'Ammi on my mind

You were here again today. Not in Abu Dhabi, where you spent most of your life, not in the café where you spent every afternoon in Beirut, or the suites where you used to say. You were here again exactly where I last left you, at the hotel I visited when delivering your invitation to our wedding.  After we sat there for a few minutes, smiling sincerely and uttering niceties that don’t really amount to a conversation, I took my leave in order to continue with my long pre-wedding task list.

I was happy to see you, touched that you were in the country and could attend my wedding, but I remember walking out thinking how you have not changed a bit, how you will always be the same.  I wonder now if that was the whole point, and if that was a point of pride for you; that you ignored people and even circumstances, and proudly held on to your quirky individualistic antics no matter what.  You were such a character, Ammi, that we remember and recount so many of your stories.  Stories that were first told in frustration became amiable references to your quirkdom.  

I love that I have all these stories with which to conjure you up, because it is odd, Ammi, how you so seamlessly removed yourself from this world, from our lives.  We barely knew how to mourn you when you passed away… It may be why I held on to that last hotel as your persistent mark, a fresh memory to preserve.  It is now over a year later, and every time I think of you, it feels unreal that you are truly no longer with us.  That thought is accompanied by a little smile, and a whispered “may you rest in peace”. Amen.

They ask me how it is

They ask me how it is, in this country where I live and love, and where news and politics ricochet off tree branches and crashing waves,

They ask me if I’m safe in the land that cradles me at the end of a long line of ancestors, each of whom come to me with the smell of the earth at every first rain, and the sun kissing my cheeks at any time of the year.

I reply with idle words to comfort them, the banality soothes their concern – they need not worry, this is how it has always been.  They worry because the news tells them to worry, because we never appear for our win in an Olympic bid, or for hosting a world invention summit. We do not appear because we have explorers who have unearthed keys to the history of civilization (at least not recently), or because we nurture scientists who have found the cure for anything.  If there was a yearbook of nations, we’d be the country that was voted “Has most potential, but too volatile to succeed”, or “Intuitively gifted, but has self-destructive tendencies”.

So I reply with idle words, though there are times when I’d like to say much more.

I’d like to say that I get up every morning not knowing if my plans will be instantly derailed by security events, but I get up anyway.

That I start planning trips for upcoming holidays not knowing if the airport will remain open, but I plan anyway.

That I browse through new houses, and make plans for rebuilding projects at home, not knowing if something will prompt us to leave suddenly, but I browse anyway.

It is indeed how we are, so we have been going on with our lives for many years, with the threat of something drastic happening looming overhead, and we go on anyway.

You are right to be concerned for us, for there is clearly cause for concern. 

And I reciprocate my concern for you: our threats present themselves clear as day (sadly), and remain sternly present at the corner of our eyes.  Whereas yours fall upon you without heed or warning.

One is not worse than the other, and equally not better.

I am fine and well in the country where I live, and you?

Summertime…

Time always takes on a new meaning in the summer. The days are longer, and somehow appear to be abundant when we stand at the first day of June and look at the distant mark of the end of August. The truth is that these long days and broad stretch are a trompe l’oeil  - summer’s irony of ironies is that there is never enough time, there are never enough days to catch up with everything.

The days run ahead of you with assumptions of availability for pieces that far outnumber the parts.  Three international festivals? Of course there will be time to participate in these rare cultural activities and attend at least one event in each.  Friends and relatives visiting from abroad? How can you not find time to see them and catch up when they’ve traveled all the way to Lebanon for such a short trip (and one day, I’ll figure out how they manage to overlap their trips so well).  Postponed trips and home projects? Isn’t the summer a better time as it gets so much busier in the fall? (The answer is no, by the way, but you ignore that logic and push on.)

Yes, the summer is the sneakiest trick you play on yourself. You beat yourself up for not making the most of the season to kick back and relax (no doubt a throw away from the days of aimless school summer vacations), while straining your schedule with all sorts of delicately dated events that fit around festival calendars and travel schedules of others, not to mention work deadlines that don’t get the memo to go away for the summer.

And so you arrive as we do now, at the start of August, where suddenly the end of summer appears within sight, and you panic. First, you panic at all the summer plans and promises that you still have not met, then you panic that you’re going to slip back into the usual fall-winter race without having filled up on summer rest.

One summer soon, I will manage to wear out my swimsuit in one season as we used to so so many years ago. For now, I’ll practice the grand summer tradition of hope, and look out at the season from inside my office window as the inevitable thought slowly rises “Next summer, I’m going to …”

Summer is a sneaky trick, but luckily, we never learn.

Wishing upon a star

It is the 11^th of January, a day that one of the more famous (though not necessarily more credible) astrologers noted as the day when the skies open up to all Capricorns and receive their sincerest wishes.  I do not subscribe to such announcements or believe in astrologers… but I have been known to regularly throw coins into fountains, delicately blow out candles, and focus on fallen eyelashes, placing wishes on each action.  So I basically figured “What’s the harm?”

When the day finally arrived, the biggest burden was not in forming a wish, but in the unshakeable realization of the 24-hour finiteness of the day. So do I not get to make wishes for the remaining 354 days of the year? I know what I want, but am I saying it right? Am I asking with sufficient sincerity? Is my desire clear?

And mostly, what is truly pertinent: if the 11^th just happens to be the same day when I’m inundated with a few issues that have kept me quite preoccupied and unable to focus on said wishes, do I get a do-over or is this part of the exercise? I mean, if the stars had the day open just for me, then is it not the same stars that made this such a stress-filled day? It just doesn’t strike me as the ‘stars being in my favour’ scenario at all.

I vote for do-over.