of human behaviour and lamenting the general lack of appreciation for our own wonderfulness.

And now I find that my own tea cup is drained and I must go top it up with fresh stuff from the pot. It occurs to me that my portrayal of coffee addiction is unfair since my own tea habit sometimes places a burden on those around me. Simply put, when you ingest as much liquid in a day as I do, you can’t let yourself get very far away from a toilet. I try to manage my tea drinking. You know, schedule it for when I’m going to be at home for a few hours. But sometimes we go out on the spur of the moment and that can mean real trouble. I always jettison what I can at the last possible second before leaving the house but kidneys filter at their own pace and won’t be hurried.

Just last week M and I went with the kids for a walk down on the newly reclaimed seafront promenade and I didn't enjoy myself a bit because I could feel the tea working its way through my body and starting to queue up in the holding area. I knew that it wouldn’t be long before I needed a toilet. Well, there are no toilets anywhere on the promenade. To make a long story short, we had to cut the walk short, race back to the car and screech off toward the nearest restaurant where I threw myself out of the car and grabbed a passing waiter, shouting “Toilet! Toilet!” in deranged tones. It wasn’t dignified.

But I love tea too much to let such things put me off for long. So off I go now to fill my cup. If you need to find me, I’ll be the one with brown teeth and an adult diaper.

Nothing Will Happen

Driving down the street with Kassem yesterday in our usual, comfortable silence he suddenly turned to me and said, “Madam, I want you to know that I’m keeping the car gassed up at all times.”

“What’s that?” I said, thinking I hadn’t heard him correctly.

“I’m keeping the car full of gas at all times these days. Just in case. But don’t worry, nothing will happen.”

I realised suddenly that he was referring to the unstable political situation in the country right now. I looked at him like he’d sprouted a second nose.

“Don’t worry, Madam, nothing will happen,” he said, laughing at my expression.

I told M about it later that evening.

“Where does he suppose we’re going to drive to, anyway, if things do erupt around here? ”

“Ah, well, he’s right. It’s just better to have the car full of gas at times like this.”

“What? You think so too?” I said. “Why haven’t you said that to me before? Are things worse than I suppose?”

“No, no, things are not worse than you suppose. It’s really not a bad situation. Don’t worry,” he chuckled. “Nothing will happen.”

Formula 1, Tupperware

I’d like to talk about the Formula 1 decision to move from Bridgestone to Pirelli tires this year, and how that will affect the driving style of someone with tons of experience, like Schumacher, versus a newer driver like Vettel.

I’m sorry, M and Big C. That was just a ruse to lure you in to the blog. I don’t actually know anything about which tires F1 is using this year. If they had commissioned Tim Horton’s to make tire-sized doughnuts to put on their wheels it would be all the same to me.

What I really wanted to talk about was my new tupperware. Well, it’s Rubbermaid, actually, that’s why I didn’t put a capital ‘T’ on tupperware, something my spell-checker is having a very hard time accepting. Tupperware seems to have evolved into the generic name for all small plastic storage containers and if the people in their trademark division are going to hunt me down and melt all my Rubbermaid products for calling them tupperware with a small ‘t’, well that’s a risk I’m willing to take.

It’s like being told to write dumpster with a capital ‘D’, or kleenex with a capital ‘K’. I know they’re brand names but they are also generic names now and unless I’m selling my own brand of tissue and calling it Kleenex I think we can dispense with capitalizing the first letter. I feel like I’m talking about a person when I capitalize. “Honey, can you pass me a Roberto so I can blow my nose? And when you’re done do you mind taking the trash out to the Frank?”

I have a thing about plastic storage containers. What I mean by that is, I love them, collect them, sort them by size, genre, brand name and find endless solace in them. When I’m with my tupperware, I feel at peace. My whole house and life could potentially be sorted, organized and labelled into clear plastic containers, and sometimes I earnestly try to do just that.

Small containers are easy to find. Getting your hands on a really big one is harder. My sis Theo came home breathless with excitement once in Calgary because she had found the storage box to end all storage boxes. So I rushed back to the store with her and when I saw the boxes agreed that there was no way I could carry on living without buying one. We each bought two. I don’t remember how many litres they held but put it this way: a St. Bernard could have had a very comfortable nap in one.

You may think we lived to regret that purchase but you’d be mistaken there. We may have had some trouble getting the boxes in the car to bring them home but it was a short drive, maybe we kept the trunk open. It wouldn’t have mattered. We were triumphant.

I used those plastic wonder boxes for all kinds of things. The kids’ toys, mainly, but I also emptied one and used it as a mini pool for them. I put it in the backyard, filled it with water, and they enjoyed a few dips in it on summer afternoons. I even tied a rope on one, put some blankets inside and pulled the kids over the snow in it one winter.

I’m not making this up, though I have suddenly become conscious of how improbable it sounds. The Plastic Box that Did It All. If it will bolster my credibility at all, I can assure you that there were a few things it was not used for. It was never used as a spare bed, even for children. I didn’t put a desk and lamp in it and try to turn it into a home office. No trout ever swam in it.

My tupperware fetish wasn’t a big deal in Canada. A lot of women are storage container enthusiasts there. Here in the Middle East it seems to be less of a thing. My Lebanese friends and family, while appreciating the utility of tupperware, seem content to own two or three pieces. They laugh at my collection.

I never announce a new purchase to M. What would that serve? He doesn’t understand how I feel. When I buy a new container I put it into immediate circulation and pretend it has always been there. In defence of my hobby, it isn’t as expensive as purse buying, or shoe buying. As for clothes, Costco is good enough for me. Though sometimes I get the feeling that M wouldn’t mind if my taste in clothing got a bit more expensive. The Next jeans, bought five years ago, that I currently walk around in don’t really cut the mustard beside what the well-heeled Beirut ladies are wearing. I’ve never even entered an Aïshti store. (No, that’s not true, I went in the small one in Faqra last fall with my sister-in-law, who was cold and wanted a sweater. All we found was weird, plaid stuff for hundreds of dollars that only Elton John would look good in.)

I set out to enthuse over my new Rubbermaid collection but now it feels like the moment has passed. Maybe it has something to do with my discovery just a few minutes ago — in between paragraphs I’ve been getting up to hang laundry, make dinner for the kids etc. — that the labels I put on the new containers are not sticking well. The lids seem to be made of that kind of plastic that nothing sticks to. This is very upsetting to me.

This happened last fall when I tried to label a plastic storage box that I’d put our ski stuff into. I knew from previous attempts that labels don't stay on this kind of plastic so this time I took a paring knife and lightly scratched the surface in a label-sized area. But when I put the label onto the scratched spot it stuck no better than before. I tried attaching an index card by twist-tie through the holes in the box handle, but it wouldn’t hang straight and kept snagging and tearing on things when I moved the box.

I never have been able to keep a label on that box. I try not to think about it. But if labels aren’t going to stick to my new collection (27 containers with interchangeable, easy-stack lids) I don’t know what I’m going to do. Oh, this is all most upsetting. Most upsetting.

Making Turkey

Turkeys are important to me. I don’t make them often and only on special occasions. This makes them more special, if you see what I mean. I didn’t make a turkey this Thanksgiving, nor at Christmas. So when I saw some turkeys in the fresh meats cooler a few days ago at the supermarket I decided to get one, thinking (as I do about most things in my life), better late than never. But I saw from the label name that they were local turkeys and this gave me pause. I had only ever bought imported American Butterball turkeys, and not even so many of those. I’m not what you’d call an old hand at making turkey, and can never remember whether you’re supposed to put them in the pan boob-side up or down, or what to do with those fleshy bits that they wrap in paper and hide inside the body cavity. Also, do you cover it while it cooks? I’ve always subscribed to the philosophy that just getting something as big as a turkey into an oven is achievement enough and once it’s in there it’s on its own.

I decided to go look in the frozen foods section to see if I could find a Butterball.

But here I had a problem. I wasn’t in comfortable shoes and I’d already walked up and down most of the aisles of the huge supermarket. That morning when I’d left the house M wasn’t up yet. I knew he’d slept poorly during the night and so when I got up I crept quietly out of the room and closed the door behind me, leaving him to it. I really wanted to get the store early, before it got busy, but I didn’t want to wake him up to get my clothes and shoes from the room. By eight-thirty when the light still hadn’t come on under the door I decided he was either having a good catch-up or had slipped into coma. In neither case would my barging into the room be useful so I wore the only clothes I had access to, which was a pair of very saggy cargo pants that look like pyjama bottoms, and slip-on shoes with a bit of height in the heel. It wasn’t exactly like going to the store in pyjamas and pumps but wasn’t that far off, either. I put on a long coat and hoped no one looked too closely.

By the time I stood in front of the local turkeys my toes, having been rammed downward into the front of the shoe with each step, were mangled like a pack of sausages which have been bent in half and sat on, or so I imagined. Without enthusiasm I leaned over my shopping cart and pushed off toward the frozen foods section.

There were a lot of very long freezers and I walked up and down beside them all but could find no turkeys. All right then, I said. Fresh, local gobbler it is to be.  Heading back to the fresh meats cooler, I pulled my shopping cart by the front end because it was so weighted down I couldn’t steer it from the back anymore. Along the way I picked up more things. The weight of the cart gave it tremendous momentum and once we got rolling on the straightaways it behaved as if it was powered by an unseen motor, which is unnerving when you’re behind it but downright terrifying when you’re in front and it starts gaining speed. I took out a row of instant pudding boxes trying to navigate a corner and an old man had to jump out of the way as we thundered past the cheese and olive counter but by throwing my weight backwards I managed to bring the cart to stop, once again, in front of the fresh turkeys. I resolved to take one whether it spoke English or not.

Reaching for the smallest one, I was taken aback to discover that it was not a turkey but a chicken. Bending to read the label, I saw that it weighed almost 4 kilos. Since when have there been chickens that size? What would you have to feed one to get it that large? There were actually only two turkeys and I took the smaller of the two, at 6 kilos.

At the cash register as I was paying for my groceries I saw an extraordinary thing. My turkey had dribbled a bit of body fluids onto the rubber mat of the conveyor belt and the cash girl commenced to clean it off with a tissue and some spray. But what was so striking was that she pressed a button and the empty conveyor belt rolled around, quietly and efficiently, while she sprayed and wiped. It was the first time I had ever seen any cashier at a grocery store in this country use the conveyor belt. They all have them, they just don’t use them. I had always assumed they weren’t hooked up or something. Every single time I’d been through a check-out, including just moments before this when the cashier had rung through my mountain of groceries, the bag boy piled everything onto the conveyor belt and then patiently moved things by hand, item by item, closer to the cashier as she cleared a space on the belt immediately beside her.

It is a mystery.

At home I shoved the turkey into the fridge and forgot about it till late in the afternoon when there really wasn’t enough time to cook it for dinner. Well, I had thought there was enough time. Along with everything else about roasting a turkey I had forgotten how long it takes. I was thinking something along the lines of an hour and a-half. But when I looked it up on the internet and saw that I needed something like 3 hours I realized that the best thing would be to keep it in the fridge till the next day. But I couldn’t do that. Instead I rushed to the kitchen, turned on the oven, hauled the bird out of the fridge and washed it in the sink in a mad panic, splashing water and epidermis all over the place, polished it up with some butter and herbs and tipped it into the oven.

It struck me that there was something odd about the turkey. I was in such a hurry to get it into the oven that I hadn’t stopped to think about it being rather an unusual shape. Unlike the rotund, trussed, North American turkeys this one was long and sort of lean. The impression was one of athleticism and self restraint.

As it cooked it bore out the appearance of being less fatty than a Butterball. I’d always been able to make gravy from what dripped down off the turkey while it cooked but this bird didn’t drip. It just sat there turning brown and sinewy as the hours crept by. I kept adding water to the pan so that the two or three drops of butter that had rolled off the skin and landed there wouldn’t burn. I must have added a litre by the time the carcass, almost done, reluctantly released a modest dribble of juice.

I stood looking at it, oven-mitted hands on hips, for some minutes after hauling it out of the oven. It was a remarkable sight. Its legs stuck straight out like it had been running for its life at the very moment the heat and flame engulfed it. The elongated, muscular body added to the effect. But the colour was the most striking feature. It wasn’t so much golden-brown as sunburn-red. As the reddest parts were all on the top surface of the bird it looked uncannily like a beach-goer who has fallen asleep on the beach under a noonday sun.

The kids were starving by then and I put aside my reflections to slice some breast meat off for our meal. Since M never knows what time he’ll get home, and it’s usually late, we are in the habit of eating dinner whether he’s back yet or not. The meat was good and not dry like I had expected. The gravy wasn’t great, but that was no surprise since I’d had almost no drippings to work with.

Shortly after we’d eaten, and before I’d got up to carve up the rest of the turkey, M came in the door. He set his briefcase down, drew in a breath and said, “Mmm, what have you been cooking?”

Turning to the kitchen, his face froze. Sunburnt, stretched out beyond the ends of the roasting pan in a pose of agonized rigor mortis, the turkey was a grotesque sight to behold.

“What —?” he faltered. “What is that?”

“Oh, that’s a turkey,” I said casually.

“Thank God,” he said, “For a moment there I thought you’d cooked somebody’s dog.”

“It’s a Lebanese turkey,” I said.

“Ah.”

“And quite tasty.”

“Oh?“

“Yes. I think this was a turkey who took care of himself.”

“Very good. So what’s the occasion?”

“Well, no occasion, really. I just thought, I didn’t make one at Christmas and all, so why not.”

“Hm.” M went into the bedroom to change. When he came back to the kitchen he said, “Have you been watching the news?”

“Of course not. You know me. Canada could have decided that beavers are getting too much power and it’s high time another animal had a turn on the nickel and I wouldn’t know about it till someone told me.”

“That’s what I thought. So you haven’t heard that our government here has collapsed?”

“What? Here? The government collapsed?” I whipped my head around to stare out the window, though what I expected to see I can’t tell you.

“Yes.”

“Well, what does it mean? Should we be packing our bags, fleeing the country etc.?”

“Oh no, I don’t think so. Nothing like that.”

“We just carry on as usual, then?”

“Right.”

We sat quietly for a moment.

“Well. All right then. Let’s get you some dinner.”

And I shuffled over to the stove and began to saw at the turkey.

Another Haircut, Hopefully No Lice

It has taken another trip to the hairdresser’s to prod me back to blogging.

Last night when my mother-in-law was here she asked if I’d like to go with her to her hairdresser’s today. She seemed quite earnest in her wish to have me accompany her and told me (again) that it was a “cheap” place, apparently convinced that frugality prevents me from darkening the doors of hair salons more frequently.

Frankly, I think she has noticed my hair growing longer and is afraid I might cut it myself again.

If any other person, in any other place, had tried to entice me to a hair salon by telling me it was cheap I would have ended the matter on the spot with a few juicy words describing my experiences with cheap haircuts. If there was ever case of getting what you pay for, haircuts must be it. But some unnamed force inside me compelled me to say, “Sure, what the heck. Count me in.”

I guess it was partly the attractive anticipation of having my hair attended to by a normal human being in a normal shop instead of in the biosphere glass world inhabited by stick-insect automatons. Plus, I kind of just wanted to experience the cheap salon. Like when you open a container of moulding food from the back of the fridge and have a sniff. You know it’s going to stink, and that there’s nothing to be gained from smelling it, but you smell it anyway. It was sort of that same compulsion.

My mother-in-law told me to be ready at nine, that we would depart then. So this morning found me ringing her doorbell precisely at nine. She didn’t answer. I rang it, at intervals, about ten times. I could hear loud, vigorous noises coming from the other side of the door. It sounded like someone was stacking sacks of potatoes up against it. Finally I pulled out my cell phone and rang.

She answered in a breathless voice and I said, a bit pinched, “I’m at the door.”

“What, my door?” she asked in apparent surprise.

“Um, yes, your door,” I said.

She opened it immediately and apologized, saying that she had called me on our home phone a few minutes earlier and, finding no answer, had concluded I must be sleeping or in the shower. So she had got out the vacuum cleaner and was doing some housework. The thudding sounds were her piling the carpets against the door.

“But we agreed to leave at nine,” I said. “I would have let you know if I wasn’t going to be ready.”

“Never mind,” she laughed. “Just give me ten minutes. Have a seat. Do you want to watch tv?”

“No thanks,” I said ungraciously and plopped down on the couch to wait.

She dressed quickly and in a few minutes we were on our way. Kassem, our driver, was wearing a winter jacket that looked strangely familiar. I kept stealing glances at it but it wasn’t until later when I had a good look at the front of the jacket that I recognized it as one of our own discards. It was one M had been presented with once in Canada for his work on a company project and the jacket bore the project’s name on its breast pocket. Well-made and warm, the jacket saw some good use for two winters but when we found ourselves in the Middle East it wasn’t needed anymore. It stayed in a box for years until last fall when I reluctantly included it in some bags of clothes we were getting rid of. Here in Beirut there are no thrift stores as such but I give our unneeded things to either Kassem or my mother-in-law and they find their way to people who can use them. I didn’t remember specifically giving Kassem the jacket, nor did I suppose he would wear it to work, but I did and he has.

It made me remember once in Saudi my neighbour telling me, in outrage, that she had seen one of the compound gardeners wearing the very t-shirt she had thrown out in the garbage the week before. She was furious. She was a very nice woman who hardly seemed to mind anything but she was wildly indignant about that t-shirt. I understood how she felt because I’d have felt the same way. The idea of someone digging through my garbage! But the difference between me and her is that I probably wouldn’t have admitted my outrage. I guess she is more honest than I am. The shame of being so rich compared to so many in the Middle East is always a millstone around my neck.

Kassem drove us through tiny, crowded streets, my mother-in-law frequently shouting from the back seat things like, “Turn left here!” when Kassem had already started to turn left. We piled out in a one-way street with parked cars lining both sides of the narrow street. My mother-in-law seized my arm and pulled me with her into the path of a taxi and a moped that was overtaking the taxi. They swerved to avoid us and we gained the relative safety of the sidewalk (it really is relative safety – people drive their mopeds on the sidewalk sometimes).

Small shops selling jewellery, fabric, plastic bowls, step-ladders and authentic Giorgio Armini gowns squashed themselves into every square foot of space and pressed over us from the overhung first floor. My mother-in-law strode boldly to the nearest glass door and pushed but the door didn’t yield so without pausing she walked a few meters to the next door and tried it. It opened, but apparently she didn’t like what she saw for she backed out again immediately.

“Come on, Jenn, I know where it is,” she said, stepping briskly to the next door down the line.

This didn’t yield the desired results, either, and she paused to look around.

“Ah, there it is!” she cried, pointed down the block. “I know where it is, I just didn’t recognize it at first.”

This time she ushered me confidently through the glass door before her. It was indeed the right place. I was prepared for it to be no-frills but this was something on an a new scale altogether. It looked like a dodgy motel. The ceiling was low and the lighting weak. The walls, originally a headache white, were smudged and smeared, as if ten generations of mud-pat making little kids had attended nursery school there. The tiles were of chipped and worn marble with veins of red and green swirling garishly around each other and threatening sea-sickness if you let your gaze linger too long. Cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air, and a tired-looking bleached blonde woman greeted us indifferently.

My mother-in-law led the way around a corner, through a scattering of bare-bones hair stations and into a portioned-off back room, where ladies who wear headscarves could bare their heads in a man-free environment. Two or three older women were sitting around in various stages of root touch-ups. None of them were getting natural-looking colours. Even the oldest of them, a women who was well over seventy, maintained her hair in deepest shades of black.

The room was just incredibly dingy looking and I tried to keep the shocked look off my face. There seemed to be one hairdresser and a younger girl working as her assistant. My mother-in-law announced that we were there for hair-cuts and that “she”, pointing to me, “doesn’t speak Arabic.” I should mention here for those of you who do not know that my mother-in-law doesn't speak English, and that the only language in which she and I converse is Arabic. My grasp of the language is stumbling and limited but it's quite serviceable, yet in the car on the way to the hair salon my mother-in-law kept asking me questions about how I wanted my hair cut, as though she would have to explain everything to them (and which is exactly what she did).

The hairdresser said kindly that she would be with us in a minute so we seated ourselves on a bench against the wall. The assistant beckoned me over to wash my hair at the little sink in a dark corner of the room. I wasn’t expecting Aveda shampoo or anything but the smell of what she was using reminded me of hand soap in airport bathrooms. Sure enough when I straightened up with the towel on my head I saw that she had been using a giant bottle of the absolute cheapest-looking stuff I ever saw. It just said “Shampoo” on it and some Arabic print.

When I sat down at the hair-cutting station I noticed that the chair was an ordinary one and didn’t have any mechanism to raise or lower it. Hard luck for her today, I thought, since at 5’7” I am taller than most Lebanese women. She came and gave my hair a cursory brushing and that’s when I noticed, with horror, the absence of any kind of disinfecting receptacle for the brushes and combs. Looking beside me at the battered implements trolley I saw a selection of hair tools and not one of them was immersed in a bottle of alcohol (or whatever that blue stuff is that sizzles up lice and ringworm). When she set down the brush that had just swiped my own head a few times I saw that it was full of hair, not my own.

My mother-in-law, friendly and chatty with everyone, discussed various subjects with the hairdresser while the other set to work cutting. My mother-in-law explained to the hair dresser that I’d had long hair last year and it was really lovely, but that I’d decided to cut it and although it looked nice now it was really very lovely before. The hairdresser was a pretty fair cutter of hair, I’ll give her that. I was pleased with the cut. But after seeing the hairbrush I’m afraid the rest of the visit was a bit of a blur for me.

My mother-in-law wouldn’t let me pay when it came time to leave. Of course. She never lets me pay for things without a big fight. These days I find I am weary of the struggle and don’t argue. The haircuts were 5,000 LL each. That’s three dollars and thirty-three cents, in American money. I don’t believe I have ever had a haircut for that price. Even as a kid at the local hairdressers in our small town I’m pretty sure I paid five dollars, or even ten.

So there, I’ve done it. I have committed the hairdressing equivalent of smelling rotten food. I’m terrified that I’ve picked up lice and I won’t be able to truly relax for at least a week. Every tingle of my scalp is going to make me tremble in fear that it’s the first nibbling of hungry parasites. All this because I didn’t feel like watching snooty Tony fuss around me in his expensive jeans and silly voice. I’m telling you today, and you can quote me on this any time you want, that for my next haircut I’m going straight to Tony and I’ll kiss the sanitized tiles he walks on.

Recreation

I can’t shake off the feeling that M is trying to turn our family into a breakfast cereal commercial. He’s always trying to get us to do activities that families in muesli adverts do and he absolute insists that we do it together as one unit.

I think it’s because he works so much. His leisure hours are few and he wants something to show for them.

“Plan something for us to do this weekend,” he says. “I don’t want to just sit around the house watching tv.”

“You don’t?” I ask. “Because you really do seem to enjoy that.”

“No, I don’t. We’re wasting our lives away. Let’s go skiing. Or biking. Hey, that reminds me: did you call that place about the scuba diving lessons?”

M doesn’t regard time spent lounging around the house playing Uno and eating peanuts as a relaxing and enjoyable way to bond with family members. For him, these are hours of his life that he’ll never see again.

The kids are in favour of the muesli lifestyle. What middle-school-aged earthlings wouldn’t be? They love skiing and boating and swimming. The bottle-neck, if you’ll permit the shapely metaphor, is me. There was a time I enjoyed a selection of vigorous outdoor pursuits but I don’t anymore. If it involves pain, hypothermia or the possibility of having to send up emergency flares, I’m just not interested. And it is my conviction that I should be allowed to enjoy my early-middle years in dignity, not squeezed into a wetsuit poking my finger into holes in a reef.

This week, with the holidays looming and no one else in the family excited at the prospect of playing Pictionary beside the Christmas tree, I’ve yielded to popular opinion and booked us a ski holiday. But I would like to let the record show that I did so against my better judgement and if I return from the trip with an ankle that spins like a loose nut when flicked, let it be on their heads.

I can't say that I ever enjoyed getting bashed in the back of the calves by chair lifts or leaving part of my face on low-hanging tree branches but at a certain time in my life I considered these a fair trade-off for the pleasure of swooshing down a snowy slope with the wind in my face and my ear tips breaking off.

But nowadays I just think: why? Ski resorts have cosy hotels with crackling fireplaces. Why should I risk injury, exhaustion and humiliation on the slopes when I could be curled up in front of a fireplace, drinking hot chocolate and laughing at the misfortunes of others?

Ironically, it’s M who risks injury more than the rest of us. The kids are supple and can collapse into a fall the way you should. I learned to ski while young and always stay well within the limits of my fading abilities. M, on the other hand, is a newish skier but doesn’t see why that should stop him going on the difficult runs. He doesn’t crash often but when he does it’s dramatic.

Not for him the quiet sinking into a puffy bank of snow. When he goes down it’s like a clothesline pole being flung onto frozen ground. There’s the sense of body parts staying straight that shouldn’t, and then all is obliterated in a cloud of snow that blinds skiers two hills over.

When the snow has settled M may be found lying in a crumpled heap, one gloved hand stabbing ineffectually at a binding that won’t release the leg wrapped around his head. He will have hurt himself in at least one permanent and significant way but he will be undeterred. While I implore him to return immediately to the chalet and possibly doctor’s office, M quietly collects his scattered bits from the hillside and pushes off, saying we can still get two runs in before lunch if we don’t waste time.

But I have a plan this year. I've booked a chalet right on the ski hill and hope to be able to nip in to the room to warm up or have a nap while the others are busy skiing the upper slopes. Just before the lifts close for the day I'll swoop up behind them, spraying them lightly with snow as I skid to a stop, and say, "Hey you guys, where've you been? I've been all over the mountain looking for you."

That'd make a pretty good muesli ad, wouldn't it?

Raining

It’s finally raining and the effect on the household is electric. The kids are tearing around shrieking and for the first time in months I’m enjoying hot tea without sitting under the air conditioner.

We’ve lived in perpetual summer for four years. Dubai only had three seasonal variations: hot, really hot and kids, come inside, your hair is on fire. And when we holiday in Canada in summertime it’s, well, summertime. “Gosh, what a winter we had!” people tell us when we arrive to cloudless blue skies and a molten sun. “You wouldn’t know it now but two weeks ago we had to tunnel through a ten-foot snow drift to get to the car. What amazing timing that you’ve arrived now — they just said on the news it’s going to be the hottest week in half a century.”

A particular weariness grips me at such times and I yearn for a cool, rain-spattered morning. I’d like to be able to do housework wearing something more than a bra. I want to curl up with a book under a blanket on a cold evening instead of bickering over the set point of the air conditioner with M, who believes that normal room temperature is 27 degrees C and anything cooler is just asking for pneumonia.

I’m not fool enough to actually wish to live somewhere cold, though. Like I was as a teenager on the farm in Alberta when I bitterly declared that I was going to get “as far away from here as possible.” I didn’t understand then the importance of being careful what you wish for.

No, without a lawyer beside me to put it into language that Fate cannot find a loophole around, I won’t wish for that. The company M works for doesn’t have an office in Greenland but if I start wishing for a cooler place you can bet your kids' inheritance that they’ll decide there ought to be an office in Greenland and that M is the just the man to run it.

The Diary Experiment (Then Abandoned)

Nov 28th, 2010

9 am: Am I going mad or is M raising the shower head by half an inch per day? I keep lowering it but it always seems to get higher. Was careful to watch his eyes when exiting the bathroom but couldn't be absolutely sure of his expression. Will bide my time...

10 am: The mosquitoes have launched a full-scale attack! No wonder we haven't seen any for weeks now -- they were busy consolidating their forces, preparing for this day. We've secured our perimeters but cannot discover how they are getting in. Also, more ominously, they seem to be unusually robust. M zapped one with the racket-zapper in the bathroom, picked it up off the floor where it lay quite burnt (we thought) and chucked it in the toilet. Moments later when one grazed his head he said, "Could it be...?", looked in the toilet and saw that the 'dead' mosquito had disappeared. M hit it again with the zapper and kept zapping it this time till it shrivelled up and turned black.

Noon: My mother-in-law brought a plate of something up for us that got Noonie excited 'cause she thought it was strawberry cake. Turned out to be raw meat, a Lebanese delicacy and one of my mother-in-law's specialties. She whips it up till it looks just like pink gelatto.

Discovered we were out of pita bread (absolutely necessary to eat the raw meat with) so M sent the natoor's son to get us some from the shop around the corner. The natoor (building superintendent, in a purely Lebanese sense – his duties pretty much amount to taking out the garbage and washing down the steps) has gone home to Syria for a week or two and left his son in charge of looking after our building. The son can’t be much more than eight years old and he is living in the little apartment down on the ground floor by himself while his father is gone. He only comes up to my midriff.

4 pm: Doorbell rang, a woman I've never seen before looming in the peephole. Introduced herself abruptly as neighbour from downstairs. Was steaming mad, said there was water leaking into her master bedroom. Fussed around quite angrily, insisted I come downstairs to view the damage, which she said had been going on for a month. Also showed me damage in another of their bedrooms from last winter when our flat was being renovated. I was sympathetic but didn't actually say I was sorry because this is the first I've heard about it and so can hardly be accused of negligence (I wasn't even living in the country last winter during the renovations). Why didn't she tell me a month ago? Everyone in this building is completely cracked, I'm telling you.

5 pm: Suddenly realized that the angry downstairs neighbour would be the same woman I accidentally trapped between floors in the elevator last month when I turned off the generator. How was I to know she was in there and that they would have to pry open the doors and haul her up by her armpits? Still, kind of explains her shirty attitude.

Nov 30th, 2010

10 am: Apparently at my father-in-law’s request, a man has painted the elevator door on our landing a hideous poo brown. It doesn’t match our apartment door, it doesn’t match the walls, but it does sort of match a bruise I have on my thigh from a shopping cart.

7 pm: Called my parents-in-law and said I was bringing a cake down to eat with them as soon as it came out of the oven.

Half an hour later got a phone call from my father-in-law. “What happened? Aren’t you coming?”

“The cake’s not done yet,” I said. “I mean, I did say I would bring it when it came out of the oven.”

“Oh. I thought maybe I’d misunderstood you.”

Fifteen minutes later the kids and I rang their doorbell. We found them sitting in front of the television with the plates already set out and the kettle on. They like cake. They asked me what kind it was. I said, “Banana and zucchini.” They burst into laughter. “Zucchini! That’s a good one! Can you imagine a zucchini cake? Ha ha ha!”

I said, “No, really. It has zucchini in it.”

Well, I wish you could have seen their faces. They had never heard of putting zucchini in a cake. I told them huffily that it was a well-established cake ingredient where I come from. I wasn’t actually sure if it was well-established or not. I know I used to have a very good chocolate cake recipe that had zucchini in it so when I ran short of bananas this time I’d grated some of the little local courgettes into the batter.

The cake tasted fine but I don’t think my father-in-law really enjoyed it. He ate very slowly, working through his slice with a thoughtful, sombre expression. My mother-in-law is quite strict with what she feeds him and zealously trys to cut all the fat and sugar out of his diet. But he gets a sort of free pass to eat whatever someone else has made and he normally has two pieces of cake when he's at our house. I'm sure it made his day when I called to say I was bringing round a cake. He probably waited for it in a state of happy anticipation. He laughed with such delight at my wit when I announced that the cake contained a certain quantity of vegetable. And at the end of it all to find it wasn't a joke at all! Poor man.

8:30 pm: The new paint has caused the elevator door to stick. We arrived at our floor and found we couldn't get out of the lift so I threw myself at the door with a cry of "You'll never take me alive!", whereupon it burst open with a ripping sound and I fell out onto the landing with one slipper gone and my t-shirt riding up my back. Later I realized we could have gone down to the floor below and got out.

Dec 3rd, 2010

9 am: Father-in-law having very bad week. Ruptured a disc in his back and was told he should have immediate surgery. In the midst of this he was faced with my zucchini cake. And last night while he was out his faithful old Chevy Blazer died and he was forced to abandon it and come home in a taxi.

4 pm: Shirty neighbour has invited me to tea! Ha!

I left her a note (when no one answered the door bell) saying I was about to run water in the bathroom that we think was causing the problem and to let me know if she found any water coming down. She called me later and thanked me for ‘caring’ and asked me if I’d like to come round for tea sometime.

I don’t, though. Scary image of her livid face still twitching in my memory circuits.

Dec 5th, 2010

6 pm: Went out to a cafe with M, just the two of us. His mind is always preoccupied with work, multi-million dollar projects and people who are getting the sack, but to my everlasting disappointment he doesn't like to talk about it. I have the opposite problem: I love to talk but have no material. I considered telling him how I'd finally found where the weird smell in the bathroom was coming from but he was eating a cream-filled cake which didn't lend itself to the tale. And so we watched people walking by on the street and remarked to one another how young everyone seems to be getting.

7pm: After the cafe drove down to the beach road and took a walk. The beach itself was mostly deserted except for a group of men on plastic chairs playing cards under the palm frond roof of a make-shift hut. A little Honda generator buzzed power for three light bulbs strung on a wire over their heads. We went down to the water and listened to the waves and I recalled the time I came across a dead goat washed up on the sand there.

8 pm: My key for the building wouldn’t work, which was not surprising since it has never worked. The building isn’t locked during the day so it’s not usually a problem. While M parked the car I stood there jigging the key around and cursing softly but the water-leak neighbour happened to come home just then and with a cheery salutation used her key to let us in.

I think Nawras is back from Syria because as we stepped into the elevator I saw his elbow, or an elbow that looks uncannily like his, propping up an unseen body on the floor in front of the telly in his room.

My Phone

I’m thinking about having my cell phone stolen. I’ll just go out one day to a cafe with it and “accidently” leave it on a table while I go to the ladies’ room or for a leisurely stroll through the shops and by the time I come back for it the hateful little slab will be someone else’s problem.

I wasn’t always this way. I loved the phone I used to have. It was one of the simplest models available at the time and let me tell you, me and that phone understood each other perfectly. It lived to serve, at least most of the time. There was one regrettable period in which it spontaneously called people with the redial button when I went to the toilet. I suppose it must have panicked, finding the front jeans pocket in which I always carried it suddenly squashing down around it with devastating force. Whatever may have been the motive, I cannot pretend to have enjoyed hearing a small voice saying, “Hello? Hello?” when I was sitting on the toilet and having to decide, after a confused moment, whether to extract the phone from my pocket and try to explain to the other party what had occurred or to play dead and not make a sound. Remaining perfectly silent, of course, isn’t always possible in such circumstances. Luckily redial usually meant it was a friend on the other end and I would be able to laugh the whole thing off with them. There was one toilet call to my father-in-law, however, and for that I elected to play dead. Foolish of course, since the man worries incessantly about family members coming to harm, so for him to get an unexpected call from me and then hear nothing but silence (I most sincerely, ardently hope) on the other end simply prompted him to ring back immediately and ask in an agitated voice what was going on and was everyone was alright?

Excepting the redial fiasco my phone was an exemplary communication device. Sadly, with the passing of the years it grew fuzzy beneath the screen and chipped around its edges. Finally the battery began to fall out at unexpected moments and I decided to buy a new phone. Why I didn’t get another model like it is a question for which I have no satisfactory answer. I just thought I’d get a really good phone and that it would last me for ages. I went for another Nokia, my faith in them unshakable (I thought) but instead of browsing their lower-end phones went straight to their top model and that was the fatal mistake.

I like appliances and electronics that are simple. The simpler the better. I once sent M all over town to try and find me a microwave that had only a dial in the way of controls. Believe me, if I could find a cell phone with a dial I would buy it. I couldn’t even answer my new high-tech phone at first. That should have been a sign to return it immediately to the store and get a simpler model, wouldn’t you think? Actually I still can’t answer it with any degree of promptitude. The phone directs me to slide my thumb over an animated arrow in the direction indicated when I have an incoming call, and I do as it says, but it doesn’t work. I slide and slide and nothing happens and the person eventually hangs up. If it’s M he gets quite testy and right away rings the landline. “Why don’t you have your phone on you?” he asks. “What’s the point of having a cell phone if you don’t use it?”

It has occurred to me that the phone is trying to sabotage my marriage. But it’s not just the incoming call answer mechanism that frustrates me. It’s a hundred other things. I can’t complain anymore about it to M – I don’t want to make him cry in front of the kids. He’s offered to try to sell it for me but when I asked him what he thought we could get for it and his answer was about one third of what I paid for it I crossed my arms and said, “I will learn to love it.”

To be fair, I am prepared to believe it is a great phone in the right person’s hands. And by ‘right person’ I mean someone who doesn’t carry an electromagnetic cloud around them at all times that scrambles every computing device in a three meter radius. I just have to be in the same room as a computer for it to crash and the hapless owner to shake his head and say, “Gee, it’s never done that before.” If the army knew my worth, boy, I wouldn't be sitting here writing this blog, that's for sure.

Anyhow, the way I see it I’m stuck with this phone until it a) dies, b) gets lost, or c) gets stolen. It looks the picture of health so I’m not going to pin my hopes on a natural death. If I lose it I look bad and M might start reminiscing about some of my losing streaks like the ‘02/’03 season when I left five different wallets at various stores and public places all over Calgary. If the phone gets stolen, however, we all win. People will feel bad for me and M will make sure I am never again in possession of the kind of phone that anyone wants to pinch. If and when the day comes that I find myself rid of it I’m going to go down to the mobile phone shop, slap my wallet on the counter, and say, “Bring me your cheapest phone, my good man. Spare no effort in scouring the shop and back room for the model that does nothing, nothing whatsoever but dial a number. And whatever you come across, ask yourself this: could a monkey call his mother from this phone? If the answer is no, keep looking.”

What, me worry?

I try not to worry about political stuff when I’m here in Lebanon. I mean, what’s the point? I never understand what’s going on anyway. My in-laws watch the news all day long and they’ll let me know if there’s something to worry about. My father-in-law worries the most of anybody and as a consequence his nerves are completely shot. He’s like a gun-shy horse, always waiting with trembling knees for the next bang. It works out well for me, though. I sleep like a log knowing he’s a few floors below me fretting enough for the whole family.

Yesterday around dinner time I heard the noise of a crowd in the big intersection near our building and I looked down to see some sort of demonstration about to start. People were massing under the intersection’s bridge near the army tank which is always parked there with its attendant soldiers. Traffic had slowed to a crawl as people drifted in twos and threes toward the gathering point and up on top of the bridge I saw large banners being readied for hanging from the girder. Someone was setting up a sound system and makeshift podium.

I wondered what was going on. I wasn’t exactly worried but a certain disquiet crept over me. Political tensions have been running pretty high in the country lately and who knew what a demonstration might turn into? Things could get violent. Dusk was falling and the figures milling around in the semi-darkness underneath the bridge began to take on a menacing aspect. I had just decided to call my father-in-law to ask him what was happening when I heard the swell of voices chanting something in unison. It was a short, rhythmic chant which quickly grew in volume. I rushed back to the window and the first thing I saw was the twin banners now hanging unfurled from the bridge. They were huge, stretching down several meters each with an identical symbol in bright red that I could see clearly from my window. Their meaning was impossible to misinterpret.

They were tomatoes.

(Yup. M confirmed it later when he came home from work and saw the story on the news. It was a protest by the local vegetable sellers against the high source price of tomatoes.)

And so you see, this is why it’s really a waste of my energy to worry about anything around here.

Chickens and Their Heads

I was making chicken stock yesterday, onion and celery simmering in the pot, when I got the chicken out of the fridge and prepared to clean it. It was a whole chicken, packed by the supermarket on a foam tray and wrapped in plastic. Tap running, I pulled it from the plastic wrap to give it a wash when I dropped the bird with a startled "Ughh!" and jumped back with a pounding heart.

The chicken had a head.

I was glad no one was at home to witness the sorry spectacle of me taking fright like that. After all, I am supposed to be a tough farm girl and there is protocol to be observed. One does not go round shrieking at the sight of a dead animal. But in my defence, chickens you buy from the store aren't supposed to have heads still on them, especially not tucked underneath so you don't see it until you've lifted the thing up in your hands.

Maybe it awoke in me some dark memory of the time I tried to make a business of chickens. I was about fourteen and starting to appreciate the lucrative business opportunities open to one when the raw materials are provided free by their parents. I was already making a nice bit of money with the calves I raised every year on our farm. The trouble with the calves, though, was that I only saw a paycheck once a year. With chickens I figured I could get a steady cash flow by selling their eggs every week. I already had a flock of bantam chickens running loose around the farm but they were more like pets than anything else. What I needed were professional egg layers so I called up a proper egg farm and arranged to buy 20 of their hens.

I don't know whether I was duped and sold geriatric birds or what but those pea-brained featherbags didn't lay half the number of eggs they were supposed to. I gave them the best food and care any chicken could aspire to and all they did was grow fat. And man oh man, were they dumb. My brother used to call my bantam chickens slow-witted but after the egg-layers arrived he began to regard the bantams as competitive chess players. The egg layers had spent their entire lives indoors before I got them. The outdoor run I attached to their coop gave them a lot of enjoyment but they simply weren't used to being outside. Every movement near the coop sent them into an absolute panic. It soon became apparent that these chickens were no more than three of four neurons ahead of a dandelion in terms of brain development and when they sensed danger a primitive mental panic switch was thrown. The mechanism was clearly of the most rudimentary sort with only a fixed-period timer to regulate it. Once the switch was activated the birds would run around in circles and squawk at the top of their voices for ten minutes even if the thing that startled them in the first place immediately became identifiable as a wholly benign presence, such as myself carrying the feed pail. The birds would not shut up until the timer had run its course.

Those hens never got to laying many eggs. The day came when I decided to put seven or eight of them in the freezer and sell the rest. Our neighbour Albert came over to do the mercy killings and my sister, whom I had somehow talked into joining me in the chicken venture, stood with me to assist. Albert quickly and efficiently dispatched the first few hens and then suggested that we girls learn how to do it. I went first. Shaking like jello on a jackhammer I killed one chicken and handed the axe back to Albert so quickly I nearly cut his hand off. Theo came up for her turn. I could see she was having even a harder time than I was working up her nerve to do it. The chicken, which Albert was holding upside down, began to cackle hysterically and flap its wings. Albert gently suggested to Theo that she not delay any longer. Theo was fighting a tremendous inner battle and kept raising the axe only to lower it again slowly a few seconds later. Finally, with Albert's gentle persuasion she raised the axe and brought it down swiftly. But even then something in her couldn't go through with it and the axe merely bumped the chicken hard in the back of the head, causing it to squawk even louder. Theo tried to hand the axe back to Albert but he seemed to feel that since she had come this far she ought to finish the job. Again he positioned the bird and again Theo raised her axe. She had a calmer, steadier look in her eye and I thought she was really going to do it this time but she pulled up at the last moment so that for the second time the axe only clipped the bird soundly on the back of the head. Albert didn't resist this time when she pushed the axe back at him and fled to a safe distance.

Anyway, that was the end of the chicken business. I sold the rest of the hens to my friend's dad, who wanted them in spite of my warnings about their shiftless attitude toward egg-laying. The bantams lost their elevated status and once more became the dumbest animals on the farm. And one of the slaughtered hens, after we had brought them into the house for cleaning as soon as Albert was done, took a few years off my life when it suddenly scrambled to its feet in the kitchen sink and flapped its wings while craning its neck this way and that as though trying to look around the room with the head that was no longer there.

The lesson you should have learned from today's blog is this: the presence of a head on a chicken is no indication of life. There may be a head and no life. There may be a life but no head. (And if you don't believe me look up "Mike the Headless Chicken" on the internet and you'll find out about a young rooster who lived for a year and a-half without his head before tragically choking to death in an Arizona motel.) And now I'm tired of talking about chickens so good night.

The Haircut

Lebanese hairdressers are both the best and worst hair dressers to go to and here is why: They are incredibly good at cutting hair and really, revoltingly stuck-up about it. This is a sweeping generalization, sure, but then this is a blog, not the BBC, so I guess I can make a few broad sweeps if the mood is on me.

This morning I cut my own hair. I just divided it into sections, leaned over the bathroom sink and started chopping. Now, I hear what you’re saying and you’re absolutely right, it should never be attempted. It’s just that I really needed a haircut and couldn’t bear the thought of going to a Lebanese hair salon. Not yet. I’ve only been back in the country two months and I’ve got to take on the challenges it brings one broken sidewalk tile at a time.

Previously when I lived here I went to a salon owned by a fella named Tony. They’re nearly all named Tony, you know. In these uncertain times I guarantee that you can count on this: if your stylist is Lebanese and named Tony you have every chance of getting a fabulous haircut. My particular Tony’s salon was recommended to me by my sister-in-law, who can be relied upon for direction in all clothing or beauty-related matters. I remember that I had delayed going, as I always do, until I could use my eyes only by lifting my hair up off my face with one hand and holding it to the side.

 The salon turned out to be small with lots of mirrors, track lighting and huge posters of women with green lipstick and blue hair. There was only one other client, a woman with a head full of aluminum foil, talking in a gravelly voice into her cell phone. She glanced at me and looked away again. In front of a door in the corner of the salon a group of three or four young people lounged, speaking in affected voices and checking their look in the mirror every two seconds or so. They were all dressed with painstaking care to look like they just got out of bed. The hair was mussed just so, the jeans had the right brand name with the correct factory tears in the leg, the makeup (only on the girls, I’m pretty sure) was thickly in place and blotted enough to absorb the rays of a collapsing star. The eye makeup was black and applied with asphalt-laying equipment.

That, of course, is how makeup is meant to be worn in Lebanon. There is no such thing as light or natural-looking makeup. You either slather it on or you don’t bother with any, which is something my mother-in-law and I discuss in the following manner: every now and again she asks me why I don’t wear makeup. I tell her I do wear it, every single day, and she says “No, you don’t,” and I say “But yes, I do, I’m wearing makeup right now,” and she says, “Where? I don’t see any.” So I point to the mascara on my eyelashes, which she says she can’t see, and the discussion dwindles away, to be revived by my mother-in-law at a later date.)

 One of the heavily made-up girls came lazily forward when I walked in and asked me in Arabic what I desired. I pushed my forelock to the side and said that I wanted a haircut, please. She didn’t say anything or even acknowledge that I had answered her. She turned expressionlessly to the mirror and checked her look — I think, particularly, her bottom, which was tiny and no doubt a great source of comfort to her in consideration of the size of her nostrils — before leading me back to the hair washing area. A washerwoman of sorts was summoned, coming up through a dark opening in the floor on the tiniest spiral staircase I had ever seen. She washed my hair while I stared at the ceiling and then I was towel wrapped and led to a chair. I was asked, by the washerwoman, if I would like some tea or coffee. Not yet having entered my tea-addiction phase which was to overpower me later that same year I said I’d just like water and while she went to fetch it one of the young men picked himself up from his perch and strolled over. Without a word or even eye contact he began combing my hair. I mean, I don’t ask for much. He doesn’t need to tell me his life story or even his name but how about a ‘hi’ or a smile and a nod? There’s just something so weird to me about a stranger walking up to me and wordlessly combing my hair. I know I’m too clenched about these things and that I’m going to be one of those very difficult old people who spits on the nurses and yells “Help! I’m being murdered!” when taken for my bath.

The young guy combed my hair while continuing to participate in the conversation his friends were having over in the corner. I didn’t understand everything they were saying but it sounded like the most feather-brained exchange a group of upright hominids could produce — a series of unconnected boasts, all hinting at a glamorous, jet-setting life but never giving any particulars to get hold of. Nobody seemed to be listening to anyone else. I sat in the hairdressing chair and stared at the potato in the mirror that was my head and wondered what a bunch of models and movie stars, as they seemed to consider themselves, were doing hanging around in a hair salon on a weekday morning. Then hair-combing guy shoved off and Tony appeared.

I didn’t know it was Tony (I only found out later from my sis-in-law). He was in his mid-thirties and dressed even more expensively casual than the underlings. He greeted me condescendingly but not discourteously and asked, in English, how I wanted my hair. He then whipped out a pair of scissors and began to flip them around so fast they became a blur in the mirror. In five minutes my hair looked fantastic. Even though it was still wet I could tell this was an excellent haircut. During the last couple of minutes of the haircut Tony’s mobile rang. On the other end of the line was someone who had apparently rung him for no other purpose than to lavish praise upon him because all Tony said, in between long periods of listening, was “Merci... oh, merci beaucoup,” in a prissy kind of voice. I swear that’s all he said for three straight minutes. I was dying to know what he was being thanked for. A haircut? It seemed a stretch. I’ve never called up a hairdresser from my home to tell them how pleased I am with my new ‘do’. Then Tony pocketed his phone, gave my hair a final whizz with the scissors and vanished.

I didn’t even realize he was done till the first guy reappeared with a hair-dryer in his hand and began to burn my scalp with it while aggressively pulling a round brush through my hair like he was hauling up a marlin. Naturally I didn’t say anything to him. The most appropriate thing would have been to screech, “For %#&* sake, that hurts!” and smack his hand away. But I sat there motionless with a composed, neutral expression, pretending I had no pain-sensing neurons and that if anyone wanted to skewer me with a barber's comb or use my lips to hold a hot curling iron it was nothing to me.

It ended, as these things do, with my hair looking exactly like the head of a Barbie from the 1960’s. The cut was good but the styling was ridiculous. My mother-in-law loved it, however, and in her subtle way asked me why I didn’t get my hair professionially styled once a week. After all, it was so flattering and a woman needs to look good for her husband.

I don’t know if you understand now why I cut my own hair over the bathroom sink. I’m not going to make it a habit or anything. I know Tony is still in business because we drove past his salon a few weeks ago so I will go to see him in a month or two. I just couldn’t face it all this week. And the crazy thing is my hair doesn’t look too bad at all. In fact my mother-in-law, once she’d gotten over her shock that I’d cut it myself and that I hadn’t done it to save money (“Oh Jenn, why did you do it, why? I know a great place that’s not expensive, I could have taken you there,”) asked me if I would cut her hair. Huh!

Broken Toilet Seat

Well, I can't believe that. I just broke a toilet seat lid with my knee while fitting a bit of insect screen inside a bathroom fan. It was a tight little area in the corner of a small bathroom and I couldn't reach where I needed to reach without putting my knee up on the toilet lid and leaning a bit. But the lid had absolutely no give whatsoever; I barely pressed on it when there was a great cracking sound and a sloshing of water and there was my leg sticking through the jagged remains of the lid and my foot in the toilet water. The lid had cracked like an egg shell. The toilet is only a few months old and the lid looked really thick and strong but it must have been made of melamine or some even cheaper substance that China is now producing. What is it with stuff here? The toilet seats in Canada are at least flexible, or were when I was living there. Why, the cheapo toilet lid in the mobile home where we spend our summers isn't much thicker than a yogurt lid — absolutely wimpy and won't suffer any kind of weight — but it'll flex way down if you sit on it and spring back up again when you get off.

The worst of this is that unless I manage to find an exact replacement toilet seat before tonight when M gets back from his business trip he's going to know that I put my foot through the old one. It won't be the end of the world or anything — he's not like the husband from Sleeping with the Enemy — it's just that this is not the first household furnishing I've broken while applying my weight to it and I'd prefer that he didn't find out. True, this incident isn't as humiliating as the chair that buckled under me at the dinner table nor as ripe for jokes as the collapsed bed but it isn't the best thing that could've have happened either. It is a toilet that I broke, after all, not something serious and dignified like a chest of drawers or a roll-top desk. M will mention it to people, you see. And there will be questions. "Put her foot through the toilet lid? Well, how did that happen? What was she doing in there?" To my knowledge M has never broken any furniture himself and how earnestly I wish that he would. Even just a stool or a fold-up camping chair. Something. The thing of it is, if I was slender and willowy there would be no issue. I could hurl myself recklessly on to a sturdy armchair causing it disintegrate beneath me in a pile of dust and it would be wholly the fault of the chair, so demonstrably of substandard construction. But lumbering around with an extra half-person on me turns the sympathy in the chair's direction and is apt to generate a look or a few words pertaining to my dietary habits and it's just a little mortifying.

Anyway, I need to go out and look for that lid replacement. And maybe grab a milkshake while I'm at it (ah, just kidding, come on.) Wish me luck then.