A Good Evening in Beirut

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Take it off,” said M.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good idea.  You should.”

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

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

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

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

Anti-Lebanese?

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

Huh? Anti-Lebanese?

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

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

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

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

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

Hips and How You'd Better Show Them Or Else

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

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

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

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

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

                                                          *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, I’m sorry but I don’t see.”   

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

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

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

She shrugged. “They are mans.” 

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

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

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

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

“Can I see the tag please?”

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

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

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

“Okay.  You can swim,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well they did."

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

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

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

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

Home: A Man's Sanctuary

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

Um…

Actually, it’s not quite like that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I was in no mood to listen to reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“A picnic would be nice,” I said.

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

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

“A picnic would be really nice.”

Getting Political

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

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

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

The in-laws are not amused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right House, Wrong Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Let That Guy in Here?

Do you have feelings about fruit?

I’ve just been giving my kiwis a squeeze and — what’s that? No, no, it’s not a euphemism for some activity best kept to myself; I really was squeezing some kiwi fruit and finding with annoyance that they still aren’t ripe. And as I glared at the obstinate little orbs lying fuzz-covered in their basket I realised that a part of my brain is permanently devoted to feelings about fruit.

The thing is, I can’t afford to waste brain space on fruit. It’s all I can do to remember to put out the water bottles on Sunday nights and to recollect what country M said he was going to when he doesn’t show up for dinner.

It’s the involuntary aspect of it that galls me the most. I have never wanted to have strong opinions on fruit and certainly would not have agreed to rent cranial space for such piffle. But I was never asked. It’s as if my brain just does things without even consulting me and I find that quite rude.

You may wonder what I’m jawing on about. Feelings about fruit? Your first response may be to say, well! I certainly do not have feelings about fruit but Jenn, if that’s what blows your hair back you just carry on.

But let me ask you this: do you have a favourite kind of fruit? I’m sure you do. Well, that’s a feeling, an opinion. That’s brain real estate. Now picture different fruits for a moment, and see if you don’t have quite a lot to say about each one.

Take the kiwis I was squeezing. I was annoyed at them for taking so long to ripen. It seems to me that theirs is a defiant sort of character, deliberately uncooperative. They sit there in the fruit basket for weeks like little stones and then suddenly without warning get mushy, all of them on the same day. And you can’t tell when they’re starting to soften by looking at them either, the way you can with bananas.

Bananas don’t last more than three days, that’s true, and it’s definitely a mark against them but you have to admit that they are very forthright. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and you know exactly what’s going on under the peel at all times.

Then you have apples, so reliable and steady – the kind of fruit you’d do well to marry. But beware the too-shiny ones: a waxy skin often hides a mealy character.

Get a load of the grapefruit. Boy, I don’t even know who eats them. Well, I do, actually: my dad. But then again he eats chickpea omelettes for breakfast. I think grapefruits are just mean. They smell so good, they look incredible (especially the ruby ones) but when you dive in you get a mouthful of sour, bitter nastiness.

My mother-in-law is under the impression that I like grapefruits and keeps bringing me bags of them. They’re fresh and wonderful looking, picked from the tree the day before. I know how ungrateful I am to say this but I just can’t stand them. They’re not easy to get rid of, either. They’re very large and take up all my fridge space but if I leave them out on the counter they might be seen by M’s mom, who will demand to know why they haven’t been eaten yet. The kids don’t want them. M will drink the juice of them if I get out the big juicer and splash half the kitchen whilst extracting their liquid. I can’t even give them to Nowras because he tells everything to everybody and I would no doubt get a call from my mother-in-law the next day, ticked off and requiring an explanation. (If you think I’m exaggerating let me tell you that when I threw out a book last fall that had been given to us by my father-in-law he somehow heard about it from Nowras — who, of course, takes out the garbage — and came to ask me why I had chucked it. And the book was a forty-year old, beat-up children's encyclopaedia.)

Are you starting to come around to my theory? And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Looking around the room where I’m sitting right now, I realise that I have detailed opinions about every single thing in the room, right down the mystery screw that’s sitting on the side table. I found that screw on the floor of the bedroom two months ago and set it on the table in the hopes that someone would find out where it belongs. I don’t want to throw it away because I know it has fallen out of something that needs it. Maybe the closet is going to collapse in a heap of dust one day, all because of that missing screw.

The point is, that screw occupies neural space. On some level, I think about the screw every time it enters my field of vision. And to a brain already brimming over with useless information, it’s just an outrage that that screw has even been allowed through the neural processing door.

Noonie asked me yesterday why Canada has both French and English as official languages and whereas a few years ago she would have been satisfied with my answer of “Because that’s how it’s always been,” she wanted more information than that. Unfortunately, I was in no position to give it. Oh, sure, I tried to fob her off with descriptions of life in pre-dominion Canada (chiefly supplied by what I’ve seen in Heritage Park and by watching Little House on the Prairie): all those beaver pelts steaming off to Europe to satisfy the whims of fashion, people building houses out of dirt etc. I even tried to distract her by triumphantly recalling a snippet from my grade six social studies textbook that said Louis Riel in his declining years tried to rename the days of the week.

But Noonie pressed her point and in the end I had to admit defeat. I didn’t know why Canada had not ended up with only one official language. I started to open my mouth to say as much but Noonie was already there. “I know, I know” she said, holding up a hand. “You used to know this stuff but it’s just been so long since you’ve thought about it that it’s completely gone from your mind, that if I’ll wait a moment you don’t mind looking it up on Wikipedia for me.”

There was nothing I could say to that. It was all true. I felt a wave of frustration at my brain’s screening methods. I used to know most of the chemistry periodic table inside and out, too, but it’s all gone now. Yet I remember things like my first-year-university roommate having shoes with a strikingly pointed toe. I mean what’s the point of remembering that? Pointy-toed shoes are more important than the physical properties of sodium?

No, the brain’s screening process is sorely inept. Stupid stuff is allowed to stay, good stuff to leak out. It seems that somebody in the memory department isn’t watching the door very closely. What we need around here are some bouncers.

Unexpected Conveniences

There are so many inconveniences of daily life here in Lebanon that when something gets done with ease and speed you find yourself blinking in astonishment.

Actually, there exist quite a few such blissful exceptions to the inconvenience rule, you just don’t realise it right away. Everywhere you look you see chaotic traffic, absolute disregard for queues and no order to anything, at least on the workaday level. What naturally passes through your mind, then, is, “Oh man. How does anything ever get done in this country?”

But by and by you become aware that the deplorable lack of law enforcement also means a lack of red tape. For example, if you wake up one day and decide you’d like to have an extra living room (Lebanese people can’t seem to get enough living rooms) and that the best way to achieve this would be to add another floor onto the top of your villa, you can simply call up a man on the telephone and he will come with some men and build it for you, very possibly the next day. There are no permits or inspections, no code to follow (well, there are, but absolutely everybody seems able to get around them). Oh, certainly your home will leak, crumble, and crack under the poor workmanship and no doubt collapse like a house of cards if Lebanon ever gets the big earthquake it’s due. But you’ll get it built without any pesky inspectors telling you that your stair risers are 0.4 cm too high and must be ripped out.

A few days ago one member of our family -- who shall, in light of the delicacy of the topic remain nameless (though Noonie wishes it to be known that it was not her) – was required to submit a faecal sample to the lab. We learned that the deposit, as it were, could be made in the comfort of our own home as long as it was sent to the lab forthwith.

The sample having been collected, sealed in the plastic container expressly made for such things, and securely wrapped in half-a-dozen or so layers of tied bags, was given to Kassem to be taken to the lab. It wasn’t my idea to make him take it, by the way. I planned to take it myself. I was of the opinion that transporting poo fell far outside the boundaries of his duties but he most heartily assured me that nothing would give him greater pleasure. Well, maybe he didn’t say it would give him pleasure but certainly he insisted on doing it. I handed him the bag, bid him godspeed, and hastily closed the door.

He was back within about fifteen minutes. The lab turned out to be only a few blocks away. See, this is another aspect to what I was saying about finding convenience in unexpected places here. Who would expect to find a lab in the same neighbourhood as their house? It doesn’t work that way in Canadian cities. But there seems to be a little of everything in our neighbourhood here in Beirut.

Within a two block radius of our apartment there is — and this is just the merest sample, by no means a comprehensive list : a gas station with car wash, four drugstores, three vegetable stands (permanent ones — I'm not counting the vendors who sell from their wheeled carts), a tire store, a floor-polisher rental place, a shop selling military-style clothes and boots, a book store, an underwear and bra store, a mattress shop, a shoe store, a bank, half a dozen toy stores, a dozen or more cafes ranging from seedy to decent, a large establishment selling all forms of chicken – raw, cooked, eggs, and ready to eat sandwiches; a doctor’s office, a dentist, a travel agency, a television studio, a florist, a wedding planner, half a dozen tiny cell phone shops, and even tinier convenience stores too numerous to count (some are so small that only one person can stand inside them at a time and how the proprietor makes a living by peddling a few bags of chips and packs of batteries I’ll never know).

I was relieved that Kassem had not been sequestered long inside the car with the poo and when he told me that the test results would be ready at 1:00 p.m. the next day I thought I hadn’t heard correctly. That was just 24 hours away.

“What, ready tomorrow?” I said. When, in the history of lab tests, had anyone ever been required to submit to a test, done the test and had the results back all within a day and a-half?

“Yes. Oh and the cost is 8,000,” he added.

“What?” I said again. Sometimes I wonder what Kassem thinks of me.

“The test. It will cost 8,000,” he repeated.

Well, 8,000 lira is like 5 bucks. I was expecting it to be around 50 dollars, maybe a hundred. I don’t know what they do with the poo once they get it. I thought they put it through sophisticated tests and maybe a chemical analysis, see what temperature it boils at etc.

At first I was thrilled with the cheap price. Of course, we have medical insurance and don’t have to pay for lab tests but a good deal is a good deal. But after a while I got to wondering, what kind of poo test only costs 5 bucks? Is it a proper lab technician doing the test or have they got some of the unemployed men I always see clustered under the Beir Hassan bridge sitting in a little room rating the samples for smell and colour?

Kassem brought me the test results promptly at 1:00 the next day. It was a single sheet of paper with a disappointing scarcity of information: just a brief description of the findings, which were all negative, and none of which was as scientific-sounding as I’d hoped (no molecular weight or gas chromatography findings) though on the other hand, none as unscientific-sounding as I'd feared.

Well, I thought to myself with an odd, anticlimactic feeling, that’s that, then.

It had all been so easy.

And although we hadn’t needed to fill a prescription this time, that could have accomplished with tremendous ease, as well. Because drugstores in Lebanon deliver to your door, free of charge, from early in the morning until late evening. There may even be all-night deliveries, I don’t know. We don’t often need things from the drugstore. I’ve only had things delivered on two occasions. Both times M had to remind me the service existed. He found me fretting and fussing about having to go out at a late hour to get nasal decongestant for Dude or some such thing and said, “Why don’t you call the pharmacy and get them to deliver it?”

You can even order antibiotics this way. No prescription needed. You don’t even have to give a reason for wanting the stuff. You just ring the drugstore up and say, “I fancy a bit of Amoxicillin, could you send some round, please,” or whatever. A young man on a moped will be dispatched and in a few minutes will buzz on the interphone and present you with the tiniest plastic bag in the world, containing your Amoxicillin.

The payment methods can be convenient, if unorthodox, too. Last month both the kids had braces put in. When I asked the orthodontist how the payments worked, since we would be seeing him over the course of two years, he said that it was up to me. I already knew what the total cost was, since we had discussed that on the previous visit, but I didn’t know how much I needed to put down for the initial payment and when and how much the subsequent payments should be. I explained this, feeling that the orthodontist hadn’t understood what I was asking.

“It’s entirely up to you,” he assured me graciously. “However much you want to pay.”

“But, but –“ I sputtered. Surely this couldn’t be. How could an orthodontist run his business this way?

“Well. how much do people usually pay on the first visit?” I tried.

“Oh, it varies. They pay whatever they want to pay.”

This was not helping me. I really had no idea. Should I pay half of the total? A tenth? “Well, what would be an average amount?” I said.

At this point the assistant stepped in with a softly offered suggestion. Clearly she knew her boss and his reluctance to get down to the nuts and bolts of it with his patients. With relief I paid her, the orthodontist having retreated into his office, and waited for my receipt. They had no credit card machine so I’d had to pay in cash and as it was rather a large amount I felt the importance of hanging on to my receipt.

She handed me a small square of cardboard on to which a simple appointment schedule had been printed. Into the appropriate spaces she had handwritten today’s date and the amount I’d paid.

“Ah, could I have the receipt please?” I asked.

“I’ve recorded the amount you’ve paid right here,” the girl said politely, pointing to the card.

I couldn’t believe it. “But — a receipt. Is there no receipt?”

She seemed genuinely surprised. “It’s there on the card, plus I write down the amount you’ve paid in your children’s file.”

The orthodontist appeared in his office doorway. “Is everything all right?”

“Oh yes, fine,” I said, “I was just asking for a receipt.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have receipts as such,” he said regretfully. “We could make you one on a sheet of paper if you like.”

It was so strange. A good friend had recommended this fellow and therefore I assumed I could trust him but it was the first time I’d ever had to insist on paying a dentist and then been told they only accept cash and then been given nothing for a receipt but an appointment card with a tiny, handwritten number in one of its little columns.

But this is Lebanon. When we had to replace our water heater (which died after six months of use, but that is another story) there was a lot of arguing about the guarantee with the fellow who sold us the new heater. I didn’t get involved in that one, but curious to know what had eventually been agreed on I asked M about it a while ago. He told me that nothing had been settled yet but not to worry because we still hadn’t paid for the heater (it had been installed and in use for a couple of weeks by that time). This would all have taken place without the aid of credit card numbers taken as security or anything like that, you must understand.

This untidy way of transacting business does make me feel like pulling my hair out sometimes but as you can see, there are times when it makes things easier to get done. And I mean, you can’t knock that 5-dollar poo test. Now that’s a deal.

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.