A Well-Fed Litani River

On the Border

            Last weekend we drove around the south of Lebanon to see what we could see.  At this time of year and after an unusually wet winter the countryside, where you find it, is velvet green.

            The ruin of a Crusaders’ fort tops a hill not far from M’s ancestral village.  It desperately needs funding and fixing up: protection for the remaining structure so no more stones are pinched by locals to repair a wall or to clad a fancy villa, as well as some large, brightly-painted signs to mark the well shafts which appear suddenly in the overgrown grass under your feet.  As ill-tended, plundered and seemly forgotten the fort is, it’s still stunning.  You feel like you’re on top of the world when you stand on its walls. There is nothing between you and the hazy blue sea to the west and the snow-capped mountains to the east. You try to imagine what it was like a thousand years ago for the men who stayed in the fort but you fail to produce any reasonable guesses because you never did get through that book about the Crusades you bought and still keep on your bookshelf. "Well," you eventually tell yourself, "there are a lot of fair-skinned, blue-eyed Lebanese people in the village that surrounds the base of this fort so presumably the Crusaders didn’t spend all their Friday nights in playing cards."

            We’ve been to the fort a few times so decided to give it a pass this time in favour of new adventures.  Last time we were there was with my brother and his wife and we ate gooey-ripe figs off a big tree growing right inside the fort.  There was  a monstrous, mother-ship of a cactus growing near the entrance, so dense and heavy-looking you could almost feel the weight of it pressing into the earth.  It was loaded with red fruit sticking up amongst the thorns like cartoon thumbs but nobody dared attempt a pick.

            When I’m in the south I am in constant awareness of The Border just a few miles away.  I’m not exactly scared but a peppery little worry gnaws at a corner of my subconscious. I know that even if there is trouble it’s not likely to single us out but still, you wouldn’t want to be lying around on a hammock eating grapes when bombs start falling. 

            I’d seen the border a couple of times before, but from two or three miles across a shallow valley.  Even then it gave me a tingle of apprehension.  When we crested a low hill and saw across the valley, just like I remembered from last time, a suspiciously orderly looking bunch of farms I knew we were not looking at Lebanon.  There were so many robustly fluffy trees, and such a tidy, prosperous look to the farm buildings and distant town there could be no mistake. 

            “Ohhh…” I breathed.  “Is that the border?”

            I knew it was, of course.  I just say things like that in order to get M to speak.  Otherwise it’s just silence from the driver’s seat.

            “Yes,” he said.

            “Wow.  By the way I’m going to have to find a toilet soon.”

            M’s eye flicked to me and back to the road.  Without changing expression he said, “How much tea did you have this morning?”

            “None,” I cried. “Not one little drop.  I just had that one glass of water you saw me drinking at breakfast.  I purposely denied myself any tea consumption whatever so that I would be able to sustain the long hours in the car.”

            “Well, your bladder must be the size of a ball-point pen tip.”

            “I can assure you that my bladder is a perfectly normal size,” I said, “and anyway bladder volume is not the point at all. The problem is the lack of toilets in the world and in Lebanon particularly.  It’s a reflection of our male-dominated society.  They expect you to be able to get out of your car and stand in front of a wall or bush to relieve yourself.  Well, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.  I’m going to invent a Ladies’ Pee-on-the-Go Total Solution:  a portable, miniature toilet with a self-erecting tent surrounding it.  Instant privacy, instant relief.”

            “You just let me know when that patent comes through so I can give notice at work.”

            We had entered another village and for a minute our view was limited to ugly concrete buildings crowding on to the edge of the road, shopkeepers sitting on plastic chairs with their feet practically sticking out into traffic; people walking, driving, piled two or three deep on tiny mopeds with worn-out tires.

             When we popped out of the village and back into countryside the border was right below us.  M pulled over to the side of the road and we got out.

            The day was warm and bright.  A bumblebee buzzed from flower to flower in a bush beside us. The gently sloping hill on which we stood was part of a large, dish-shaped valley so we had an expansive view in all directions.  Our side of the border hummed with life: cars hurried along roads, baby goats gamboled at the fringes of a large herd, a farmer bumped along a red-dirt path on his way to an olive grove. On the other side of the border all was still.  I mean literally nothing moved.  I stared and stared at the closest farm, a cluster of tidy buildings and neatly planted trees not more than 200 metres from the border, but I couldn’t see a single animate thing: not a person, not an animal, not a distant metallic glint of sunlight off a car bonnet.

            The long, snaking border road was strikingly deserted, too. It was two lanes wide, but only one lane was paved.  On both sides of the road was identical, serious fencing.  Outermost was rolled barbed wire, and inside of that a ten-foot high electric fence.  There were posts with what looked like cameras mounted on them here and there on the opposite side of the road.

            The contrast between the quiet laziness of the spring day and my knowledge of the violence that happens here – most recently just six years ago – made what I knew irreconcilable with what I saw.  It seemed to me that it could only have happened in a movie.

            “Where is everybody?” I asked M, inclining my head toward the border. “Over there, I mean.”

            “Oh, don’t worry; even if you can’t see anybody, they’re there,” he said.  “Probably watching us right now on camera.”

            I recoiled. “What? Really? Those are actually cameras mounted on those posts? Oh dear me, that is not a pleasant thought. Let’s get going.”

        We got back in the car and stopped at a kind of public garden which had little individual-family picnic shelters, each with a barbecue stand and sink with water supply.  Several families had taken advantage of the fine day to pack lamb or chicken kabobs and tupperware bowls of tabooli and were busily lighting coals and arguing with their sweating children about whether or not it was sufficiently warm enough to safely remove their woollen sweaters. While M bought a lemonade and found a shady frond to sit under I rushed to find the toilets.

            When I came back M said, “Were the toilets pretty bad?” 

            “Oh yes,” I said.  “Right on par with my expectations.  God-awful stink and an inch of water on the floor.  At least I always hope it is water in these cases.”

            “Want some lemonade?”

            “No. I’ve sworn off liquids until July.”

            We got back in the car and drove more or less beside the border for a few miles.  I don’t know why M chose to do this.  He doesn’t tend to explain his navigational decisions. But I found the border irresistibly fascinating and could hardly take my eyes off it. The history of it -- the wars and the fighting and the lives lost -- only seemed possible to me when I considered them in the abstract.  Here in the warm spring sunshine with the shouts of children playing soccer behind us and carefully tended young apple trees blossoming sweetly on the other side of the border, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

            We came upon an UN tank with a couple of brown-skinned young men standing in front of it dressed up like GI Joes.  We strolled over and said hello.  They were Indonesian, and quite friendly.  I thought we’d have lots of things to say to them and it would be a really poignant, international, we’re-all-brothers moment but nothing sprang to mind when it came to the point.

            So we got back in the car and drove some more.  We passed a children’s playground which had been built right beside the border and it was hopping with kids.  They paid no notice to the menacing fence a couple of meters away.  I wondered if the little boys dared one another to pee on the fence, the way some farm kids back in Alberta do with electric cattle fences.

            Soon we veered away from the border to head back into the interior of the country.  We passed through beautiful valleys and lunched beside a fatly rushing Litani River, ready to burst its banks with the abundance of melting snow this year.

         I saw a lot of wonderful things, and a few of the usual-for-Lebanon depressing things, but my mind kept going back to the border.  What must it be like for children to grow up in its shadow?  In a sense, every child in Lebanon grows up in its shadow, but I was thinking of the ones who lived in towns right beside it. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to know you were being watched all the time.

         There is a knothole in the pine footboard of our bed that looks just like an eye with an eyebrow above it.  Sometimes at night when I’m reading by lamplight I sense, out of the corner of my eye, that I’m being watched.  I look up from my book and meet the gaze of the knothole eye, peeping at me over the duvet. Frankly, it’s a little creepy.  The eye always looks a bit too alert.  But it’s fine, I know it’s a knothole in a piece of wood.  I don’t think I’d be so fine with a real eye watching me all the time.   

 

One Marble's Journey

        A couple of years ago at a dinner with M's colleagues a very funny man not really named Tom told us that his sister had recently rung him up from the States to tell him that she had pooped out a marble he’d dared her to swallow when they were children more than thirty years before. She’d had a foot massage that day which had apparently stimulated her bowel to move with an energy hitherto unimagined. Her intestines had had themselves some kind of spring cleaning and with all the shuffling and shifting around the marble was loosed from the intestinal fold into which it had settled all those years ago.

        “Reflexology can do that,” the host of the dinner told us in his Venezuelan accent as he walked by with a platter of barbequed fillet.  “They start rubbing your toes and you begin to fart.”

        Well, I was riveted. I just couldn’t believe someone could carry a marble around inside them for thirty-some years.  And I certainly hadn’t been aware of an ‘on’ switch for my bowel lurking on the deceptively blank-looking bottom of my foot.  I think a few of us standing there listening to Tom that day may have looked a bit sceptical because he added that his sister is a doctor and took a sharp clinical interest in the proceedings.  I wondered – literally couldn’t help wondering – if she had felt the marble coming out or had only been aware of its passing from the sound of it clinking gently against the side of the toilet bowl. 

        A few months after that when I was just starting this blog -- cobbling together the first entries -- I wanted to tell the story of Tom’s sister because, come on, literature doesn’t get more entertaining than that.  But as it happened, an Alexander McCall Smith book I was reading right around the same time had a character in it who mentioned hearing about a man who pooped out a marble after twenty years.  When I read that passage I put down the book in wonder. Well, for crying out loud, I thought.  So much for the amazing, one-of-a-kind marble story.

        So I didn’t write about it on my blog.  The startling singularity of the incident was clearly not as singular as I’d thought. Maybe a lot of people knew someone who had pooped out a marble.  The other thing was, what if someone thought I’d stolen Mr McCall Smith’s idea and was just making up the bit about someone named Tom and his sister?

        But I don’t care about any of that anymore.  The story is true (except Tom’s name) and too rich not to share.  I hope you got a laugh or even a tiny thrill of astonishment from it.  Sorry that it’s a bit of a gross subject.  I did warn you that toilets come up in my blogs quite often. 

Playing Monopoly (Or, A Sore Loser)

            I wonder if a game of Monopoly has ever ruined a marriage. 

            They say that the best test of compatibility between two people is to take a trip together, and I while I believe this to be a very useful exercise – why, just getting through airport security when one person is well organised and the other is not can be highly predictive of future harmony – I submit that playing a competitive board game such as Monopoly or Risk is the best test.

            I don’t  think I’ve played Risk since my twin best friends and I sat down to a game of it in their kitchen when we were fourteen. I remember that the game started companionably enough, with the crunching of potato chips and jokes about armies massing on borders etc. but the mood soon darkened.  Some kind of feverish greed for power began to steal over the three of us.  Polite, apologetic advances gave way to ruthless invasions.  We stopped talking and our faces got red. Things got uglier and nastier until finally one of the twins stood up, seized the board by the edges and flung it off the table.

            We never played it again or even talked about it but the incident has stayed in my mind as a reminder of how board games can turn ugly.

            So when Noonie appeared in the kitchen last Sunday with the Monopoly box in her arms and asked if we would all like to play, I hesitated.  Frankly, I have my reservations about Monopoly  -- the games last longer than all good sense and by the end the players always hate each other -- but somehow I always think this time is going to be better.  I mean, Monopoly is a paradigm of wholesome, family fun.

            I couldn’t say no. Dude declined to join us (with reservations, I believe, in line with my own) but M agreed so the three of us sat down at the table. As the banker, Noonie dealt out our starting cash and we rolled the dice.  I knew from the first round it wasn’t going to be my day.  I landed on one of those cheap properties along the first side and bought it with alacrity but after that ended up on one of the railroads (actually, since we have the French Disney version of Monopoly – don’t ask – it’s not a railroad but "Bateau Pirate Capitaine Crochet"), and then on Go to Jail (or "Allez En Prison", in our case).  While I sat in jail waiting for my next turn I watched Noonie make a solid purchase along the second side and M scoop up "Alice au pays des Herveilles" in the coveted yellow section.

            The really crummy thing about Monopoly (which, in all fairness, its name does suggest) is the snowball effect. Once you start getting ahead of the other players, you just keeping getting further ahead.  And when you fall behind, it’s a slow bleed till the ignominious moment you find yourself begging the person beside you to loan you three hundred bucks so you can stay in their hotel.

            After several trips around the board I still didn’t have more than one of any property in a series and M was already putting houses on a low-income neighbourhood near the jail.  I had managed to get one property in the second most valuable series, the green ones, which I clung on to in the hope that it would be a useful bargaining tool when I needed to make a private deal but nobody seemed very interested.

            See, M gets very serious and strategic when he plays board games.  He bought property which he knew I had my eye on, then offered to sell it to me at a scandalous price. He watched, hawk-eyed, every time I rolled the dice and made sure I moved my game piece the correct number of squares. When Noonie landed on one of M’s high-rent properties and couldn’t afford to pay him I helped her out. Then later, when I landed on one of his Las Vegas-type clusters of buildings and saw that the charge was more than my total sum of cash (and Noonie had no money to lend me) he watched impassively as I sat there pathetically re-counting my banknotes just in case a couple of fives had accidently stuck together.           

            “Look, I don’t have enough,” I said.  “Could you let me stay for a discounted rate this time?  Or maybe you want to buy my Aladdin property?”

            “I’ll buy Aladdin,” he said. “For 200 dollars.”

            “But that’s outrageous,” I spluttered. “That’s less than what I bought it for.”

            He shrugged. “I have no pressing need for it.  Take it or leave it.”

            I’m sorry to have to say that M never has the decency to look sorry for driving someone to bankruptcy, despair and nights slumped in dark alleyways behind Park Place swigging mouth wash.

            I glowered at him and, in a reckless indulgence of spleen, began to express my dissatisfaction with the core dynamics of Monopoly.  I said it was a stupid game. I blamed the dice for harbouring ill-will toward me, and accused M of being too serious.

            “Who’s being too serious?” he said. “You’re the one getting mad and whining about everything.  And you were pretty cheerful earlier on when you thought you might win.”

            I huffed and started to pack up my properties, plucking my Lady and the Tramp game piece off the board.

            “What are you doing?” said M. “You can’t quit just because you’re not winning.”

            “What’s the point of continuing?” I said. “You know there’s no chance for Noonie or I to recover our footing. From here on it’ll be like the lions starting to eat the gazelle who’s dying but not dead yet.”

            “What have gazelles got to do with anything? You can borrow from the bank.  There’s no need to have to declare bankruptcy yet.”

            “Borrow from the bank?” I scoffed. “And how will I ever pay them back – with interest – when I have almost no income?”

            “Well, you get your 200 dollars every time you pass Go.”

            “And a fat lot of good that does me when your 101 Dalmatians hotel costs me 450 dollars every time I land on it.”

            “Boy do you exaggerate.  You’ve only landed on it once.”

            “That’s right.  And now I’m broke.”

            I packed up my things, breathing heavily. I didn’t lift up the game board and fling it but I did shoot a withering glance at M’s little metal Pinocchio standing pertly on "Parc Gratuit", grinning inanely into space.

            Noonie and M didn’t have much choice after that. M wandered back to the sofa to see what was on tv while Noonie slowly packed the game back up.

            “I’m sorry, Noonie,” I told her later.  “I always forget how much I hate that game.  Plus, I mean, I kind of wish people wouldn’t try so hard to win.”

            “That’s okay,” she said. “Sometimes I hate Monopoly, too, but sometimes it’s fun.”

            “You mean like when you’re winning?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Some games are a love/hate relationship,” I sighed.

            “Yup.”

            “Some are always good, though.”

            “Yeah, like Uno.”

            “Yes!  Like Uno.  Now there’s a game I’m good at.”

            M, strolling through the room, said, “Uno?  You can’t say you’re good at a game that is based almost entirely on luck.  It makes no sense.  It’s like saying you’re good at winning door prizes.”

            “Actually, I know a couple of people who are good at winning door prizes,” I said.

            A pained looked passed over M’s face but he said nothing.

            “I just think games like Uno are better at keeping things light, you know?” I said. “Monopoly is no good for a marriage.”

            “Certainly not for husbands,” M agreed with enthusiasm. “I bet there have been a few men to lose body parts over it.”

            He suddenly eyed me suspiciously. “I think we should put away all the knives next time we play.  Just as a precaution.”

            “There won’t be a next time,” I said. “I’m not going to let Monopoly ruin our marriage.”

            “But if we never play again how will you ever pay me back the 450 dollars you owe me for staying in my 101 Dalmatians hotel?” he said with a evil grin. And exited the room with impressive speed.

                       

           

           

           

           

           

           

             

These Lebanese Don't Bottle It

            Everything is a drama in this country.  It is a land of raised voices and extraordinarily drawn-out arguments.  I’m starting to think that the Lebanese actually enjoy arguing because they don’t stop when they could.  And, more telling perhaps, they argue when there is absolutely nothing to be gained by it. 

            If, for example, you are walking down the street one day and happen past a man accusing a parking valet of parking his car too close to the curb and scratching the wheel rims, you can be sure they are going to stand there arguing for at least fifteen minutes. Both parties will begin encouragingly enough with a line of defence or attack, as position dictates, but then instead of the argument evolving somehow the men will keep repeating the same one or two points with breathtaking single-mindedness.  Nothing changes except the volume of the voices, which grows louder and louder till you are certain that the argument must surely either collapse with a final, sputtering hiss or erupt into frightening and unseemly violence.  But no.  This kind of altercation doesn’t come to blows, nor do the arguers run out of steam. 

            When you really take a good look at the two men you will perceive a calmness beneath the vigorously gesturing arms and red faces.  There is something familiar about it that you can’t put your finger on at first.  Eventually, if you live amongst the Lebanese long enough, you will.  The day will come when you finally realise that what you’re witnessing is a little bit like play acting. Watching two Lebanese argue gives you the slight sense that you are watching the rehearsal of a play and that at any moment the director might yell, “Okay, let’s stop there for today,” and two men who were a moment ago eyeball to eyeball, forehead veins ready to burst, will abruptly  turn and wander over to the water cooler together, chatting about football.  It’s not that the man with scratched wheel rims isn’t genuinely angry.  He is.  It’s just that if I came across two guys shouting at each other like that in Calgary I’d be afraid one was about to pull a knife on the other but here I wouldn’t even spare them a glance.

            Lebanese women argue, too.  They also cry with aplomb.  This morning I was in a book store thumbing through the classics, wondering if I should waste money on another Dostoyevsky novel which I will revere, be in awe of, praise as literature far above the appreciation of mortal man etc. and never read past the third chapter, when I heard the sounds of a minor accident coming from the other side of the shelves.  It was the scuffling of shoes skidding on fake-wood flooring, a child’s robust cry of alarm, and the crash of books as well as body hitting the ground.  Well, I thought to myself, trailing an indecisive finger over Steinbeck and wishing as always that he’d taken more road trips with Charley, I guess some kid was running around a corner too fast and skidded on the cheap floor.  Judging from the way he hollered as he went down he’ll be all right.

            Then I heard a woman crying and the sound immediately filled me with real alarm and I stood up so fast that I dropped the handful of Archie Double Digests I’d been holding (for Noonie, not me.  No, really).  I hastened to the end of the aisle and saw on the floor in front of me not a child but a woman, somewhere in her twenties, curled on her side and weeping.  Another woman was already crouching down beside her as I arrived.  Books lay in a heap on the floor beside them and it took me a moment to realise that there was no child and that the voice I had heard was the woman’s.

            “Where are you hurt?” the lady beside her asked.

            “It’s my leg and my arm,” the victim moaned.

            “Oh dear, oh dear, let me help you,” said the kind woman quietly; I saw from her badge that she was a store employee.

            If this had been my first day in Lebanon I would have assumed the victim had broken a bone and possibly dislocated something as well.  Why else would she make all that noise? Yet as I looked at her it became quite obvious that she wasn’t really hurt at all.  She might have been crying from embarrassment; she was a bit overweight, after all, and wearing silly, high boots with a pencil heel.  But I don’t think she was embarrassed in the least.  If the same thing had happened to me I would have dragged my mangled legs straight out the door without a peep to anyone and never come back to that book store again.

            This is Lebanon, however.  Here, pain is meant to be fully expressed, not stifled, bottled up and allowed to fester into an eventual psychiatric illness as we do so encourage in my culture.

             Several people helped the weeping woman to her feet while the rest of us gave her sympathetic (or, in my case, incredulous) looks and watched as she was led to the office at the back.  I saw the shop employee pick up the phone and after a moment begin speaking.  Snippets drifted back to me: “… her leg…”  “..she doesn’t want to go to the hospital…” while the other woman continued to cry immoderately.

            It occurred to me that I’d been hearing a lot of crying lately.  Last weekend I attended the memorial service for an elderly member of M’s family.  As is the custom, the actual burial had happened the day after the death and the memorial service was held about a week later.  We drove the long, terrifying road (no lane designation and a continuous game of chicken with oncoming traffic) from Beirut to the ancestral village on Saturday and spend the evening visiting with M’s considerable extended family (he has 73 first cousins, just to give you an idea of scale).  A lot of time at such gatherings is spent just identifying one another, especially kids who have grown up since last time they were seen.  Not only are there several hundred members of the extended family but there is widespread practice of name-economy.  “Who’s that? Is that Nabil’s son?” one aunt will whisper loudly to another.  “No, that’s Ali’s son.”  “Which Ali?  Fatima’s husband or Sarah’s brother?” “No, no, neither of them.  You know, Mohammad’s son Ali.”  “Oh, him. Yes, I can see the resemblance in his -- wait a minute, which Mohammad? ”

            The next morning we trooped down the road to the funeral hall.  Actually, they are two halls: one for the men and one for the woman (the men’s hall is new, the women’s quite old and dingy, making me think that maybe chivalry really is dead).  And actually, I didn’t troop down the road with the rest of them.  I was late, on account of trying to have an entire bath by standing in front of the wash basin with a small facecloth and a bar of soap. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, and when I was finally dressed I realised that I was very hungry and had to eat something before we left so I put two eggs on to boil but the wind gusting through the house (with all the windows closed, mind) blew out the flame and I didn’t come back in to check on it till the eggs should have been done.  So I had to relight the burner and wait for the eggs to cook while the others went on ahead. I stuffed down the eggs and a cup of the exquisite juice M’s mom squeezed from fresh blood oranges bought along the roadside and trotted down the hill with just a few minutes to spare.  I was sure that I knew the way to the funeral hall.  There’s only one road, really, but somehow I took a wrong turn and ended up having to ask a couple of women the way.  They were going to the funeral, too, and in fact were relatives of M’s, and told me to hop in their car with them.  A few hundred metres later we pulled up in front of the hall.

            It was the second time I’d been to the hall so I was prepared for the utter lack of style or comfort within. The building is simply a large square of cinderblock walls with a flat roof over it, painted on the inside with that grey-toned white which makes me feel queasy.  There was a raised platform at the front of the room and hundreds of white plastic chairs set up in rows to face it. There was a huge paper poster, perhaps ten by twelve feet, hung on the wall at the front of the hall. Arabic words I couldn’t read (which isn’t saying much) were written on it, above a dark and Tolkien-looking scene of a winged horse and a warrior in plate armour.           

            Hundreds of women filled most of the seats in the hall as I walked in and found Noonie.  We took chairs near the back, as far as possible from the speakers which we remembered from last time had threatened to hammer right through our ear drums. 

            When a lady got up on the platform and began to fiddle with the sound system we knew we had chosen our seats wisely.  She tested her voice and it initially came over at a perfectly suitable volume but it wasn’t loud enough for her by half.  She cranked the dial till our ears started ringing and that was where she left it.  She began to speak.  And the problem for me is, my grasp of Arabic is really weaker than it appears.  I get by in day to day chat because I know all the most common words and expressions.  But when someone starts speaking with vocabulary I’m not familiar with, I’m totally lost.  And it’s even worse if they use formal Arabic, which is as different from the local dialect as Chaucer is from today’s English.  I can’t follow a line of it.  I’ll keep hearing individual words jump out and am drawn, irresistibly, into trying to stitch them together into a meaningful message.  I’ve written before about the perils of such activity.

            What fascinated me about the funeral was how the speaker wound the mourners up by telling them sad religious stories.  Well, I say “telling” but that is the wrong word altogether.  What she did was wail in such a heart-breaking,  minor key, with such dramatic words of death and tragedy, that almost everybody in the hall began to shake and cry. And I don’t mean cry in the silent, stiff-upper-lip way which you would expect at the funeral of a very old man who went off quietly in his sleep.  Oh no.  These woman cried loudly, shoulders shaking, tears streaming down their cheeks.  It made me squirm with embarrassment. One woman spent the entire time walking up and down the aisles with a box of a kleenex and a waste basket for used tissues.  She kept trying to give me more kleenex which made me feel embarrassed anew because I hadn’t used even one. 

            The service last about an hour and a-half and the speaker kept at it without pause the entire time.  She would wind the women up, get them all crying, then she would speak more calmly  and eyes would dry.  After a while she’d start up the wailing again and the crying would break out once more.

            I supposed, and M agreed, that it’s very beneficial to squeeze all that emotion out.  And it doesn’t take long to consider the advantages to a family or society of being upfront with your feelings.  I acknowledge this knowing I won’t ever be able to be this way myself  (fun as it would be to try it on my family).

            The last time I cried in front of anybody was in 2006 when I got an email from M saying that our cat Hoolio had gone mad with terror from the bombings in Beirut and flung himself through a screened window to his death seven stories below.  M has, at times, suggested that I cared more about that cat than about some people but it’s simply not true.  I’ve just been fortunate enough not to lose anyone I’ve been close to.  The day will come and I’ll cry, a lot.  But mostly when I’m alone.  

           

Your Kids' Friends

           Your friend's nose isn't the only thing in life that you can't pick.  When your kids are big enough to make their own friends and your opinion on who is a suitable companion for them doesn’t count any more, you realize that from here on in you’re going to have to be a more tolerant and accepting person than you ever had plans to be.  Or at least that you're going to have to fake being tolerant and then gripe and whinge about it in a blog like I’m doing.

            Actually, for the most part I’ve been lucky.  Although my kids have at times taken a shine to someone with poor manners or compromised personal hygiene it has generally been  a flow of good-hearted little people through our door.  Same with the mothers.  There has been the odd one that I suspected of being a closet psychopath and another who never once looked me in the eye during the entire year our kids went to each others’ houses. But I’ve also made some really good friends this way. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

            Yesterday I lost.

            Dude hadn’t exactly invited the boy to our house.  The boy, whom I shall call Geraldo because really, that name just doesn’t get used enough, has not been Dude’s friend for long.  In fact, I’d never heard Dude mention his name until last week and then it was in reference to World of Warcraft, the online game Dude is addicted to.  Apparently Geraldo plays it too, and, critically, is allowed to play it for as many hours as he wishes. 

            Dude had accepted two invitations during the week to go to Geraldo’s house and so when Geraldo phoned again yesterday morning I told Dude he ought to insist Geraldo came to our house this time, out of courtesy.  

            Dude insisted, Geraldo acquiesced, and the appointment was set. When Dude hung up the phone he said, “Well, he’s coming but I don’t know what he’s going to do while he’s here.”

            “What do you mean?” I said. “You spent seven hours at his house the other day.  What did you guys do all that time?”

            Dude shuffled. “We played video games.”

            “The entire time?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Didn’t his mom tell you to stop at some point?”

            “No.  Geraldo gets to play as much as he wants.  His parents don’t put a limit on his gaming time,” he added wistfully.

            I nodded grimly.  I was beginning to understand why Dude, with his restricted computer hours, had been keen to go to Geraldo’s house.

            “He also gets to stay home whenever we have school field trips,” Dude said.  “And while we’re out on our field trip he plays video games all day long.  He’s a bit fat.”

           

            I’d met Geraldo’s mom briefly at the school during curriculum night when I’d been startled out of a peaceful reverie in a darkened classroom while waiting for the teacher to come and give her talk.  Geraldo’s mom burst into the room in full cry, stepping on the heels of the teacher as she entreated her to take special care with Geraldo who was “capable of excelling but only if given adequate direction”. 

            What is it with parents who regard general information sessions like curriculum night as appropriate times to get in some one-on-one dialogue with the teacher about their own kid?

             I dread school meetings for this reason.  Our school principal, an excellent speaker and most likeable fellow, always precedes the evening’s information session with the polite suggestion that people hold their questions till the end of the talk.  But some people just can’t wait till the end.  And even though there are three hundred other parents sitting in the auditorium and tonight’s topic is the International Baccalaureate, it’s okay to stick up your hand and ask the principal why the school doesn’t offer violin as a band instrument because your darling Fou Fou is showing a natural gift for the violin and it’s just a shame a real shame that her budding talent is to wither on the vine. 

            While the auditorium full of parents sits silently listening to this not one of us stands up and says, “It’s a heartbreaking story, lady, but did you notice that there are three hundred other parents in this room, all of us needing to get home to make supper or grade papers and that there might be a more appropriate time for you to ask the principal about violin lessons for your daughter?  And by the way, did you know that in addition to violin the school also neglects to offer Mandarin, quilting and animal husbandry?  It can’t offer everything.  Spring for some private lessons, man.”

            It wasn’t that Geraldo’s mother seemed in any way unkind, and her loud voice and cattle-dogging of the teacher were not meant to offend anyone.  Moreover, she wasn’t snobby and in Beirut that is worth something.

            I had to give Geraldo’s mom directions to our building.  You’ll recall from previous blogs how much I enjoy giving directions here in Lebanon.  It’s not just that there are few known street names. Lebanese people are deeply opposed to any orientation lexicon other than ‘right’, ‘left’, ‘behind’ and ‘in front of’.  They will not use a phrase such as ‘on the north side’ and won’t understand you if you do.  Nor can you say, “It’ll be on your left if you’re going towards the sea.”  When you say that, they think you’re telling them to drive all the way to the seafront.  It’s a very tiring procedure.

            Geraldo’s mom made it worse by shouting at her kids while on the phone with me.  Several times she shouted at them, without warning, while I was in mid-sentence. From the nonstop background voices I guessed she had about six children in the car with her.  Luckily she was a quick study and found our place without much trouble.

            Geraldo turned out to be more or less a chip off the maternal block, although in this case the chip was bigger than the block.  We could hear his voice before he came in the front door.  Dude had gone down in the elevator to meet him when he was dropped off and through our steel-cored front door we could hear a loud, tuneless voice and I knew right away it had to be Geraldo.

            He strolled through the doorway as if he owned the place, giving me a thumbs up as he did so.  He wasn’t exactly rude, just afflicted with what I’d call misguided confidence. 

            He was a large boy, as Dude had mentioned, and he carried all the extra weight on his thighs and belly. This is just not a good look for a male of any age or species.  But, I told myself, who was I to judge?

            The boys closed themselves up in the bedroom to get down to the video gaming marathon they had planned.  I could hear Geraldo’s voice all the way through the house.  Noonie and I exchanged a look and I said, “Oh, I don't know about this guy.” 

         “Yeah, I know.”

          “But no, I mustn't think like this.  We live in Lebanon now.  We have to make new friends and sure, they’re going to be different than our old friends.  We have to adapt and not keep comparing.”

            Brave words, I thought, as I heard Geraldo exclaiming loudly in language that hadn’t been heard in our house since the time I’d brought home a 50 Cent CD in a misguided effort to get M some music for his car.

             Dude had warned me that Geraldo swore and in fact I’d overheard him telling Geraldo on the phone that he wasn’t to swear at our house.  Sure enough, Dude’s much lower, gentler voice followed the outburst in a tone of diplomatic reproof.

            When I called the boys for lunch Geraldo sat down to the take-out barbequed chicken with good will.  He said no thanks to my offer of Pepsi because, he explained loudly, he had become overweight from drinking too much of it.  

            He asked me for a glass of water and then turned enthusiastically to the chicken.  When Dude got up to get himself one of the apple flavoured fizzy drinks he likes from the fridge Geraldo bade him grab one for him, too.

            “What about the diet?” Dude said.

            “These only have half the sugar of Pepsi,” Geraldo boomed, grabbing the bottle and wrenching off the cap.

            M, now over on the couch, asked Geraldo if he knew how to speak Arabic.  As Geraldo’s mother and father are both Lebanese we knew he must be able to speak it even if he didn’t do so at school.

            “I go to the American school, what do you think?” Geraldo said without turning around, his back towards M.

            M looked at me and I looked back at him.  I thought M was going to give the kid a piece of his mind but he didn’t.  Like me, he must have sensed that there was no intention to be rude.  But still.

            “Well, that was a good first course but now I’m ready for the main course,” proclaimed Geraldo.

            “There is no other course,” said Dude. “Aren’t you full?”

            “Yeah, I am, I was just kidding,” said Geraldo.

            M leaned towards me and whispered, “I don't think he was.”

 

            After lunch M went in to the bedroom to take a nap and Noonie and I stayed in the family room.  The boys went back to Dude’s bedroom to continue the video games. 

            A half hour later there was a tremendous banging of doors and locking and unlocking sounds and I peered through the glass hall door to see the bathroom light on and Dude going into his room.  From this I deduced that Geraldo was in the bathroom and that his short journey from Dude’s room to the toilet had produced the series of loud sounds we’d just heard.

            “What’s going on in there?” Noonie asked.  “Baba’s going to be mad if they wake him up.”

            “I think it was Geraldo going into the bathroom,” I said.

            “Sheesh.  Can’t that kid do anything quietly?”

            The phone rang.  I saw that it was M’s number which meant that he was calling from the bedroom.  “Oh no, it’s Baba, they’ve woken him up.”

            “Tell those boys,” said M crisply, “If they don’t quiet down there’s going to be trouble.”

            “Well, it’s not Dude being noisy, you know,” I began, but M had already hung up.

            I went through to Dude’s room and poked my head in.  “Baba got woken up by all that  racket and he’s not happy.  Can you tell Geraldo to try to be a little quieter?”

            “I’ll try,” he said.

            On my way back past the bathroom I had the extreme misfortune to overhear sounds from within that put me in mind of a pail of chowder being dumped into a pond, with an accompanying horn quartet.

            I hastened past the bathroom and through the hall door which I shut quickly behind me. 

            “What’s going on?” said Noonie.

            “Well, either Geraldo’s colon just exploded or a full-grown cow somehow got into the bathroom and is making use of the toilet.”

            “Oh no.”

            “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

            I fell into gloomy silence, planning how I would sterilize the bathroom as soon as Geraldo went home.

            After a while the sounds ceased and the loud clicking of the lock and door handle recommenced.  I heard Geraldo going back down the hall to Dude’s room.

            “You know,” Noonie said, “I never actually heard the toilet flush while he was in there.”

            “What!” I squeaked. “Are you sure?”

            “Well, I wasn’t exactly listening for it but yeah, I’m pretty sure he didn’t flush.”

            “Oh dear heaven.” I clutched the edge of the couch.  “Well, there’s nothing else for it.  I’ve got to go in there.  And the sooner the better.”

            I stood up and paused. “You know, I don’t hear the fan, either.

            Noonie cocked her head to listen.  “No, the fan is definitely not on.”

            “I’m going in,” I said. “If I don’t come back in ten minutes call an ambulance.”

            I pulled my t-shirt up over my nose and mouth, opened the hall door and went through to the bathroom.  Very slowly I pushed open the door and poked my head in.

            The lights had been left on inside. The bathmat, normally found in front of the shower, had been dragged over to the base of the toilet and scrunched up all around it, as if applied in haste for the purpose of blotting up spilled liquid.

            The toilet, I found to my inexpressible relief, had not been left entirely unflushed.  It needed a second flushing to make it presentable but considering what I might have had to face it was very reasonable.  I gave it an extra flush for good luck, switched on the fan and got out of there.

           

            The boys stayed in the bedroom for a long time after that.  I was sitting at the computer when Geraldo burst into the family room.  I watched in surprise as he pulled his shoes noisily out of the shoe closet, opened the front door and stepped out onto the landing.  Dude, coming behind, was saying, “Okay, I'll see you later.”

            “Yeah, see you,” said Geraldo.

            “He’s going home?” I asked.

            “Yeah, he called his mom a little while ago and his driver is in front of the building now.”

            It was strange to say the least.  I was sitting right there, I mean, literally a couple of yards away from the front door and Geraldo hadn’t even looked at me on his way out. 

            Lebanese people are so gracious and well mannered in these situations --greetings and partings and so on -- that I could hardly believe what had just happened.  I didn’t expect him to say, “Thank you very much for having me over, Mrs. Lovely,” but how about a nod on the way out?

            “Bye Geraldo, thanks for coming,” I called.

            I could see him through the partly open door, waiting for the elevator.  He made no reply.

           

            In the evening I went in to Dude’s room and found his desk chair lying on its side amongst a sprinkling of wood splinters.  One leg was broken right off.

            “What the --?” I cried, falling to my knees and grabbing up the broken end of the chair leg. 

            It was a solid wood chair of sturdy construction.  The leg had been fixed to the seat by a long bolt and reinforced with two wooden pins at the seat level and another where it joined the other leg.  The bolt had been torn right through the wood.

            “Dude,” I called.

            He appeared in the doorway. “Yeah?”

            “‘Yeah?’ What do you mean, ‘yeah?’” I said. “What happened here? Were you guys jumping on this chair?”

            “No,” Dude said, “Geraldo was just sitting on it and it broke.”

            “Just sitting on it?  I don’t think so.  It couldn’t have broken in this way by someone just sitting on it.  Look at this, how the bolt has been torn through the wood. It needed some serious lateral stress to achieve that.”

            “Well, maybe he was leaning to the side a little,” said Dude.  “But I’m telling you he wasn’t jumping or anything, just sitting.”

            I looked at him.  “You sit on that chair every day and manage not to break it.  I use that chair to stand on when I get stuff out of high closets.  It’s a very strong chair. Or, rather, it was.”

            Dude nodded glumly. 

            I looked at him and thought, why am I making him feel bad?  It’s not his fault Geraldo broke the chair.  And even if Geraldo didn’t ooze charm from every pore he was still a friend.

            “Hey,” I said. “Why don’t you bring me the wood glue and we'll see if we can't fix this chair.”