Driving in Beirut

            Instructions: attach a thick strip of rubber all the way around your car at thigh height, buckle your seat belt, and try not to worry.

            That’s all you really need to know about driving in Beirut. When you first come here and see the way they drive you may be tempted to buy a Brinks armoured van for the family car or, as an even more attractive alternative, to simply stay at home until it’s time to leave the country.

            “I can’t possibly go out there,” you may whimper, looking at a traffic roundabout where the world’s longest-running game of chicken is being played out under the insouciant hands of Lebanese drivers. As you watch, the cars converge on the roundabout from four directions, each one rushing recklessly toward the vehicle-clogged epicenter as though alone on the road. To your disbelieving eyes, no car smashes into another. But how do they do it, when no one appears to yield to anyone else?

            Well, there is a sort of system, you just might not realize it at first. Before I tell you about it, however, I must stress that it is only a sort of system and that any motorist at any time may flout the rules.

            The system boils down to one word: bravado. In almost any situation, right of way is given to the boldest driver. At a roundabout, for example, the speed at which you approach the intersection indicates your willingness to pulverize anybody in your way, and the drivers already in the roundabout will note this. During the next few seconds they will make a further assessment of your manner, and based on that will make a decision either to apply their brakes and let you go in front of them, or, if you have shown hesitancy, to continue moving into your path, forcing you to hit your own brakes.

            It sounds like a ridiculous system and it assuredly is, but that is how it works. There are as many fender-benders as you would roughly guess, knowing what you know so far. The reason there aren’t many more serious accidents in Beirut is that there aren’t a lot of opportunities to drive at high speed. Nevertheless people do try their very best to crash into walls and plunge over the cliffs at Raouche and mow down pedestrians, but the crushing density of cars on the road limits their chances. Driving outside Beirut is another story and I’ve touched on that in other blog posts. I titled this post ‘Driving in Beirut’ for a good reason. Once you venture beyond the protective congestion of the city streets you enter another stratum altogether. I would never advise anyone setting out on Lebanon’s highways not to worry.

            The bravado system functions less well in the little one-way streets which make up most of the city’s road-miles. Because of the permanent scarcity of parking spots, there are always vehicles double-parked, leaving barely enough room for one car to go down the street. Since Lebanese drivers don’t trouble themselves about pesky one-way street rules too much, there are always cars going in both directions on these tiny roads. Two such cars meeting head-on can’t begin to get past one another unless they’re lucky enough to meet where an open driveway has left a gap in the line of parked cars. Then one driver can carefully inch into the gap, letting the other by. If there is no gap, one of the cars simply has to back up, either to the end of the street or to the closest gap. And who should be the one to back up? It ought to be the one without the legal right of way, but it isn’t always. Bravado features in these situations, too, and if someone is aggressive enough, a meeker driver might decide to backtrack even though he is in the right.

            I get behind the wheel myself now and again in Beirut but it’s generally just to sit there with the motor off while I make engine sounds and pretend I’m overtaking Fernando Alonso around the last turn at Monte Carlo. I’m kidding, I don’t do that. Not anymore, anyway. What I mean to say is that I do drive occasionally in Beirut and it’s the tiny streets that terrify me. I can rip along the main roads with a weird, adrenalin-fuelled kind of confidence, but I’m no good at judging how much space there is beyond the burly shoulders of our SUV so I’m worried about scratching it in narrow places. I have to rely on the helpfulness of the men who stand around shop fronts at all hours of the day on every street in Beirut. They always step over to signal me through a tricky spot and never laugh at my ineptitude.

            M is an expert at gauging how much clearance he has on either side of the car at any time. Many years ago in Calgary, when I’d only known him a short time, we were driving in Kensington and decided to take a short-cut through a back alley. It is an old part of the city and the alley was quite narrow, with vehicles and rubbish bins dotted along the sides. M shot through that alley at about thirty miles an hour with no more than an inch or two to spare on either side of the car, but he didn't do it to show off. Indeed, he didn’t seem to realize that there was anything remarkable in it. He drove as he always did, with one hand lightly cupping the wheel, elbow on the armrest. He might have been steering the May Queen float down Main Street in the annual Sundre parade.

            The first time I came to Lebanon I quickly saw that most young people drove more or less the same way M did. My father-in-law was a steadier sort though, and I felt relatively safe when he drove me around. Their family car at the time was a skin-pink Mercedes which they called The Sow. It was, I think, only my second day in the country when M’s parents decided to take me on a little driving tour of Beirut in The Sow. 

            At some point in the afternoon M’s dad, for reasons best known to himself, left the main road and started climbing slowly up steep, tiny streets towards the top of a hill. The street switch-backed and seemed to grow narrower with each turn. Since the traffic was two-way I couldn’t see how the cars could keep managing to get by one another if the road continued to shrink. It did, and they didn’t.

            The moment came when the road became so narrow that drivers pulled their side mirrors in and inched past one another with shouts of guidance from bystanders. We, too, folded in The Sow’s side mirror and crept our way past cars going in the opposite direction, close enough to count their occupants' moles and slowly enough for me to feel like rolling down my window and saying, “It was nice to meet you, call me sometime,” when we finally nudged past them.

            Then one car didn’t get past. As they nosed with painful slowness past one another The Sow and the other vehicle made contact. A metallic groaning sound came up from our girl’s stricken flank but my father-in-law didn’t stop driving. He didn’t even change expression or turn his head to look at the other driver. Both drivers simply kept creeping forward while we, the passengers, stared wide-eyed into each others’ faces through two sets of window glass. The horrible grinding noise seemed to go on for a long time. Finally they managed to open an inch of room between the two cars and the sound abruptly stopped. I let out my breath in a huge sigh of relief but my father-in-law, if he felt any relief himself, revealed nothing. He simply kept going. The other car kept going, too. I watched the backs of the occupants’ heads as the car slowly moved away but no one turned around and soon they were lost from sight in the long line of cars. Nobody in our car commented on the incident then or at any time afterwards.

            Kassem is a skilled close-space driver, too, but for all that our car comes home with a new dent in it about once a week, so he’s certainly hitting something on a regular basis. His real Achilles’ heel seems to be the wide wheelbase of our car because he routinely overestimates the tire’s distance from curbs (which are of the sharp-edged design here) and bounces violently off them while travelling at speed, causing wheel and rim damage and hopefully nothing worse. If I am with him at such a time he’ll dart an anxious glance at me out of the corner of the eye as my head is thrown sideways and bobbles back to its upright position, and then go on driving wordlessly as if nothing has happened.

            What with one thing and another, you’ll appreciate that we don’t rush to the phone to make an appointment at the body shop every time our car gets a scratch. We let the gouges and dents accumulate for a while before sending the car in for a full facial. Last week I mentioned to M that I could see some rust starting in the deepest of the current scratches – a strange, clawed-out kind of gouge under the edge of the rear passenger door which Kassem couldn’t explain – so we called the garage and made an appointment.

            Yesterday morning the shop called to say the car was done and we dispatched Kassem to go pick it up. He brought the gloriously refurbished automobile back to the house and left straight away again with Dude, who needed to get to the skate park to meet a friend.

            A few hours later, As Kassem and Dude were on their way home and crossing a large intersection just a few blocks from our house, a young man on a moped carrying a delivery backpack from Roadster Diner collided with them.

            The young man wasn’t badly hurt. Apparently he had misjudged Kassem’s speed and thought he had time to cut in front of the car but, seeing at the last moment that he hadn’t, yanked on his brake and wrenched his handlebars so that he slid sideways into our front passenger door. It was enough of an impact for the end of his handlebar to leave a large dent in our car but the young man didn’t even drop his bike. Undoubtedly used to this sort of thing, he brushed himself off, got back on his moped and sped away. Somewhere, there were people waiting for their hamburgers and if he hurried he might still get a good tip.

           

             

Is Smog Giving Lebanese Women Breast Cancer?

            “Lebanese women get breast cancer ten years earlier than women in Western countries.”

            It was a statement to make me sit up in astonishment. I was sitting in my doctor’s office, having come to see him for my annual check-up.

            Dr. Honeydew (no, of course not) sat behind his desk in a spotless blue shirt and red tie. He had asked me if I would like to have a mammogram and I was bemused by the question, having expected that he would tell me if I needed one this year. Mammograms aren’t a barrel of laughs, as you may or may not know. Why would I go to all the trouble of making an appointment and driving to the hospital if didn’t need to? I could give my boobs the equivalent experience by going home and asking M to back the car over them.

             “I had one done last year,” I said. “Do you think I need another one this year?”

            That’s when he told me about the cancer rates here. “The average age of breast cancer patients here in Lebanon is ten years younger than in places like Canada. That is why I recommend an annual mammogram for my patients over forty years of age, but because you are Canadian I will recommend that you have one every two years until you are fifty.”

            “But those rates don’t make any sense,” I said. “What about the healthy diet here, the low rate of obesity?”

            “Ah, but Lebanese women smoke a lot,” he said. “In Canada people are ashamed to smoke. They try to stop. Here, they are proud to do it.”

            Since he said it wasn’t necessary I opted to skip the dough press until next year, but a part of me was thinking that breast cancer rates in Western countries are presumably based on environment and lifestyle, not genetics, and since I was living in Lebanon wouldn’t that make me prone to the Lebanese cancer rates?

            Dr. Honeydew’s words kept coming back to me in the days following my check-up. I didn’t exactly doubt them, but I did suspect them of being an exaggeration.

            Finally I had a look on the internet for confirmation and guess what? It’s true. Dr. Honeydew did not exaggerate.  

            I learned that the median age of breast cancer patients in Lebanon is 52 years, compared to 63 years for developed countries such as the US.

            Unfortunately, other than one or two cautiously speculative observations about the high incidence of smoking in Lebanon, none of the researchers had submitted any theories as to why the breast cancer rate is so high here.

            If I were to be instantly and magically endowed with a PhD in the relevant branch of medical research I’d get right to the bottom of this and the first place I’d start looking would be air pollution. If I haven’t said it before, the pollution is terrible here in Beirut. In the three years since we’ve been back living here it has, for me, grown to eclipse all other negative aspects about this city.  Driving down the road is dangerous here; worse are the prospects of a pedestrian. Sitting at home in front of your tv can be dangerous, on certain lively nights. But the most dangerous thing you might do in Beirut is breathe.

            Here are four non-scientific facts from my personal encounters with air pollution in Beirut:

            1. The smell of diesel and car exhaust is strong enough where we live to force me to keep the windows closed most of the time. I air out the apartment in the morning and when that’s done I close the windows tight again.

            2. The pollution leaves a sooty black film on anything left outside. I notice it most on our balcony. If I clean the balcony floor one day (with soap, hose and mop; so that you could eat off of it if you wished), the next day it will be dirty. If, when I’m hanging up laundry to dry, the sleeve of a white shirt brushes the floor of the balcony it will have a sooty-black smudge.

            3. Depending on how windy the day is, my line-dried laundry usually smells strongly of exhaust. I’ve taken to putting much of my washing in the dryer to avoid this.

            4. Last week when I washed the inside of my kitchen window I used a soapy sponge and a squeegee. As the water ran down over the white aluminum frame at the bottom of the window I saw that it was dark grey (and I washed this window about three months ago).

            You can find scientific papers discussing air pollution in Beirut on the internet but they’re long and confusing and often out of date. They all seem to conclude with weak, and, I have to say, stupid summaries in which they take a very long time to cautiously opine that the air is really quite polluted here and more of us ought to use bicycles (have these people ever tried to cycle around Beirut streets? You’d live longer if you took up Highland dancing in a Cambodian minefield).

            I don’t know why the authors of scientific papers are so afraid of speaking in plain English but I have waded through the sludge and selflessly – some might go so far as to say heroically -- plucked out one clear fact for you: particulate matter concentration fifteen years ago averaged 200 micrograms per cubic metre across Beirut. Currently it may run as high as 500 in the worst areas of the city. Compare that to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency limit of 12 as set out in their National Ambient Air Quality Standards.

            That’s a frightening difference even if you don’t have any idea what particulate pollutants are or how they hurt us. You probably know what happens to people who inhale asbestos dust; well, this is the same concept. I’ve read only a little about particulate matter but I do sincerely advise you to avoid pursuing knowledge in this area. Frankly, it’s terrifying. These are microscopic bits of solid or liquid matter suspended in the air and when we breathe them in they sail right past our nose hairs, through the sinuses and down into our lungs. They’re just so very small that our normal defences can’t catch them. If they’re small enough they may even pass through our lungs into our bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream they can reach any organ in the body. In addition to lung cancer and all manner of respiratory illnesses they harden arteries and stop hearts. Really tiny particles may even reach the brain and imbed themselves there, snuffing out precious circuits and mimicking Alzheimer’s disease.

            An increase in concentration of 10 mcg/m3 particulates in the air is associated with an increase of 1% in mortality rate. I don’t know if that relationship is a straight slope into which you can plug any figures, but if it is that means increased mortality here in Beirut is twenty to fifty percent higher than it would be if the air was clean.

            This is really, really bad. I won’t depress you further with information about other air-borne pollutants (particulates aren’t the only bad things in the air) or chronic bronchitis rates in this country. Rather, I will leave you with the image of Dr. Honeydew stepping ahead of me out of his office after the check-up and, going a few metres down the hall, holding a door open expectantly for me.

            The thing was, the door he held wasn’t the exit door. It wasn’t even in the direction of the exit door. Since we had definitely concluded our visit I didn’t understand what was happening.

            I stopped and looked from him to the door he held open and back up the opposite direction of the hall where I knew the real exit door to be.

            “Is this – what--?”

            “It’s the bathroom,” he said, and gestured for me to go inside.

            Well, it was uncanny. The hot chocolate I had drunk in Caribou before my appointment had filtered through and I really needed the toilet but how could Dr. Honeydew possibly know that?

            As I blinked in surprise and stepped past him into the bathroom, he smiled. “I saw during the ultrasound exam that your bladder was full.”

            Honeydew, I thought, you know too much.

           

Air Canada's New Premium Economy Class (Or, Cattle Class is About to Get Worse)

In a nutshell:

The only flight you’ll find Premium Economy on right now is Montreal to Paris, starting on July 11^th, 2013. Air Canada says it will continue to add the new class to other international flights, but haven’t given many details about that yet.

A normal, round-trip economy ticket from Montreal to Paris in August of this year will cost you about $950 (taxes and everything included). The same flight in the Premium Economy section of the plane will cost you about $1700. A first class ticket: $4100.

                                                                    *   *   *         
  
 How perfectly thrilled I was to find in my email inbox this morning an advertisement from Air Canada announcing that they are introducing a “Premium Economy” class on selected flights. You understand what this means, don’t you? Just when you thought travelling on Air Canada couldn’t get worse, it assuredly will. Buckle up, fellow third-class travellers: however neglectful or rude the flight attendants have been in the past we’re about to usher in a whole new era of neglect.

            Think about it. The flight attendants in business class are always much nicer than the ones in economy. With the addition of this new class we in the back are being bumped down a notch. Whichever attendants used to be assigned to the economy section will now get the economy-plus section, and those of us sitting the back of the plane will be left in the care of employees just back from forced leaves of absence for anger control issues.

            The only surprise is that the new class was so late in coming. Other airlines have been using economy-plus classes for years and cackling with glee over the added opportunities to trim the benefits of economy class.

            Last year Air Canada cut the checked bag allowance for most overseas travellers, including me, to one. Until then I had been allowed two bags between Canada and Europe or the Middle East for as long as I’ve been travelling.

            Duration of stay has never been a consideration for baggage allowance, which seems odd, not to say unfeeling, to me. If I was travelling to a nearby city for a week the single bag limit would be reasonable. When I'm coming from half-way around the world to park at my destination for two months I like to have more than one pair of everything with me in order not to spend the entire vacation soaking my washing in the sink. I need that second bag.

            You can bring a second bag, of course. I believe that Air Canada hopes you will. To travel from Lebanon to Canada that extra bag will cost you a hundred dollars (plus taxes) each direction, and while I’d sooner take that hundred bucks and buy a dartboard with the head of Air Canada’s CEO custom-printed onto it, the option is yours.

            It won’t surprise you to learn that Premium Economy passengers are allowed two free checked bags. What a coincidence that we at the back of the plane just lost that privilege last year.

            The Premiums are also promised priority check-in and boarding. Instead of improving baseline service generally, Air Canada is making whoever expects reasonable service pay extra for it.

            A hot towel, wider pillow and amenity kit are some of the features of Premium Economy. I used to bring my own amenities until they wouldn’t let me anymore, and I’m not going to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a microwaved wet wipe. Of more interest to me is the promised wider seat, 7 extra inches of leg room and “more recline”. The seat width and leg room are the only two features I might want badly enough to pay for. The extra recline in the chair worries me, however. I’d want to see how far the guy’s head in front of me projects into my face area before deciding whether I like it or not.

            There was something in the email from Air Canada which shocked and astounded me far more than any of all this, though. It was the sight of a little gold medal near the bottom of the page with the accompanying message that Air Canada had been voted the best international airline in North America three years in a row.

            It didn’t say which three years in a row. Maybe it was in the 1960’s. But no. A moment’s reflection has brought me the recollection that according to -- well, everyone I know, Air Canada is pretty fair when measured against most US airlines. I never go to the States myself but friends and family have assured me that Air Canada is positively luxurious compared to the dirty, squashy tubs chugging from point to point through the skies of America.

            I wonder how it would measure up to European airlines in a global poll. My vote, I can assure you, would be sadly unpatriotic. In my limited experience the national carriers of Germany, Holland and the United Kingdom are much better than Air Canada. For real gold medal service, at least as viewed from the back of the plane, I can confidently recommend Emirates Airlines. They have the best economy service of any plane I’ve been on. Middle East Airlines, our national airline here in Lebanon with unfashionable, peacock-blue seats and the proud reputation of having been among the last airlines in the world to prohibit smoking on board, serves far better food than Air Canada.

            What irks me about all of this is that flying is not an optional luxury for some people yet airlines continue to operate as if it were. I’m not talking about the chartered vacations on which people buzz from Canada down to Mexico in the winter, or anything like that. I think people make those kind of plane reservations with appropriate expectations. If you don’t like being jammed into a tiny seat for five or six hours, you won’t go. But if I don’t fly home to Canada I don’t get to see my family. Unless I become a serious hot air balloonist or am prepared to sail on a series of ships which would take me to the western side of Canada with just enough time to spare for me to touch soil and turn around again, I have to fly. Usually, I have to fly on Air Canada.

            I know what you’re thinking. Stop griping and just pay the extra for the Premium ticket. Enjoy the room to spread your bum cheeks, stretch your legs, soak up the comfort of your “wider pillow”. Well, I won’t do it. It’s what they want, don’t you see? They’re trying to drive me out of my home at the back of the plane and I tell you, I won’t go.  

           

The Cold Week in Beirut

            I guess the storm is finally gone. For five or six days Lebanon has been in the grip of a fierce blizzard that blew in from Russia, or at least that’s how the newspapers describe it. The blizzards have all been happening up in the mountains. Down here in Beirut we had five days of almost non-stop heavy rain, winds that threatened to peel the paint off the buildings, and for five memorable minutes a dump of hailstones the size of cherry pits.

            The storm wouldn’t have been a very big deal except for the fact, always huge and significant but shrugged off by the people living here if you bring it up in conversation, that there is no proper infrastructure in Lebanon. Under this storm’s torrents of rain retaining walls popped out of place, roads flooded and people found their shops and homes standing in water.

            While I cringed at the thought of how the Syrian refugees, stray cats and Lebanon’s poorest were coping with the rain and bitter cold, I had my own domestic distractions in the form of water leaks, power spikes and cuts, angry downstairs neighbours (yes, the same malignant pair of pustules as have ever plagued our existence) and cancelled school.

            I barely survived two weeks’ of the kids being at home over the holidays and when this storm caused the Minister of Education to announce nation-wide school closures, I slipped ever closer to the edge of the abyss. If you’re a mother you won’t have to ask what abyss I’m talking about. You know. There aren’t enough stale chocolate Santas on the Christmas tree to support me when the kids start fighting solely as a means of passing time. The quality of the insults reaches rock bottom and they start dredging up grade-4 favourites like “Poo face” and “Fart breath”.  

            The schools are supposed to reopen tomorrow. If you looked outside right now you wouldn’t believe they could be closed today. The sun is shining in a blue sky with fluffy white clouds prettily arrayed about. But it was a damp 14 degrees C inside our bedroom when we got up this morning and for all the schools in Lebanon without heating, that’s too cold.

            It’s hard to believe that they shut down all the schools in a country because the mercury is dipping to five or 10 degrees C but that’s just my Canadian perspective. They wouldn’t have many school days left in Alberta if they followed such a protocol there, but that’s because they have insulated buildings and central heating. Albertans don’t know about cold houses.

            I didn’t know about cold houses myself until I came to Lebanon. People used to ask me – still ask me – how I could bear living in Canada when it’s “so cold” there. I have never understood how to answer such a question. The first thing that always comes to my mind but which I never say out loud on account of it being a tad sarcastic and patronizing, is that while Canada is indeed a cold place we don’t actually walk around outside in the winter in our underpants. We put on warm clothing and we heat our cars and homes.

            But, see, this is the part that someone who has only ever lived in Lebanon doesn’t understand. When you tell him that the houses in Canada are warm he can’t really comprehend it. The reason he can’t, even if he is a clever man with an admirable history of haggling prowess at the vegetable market, is that there are no warm houses in Lebanon. You may as well ask him to imagine a cabbage which preys on rabbits.

            People will argue that because Beirut normally only experiences the mildest cold weather builders here don’t see a need to insulate homes. But that’s a ridiculous defence because insulation works at keeping the air-conditioned air inside during summer, too. Whatever reason people will give for homes here being thermal disasters (other than the obvious and shameful truth of it being the short-term cheapest way to build), no one can deny that they are monstrously unpleasant in winter. On a sunny day – and Beirut has plenty of those even in the dead of winter – the air outside your apartment feels much warmer than inside.

            The rooms on the northern side of any building are the worst. Our salon and Noonie’s bedroom are both on the northern side and they become meat lockers in the winter months. I’ve been known to keep lettuce in our salon when my fridge is too full.

            It’s to do with the humidity level of the air. It’s damp here so when its cold it feels repulsively frigid, like a naked leap into a mountain pool. I know that a lot of people living around the world are used to cool, damp climates and that our few weeks of it here on the Mediterranean don’t count for much, but boy, I just find it ironic that people ask me how I can stand the cold in Canada. I never felt half as cold in Canada as I have here in Beirut.

            People in Lebanon expect to have to wear sweaters and jackets indoors in winter. Were you aware of this? You go to some government office in Beirut on a December day and the men and women sitting behind their desks are wearing wool coats with scarves around their necks. You can practically see your breath inside their offices but nobody bothers trying to heat the place because they know from experience that the heat just drops out through the walls like water from a sieve.

            We do have heaters in our apartment and we use them but you have to be sitting right under them to feel their effect. The room almost never really heats up and when it does it begins to ebb away the second you lower the heat down again. You feel as if you are trying to heat up Beirut rather than the room you are sitting in and before long you find yourself sighing and reaching for your wool coat, too.

            M remembers his first winter in Canada. It was late December when he left Lebanon and his mum sent him off with a suitcase stuffed with wool sweaters and not much else. She thought his every moment of existence in that northern, beaver-infested hinterland would be a battle against hypothermia. For the journey itself she tucked him into three layers of wool (he was twenty-one years old and should have been doing his own tucking but that tells you something about Lebanese mothers and also a bit about why M was getting on an airplane) and, if I’m not mistaken, two pairs of woollen trousers worn one on top of the other.

            Well, M almost passed out when he got to his uncle’s place in Calgary. The uncle and his wife picked M up at the airport and drove him back to their apartment which they kept, in Canadian fashion, at a dry and toasty 23 degrees or so. M got in the door and, never having experienced anything like good central heating, began almost at once to overheat. His uncle thought he was sick. With flushed cheeks and sweat running down his back M peeled off the layers until he reached his t-shirt where he sensibly remained for the duration of his years in Canada. The wool sweaters went in a box and were never worn again.

            It is funny, though, how people’s tolerance for heat and cold varies. I’ve frequently mentioned M’s and my thermostat wars on this blog. Then there is M’s sister who can’t bear the slightest cold and can generally be found from late October to mid-April draped across a portable heater in her living room like a wet mitten someone is trying to dry out. On the other end of the spectrum dwells our neighbour in Newfoundland who once told me that while she liked the sun she didn’t care for too much heat, and that “anything over 18 degrees” was getting a bit warm for her liking.

            Half our family friends in Canada who are of retirement age head to Arizona or Mexico for the winter but I met an Englishwoman once who told me that she and her husband had lived in Canada for a couple of years, in southern Ontario, and that while they enjoyed their time they eventually decided to leave “because of the weather.” When I sympathised with her and said that the winters were hard for those not used to them she said, “Winters? Oh, the winters were fine. It was the summers we couldn’t bear. Too hot and humid even to sleep at night. We couldn’t wait to get back to England.”

            What sense can we make of any of this? Why, none at all of course, just like this blog post.

The Matriarch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “What for?”           

            “For not coming to see her more frequently.”

            “But he comes pretty often.”

            “Not enough to suit her, apparently.”

            “Will she yell at you like that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “What new house?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Rubbish, I never said that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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