A BEAUTIFUL HOSPITALITY

Tomorrow Larry and I will pack up our summer clothes and a few bags of toiletries to return to a room in the girls' dorm for a few more weeks.  Our little villa is still under construction and our absent hosts, who have blessed us with a comfortable home for two months, will be returning from their annual leave in two days.

I don't mind at all. 

We arrived with 8 suitcases and two carry-ons two months ago. That represented the things  we considered necessary and non-replaceable.  Our pilot visit in November tipped us off to a few things we might want to bring:  My favorite vegetable peeler.  A generous supply of volumizing shampoo and mousse for fine hair.   Twenty bars of Ivory soap.   My Cutco knife set.  Two 1/8 size violins.  Two!  Their value is still under question, as I've comfortably transitioned into a far different livelihood.  But there they sit taking up good space, yet to prove their worth!

But with the possibility of being placed in an empty apartment to wait, we've also acquired a room full of Lucky Home purchases.  Iron and ironing board.  Drying rack and clothes hampers.  Hangars and trash cans.  Seasonings.  Dishes and glasses and kettles and hotpads and...

Never heard of Lucky Home?  Walmart has just met some stiff competition.  But since WallyMart probably will never get within a few thousand miles of here...

Lucky Home is a hard-to-beat housewares store packed in under one of the nearby apartment complexes--the Dollar Store of everything kitchen/cooking/eating/serving.  It could boast of the best prices and the thickest congestion of  household products in the neighborhood if it did any advertising. But evidently it doesn't need to.  All of Sabtieh Hill--and beyond--know about Lucky Home.  And that's enough to keep a contingent of staff busy finding places for customers to park.   Most retailers have a fellows on the street to "handle" customer parking, as open parking lots are absolutely rare among the never-ending apartment complexes.  And only the western-style malls in the area have parking garages.   A slight hesitation of a passing car will tip of the parking staff of a potential customer.  Without hesitation he will offer to take your keys and double park you anywhere nearby that will allow at least a single lane to cut between apartment buildings.  If you're willing.  If you look  frightened he'll just cut his hand through the air in disbelief,  "Not worry.  I work here.  Why I take your car?"  If you're independent-minded like one friend I was with, you double park yourself and pull a large cardboard out from under the seat with your cellphone number scribbled on it and perch it on the dashboard.

Lucky Home, like many of the retailers in town, is staffed by all men--at the cashiers, on the floor, in the stockroom, on the street, everywhere.    If you indicate you're equipping a household, you get a personal assistant who will follow you around explaining, suggesting, pricing, and carrying your goods.  And he knows his housework.  Which brooms pick up dirt the best.   Which kettles will burn your food.  The most efficient tea kettle.  Which toilet cleaners will match your bathroom.  At first I thought he was just throwing out random suggestions, but evidently he listened to know my colors, style preferences, price range, taste....and probably even figured out my personality to.

All that to say...we bought Lucky Home out last week.   Now, with a dorm room instead of an apartment, we have to store all of it while we wait for our little villa.  So instead of eight suitcases, we have a room filled with unwieldy, unpackable housewares.  We had to replace all the trivia we sold at our yard sale a few months ago!   Luckily (for Lucky  Home) we spent less here replacing everything  then it would've cost to ship. 

So I don't mind at all.  

When people inquire if I'm impatient to get settled, I just tell them that since I spent 27 years in one place I can move several more times in the next few months and still hold a good average!   These two months have been an unusually pleasant, restful blessing.  We accepted the McKenzie's offer readily and we've enjoyed every bit of their beautiful hospitality.

That's because, in addition to a panoramic view of the Mediterranean and breezes that blow above much of the city pollution, we've enjoyed a beautiful garden setting.  Evidently the staff family who lived here when the house was first remodeled after the war were avid gardeners.  The pictures below capture only some of their investment and don't include the flaming bougainvillea or apricot blossoms that were in bloom when we first moved in.  Or a thousand snow-white droplets that covered the lawn in early spring.  The pictures were taken before the  gardenia bushes out front gave way to high-class aroma-therapy for anyone sitting on the front porch.  The pictures also don't show the  late-blooming bougainvillea that will soon cover much of the front of the house. Or the small daisies that will be scattered across the hillside behind us.  There's still a show before a dusty, parched summer sets in.

Waiting to look like home.

As I look at all that someone invested years ago--choosing the colors, planning the blooming times, placing each artistically along terraces and walks, and watering faithfully through Lebanon summers--fully aware others would get to enjoy it all--I know I've received a "beautiful hospitality." Because a flower stands for so much that is....home.

Is that why I already have 20 geranium plants waiting to live in window boxes at my new little villa?

Whether I know the name of the flower
or not, I've enjoyed several enormous
 bushes of solid pink, red, and wine.

Could this possibly be lavendar? 
A handful of crushed leaves seem credible to me!

Intense oranges, yellows and pinks edge 
walls and walks.

It's a larger honeysuckle blossom than on
Jones Road--aroma therapy that is strong
enough to cover the exhaust of Beirut traffic
that can reach up Sabtieh Hill on a smoggy day.

A rose is a rose is a rose.  And they're everywhere...

...but mini-roses catch my attention.

Iris enjoy Beirut as well as Berrien,
and remind me of home...
the best kind of hospitality!

WILD AND WEEDY

If a slower pace of life doesn't turn me into a green thumb, it will at least make the most of my free time.

IN all my leisure, the weeds of Middle East University have caught my attention.  It's not that I need time to notice a weed; I've spent years harboring the obsessive-compulsive behavior  of never entering  the Village Adventist Church in Berrien Springs without at least one handful of weeds.  Even on a mid-summer Sabbath morning.  It was an act of service.

Middle East University has unwittingly hired on the same service and given me a great deal of  fulfillment.

When I'm on my early morning walk and think no one's looking, I dive for the thickest, most gnarled thistle mocking me from under a bush or wall, hiding by a fence, or standing crassly in the middle of the campus lawn.   Facts are, the university maintains some naturally lovely grounds that are the envy of the neighborhood--and that have been graciously offered for their enjoyment.  Sabtieh Hill residents are free to use the parking lot for laps, the tennis and basketball courts, the soccer field or children's playground.  And the grounds are well kept.   

A stand of wild beauty breaks 
the boredom a field of dry grass

So whatever I do is only incidental and for my own pleasure, including helping out the gentleman that's hired to keep the grounds free of empty water bottles, candy bar wrappers and the classic tissues that are used here in place of napkins, paper towels, hand towels and handkerchiefs.  The local folk I meet in the process seem genuinely appreciative, especially when I tell them this is what I did on our dirt road in Michigan on Sunday mornings after the beer parties in the woods.  I like to own my own quirks.

But because I have pretty much collected at least a full season of trash from a few of the unseen corners of the campus and filled a few dozen trash bags, I'm now left focusing on the weeds.  It's a conflicting option, though.

Lebanon's best weeds produce beautiful flowers.  They're not the kind you want to pull.  So one day I took a camera on my morning walk instead of a trash bag.  We're at the end of spring here and the warm days have coaxed up miniature beauty in the most unsuspecting places.  I suspect a few are leftovers of someone's long-ago garden gone wild.    

An overgrown ditch can be a small garden.  A drain pipe can spill out a trail of miniature blue jewels.  A wild vine might weave itself through a tree and add its rich, orange flowers among its branches.  And the rocky site around the little villa where I'm waiting to live is cluttered with splinters of building tiles--and delicate, yellow wild flowers.  Even the vine eeking an existence out of the dirt in a rain gutter offers miniature blue flowers.  I'm pretty sure they're cousins to Forget-Me-Nots.

A whole bouquet thrives among the
construction debris of our little villa

Unruly but dainty color trims a garden wall

These glorious spring weeds may not last the blistering, dusty summer.  But the statement is enough:  A weed can be beautiful.  Even though some of them are nearly microscopic, often hidden and temporary, they still add to my climb up through the pines to our temporary home, or my walk down to work, or my early morning jaunt around the campus.

They remind me to be careful of the value I place on weeds...and people.  

The unruliness I detect in someone's life may be the very opposite of the beauty God is nurturing.  The dysfunction that I might want to straighten out may really be an essential step in the growing process.   I don't want to uproot what God is doing.  If I pull it out, no one will ever see the bloom.  Everyone will miss His handiwork.

But as far as picking up trash and pulling weeds, I think I'll still stuff my jeans pocket with empty plastic grocery bags when I head out for my morning walk.  But I'll leave the people-work completely up to God.  

A garden of hundreds like this bloom
 along the stairs down to the campus

I can let these weeds be--at least 
until summer.

Too bright to hide

A poignant reminder of a generation
who had to leave their flowers
to the war...untamed and uncared for.
But beauty still grows inspite of it all.

P S   Evidently my trashy past-time is not real secret; someone just gifted me with a package of disposable gloves.  

LOSE YOUR HAT IN LEBANON

Evidently we were the first tourists of the morning when our driver braked and swerved into a few strategically placed parking spots along the mountain road.   Someone pointed out a sign that advertised the most original castle in the world.  The driver explained that each stone in the small castle had been designed and hand-carved by the same artist, a stone mason of a very special sort.  He had been at it 60 years; it deserved a few minutes of our time.  Real quick.  If we had been maneuvering up the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia I would've known the place was a well-contrived tourist trap.

A castle's record

But if tourists had any reason to pay attention, this nameless artist deserved the benefits of a livelihood to accompany his humble journey.  Every stone was a visual statement.  A study.   Some of them recorded personal experiences.  Others commemorated political events.  Some were a social statement.   Others a commentary on life.  Some had the likes of a royal coat of arms.  Others looked like cartoons.  And each one came out of the chisel of one man's life.

Even before I stepped into the shadowy wax museum that the castle housed, I admired this man for his transparency and emotional honesty in a world full of pretense and effects.  His willingness to be open gave him a certain strength:  Even the front door was his statement to any who had ever dealt him a tough blow.  The cruel schoolmaster, the taunting classmates, the old girlfriend would have to bow very, very low to enter the four foot door into his life!  

Lebanon's pride:
Taking the Phoenician alphabet to the world

It seems the artist, a sensitive soul, had found school difficult.  The structure of the classroom had been hard.  He was often the brunt of the teacher's wrath and his classmates' bad humor.  School told him he was nothing and would amount to nobody.   Then, as a young man, he fell in love.  The beautiful young thing left him heartbroken because it was known he would go nowhere in life.  He could not provide.  

Everything hurt.  Life was a failure.

And so, young and determined, with finally a loyal woman alongside him who must've invested every bit as much as he did, he began a lifelong project of proving that he would make something of his life:  If nothing else, he would create a three-dimensional record of how everyday life had shaped him--a commentary on one's choice to be a victim or builder, to bemoan one's life or create something from it.   The results?   An engaging, honest autobiography of a wounded but emotionally resilient and creative soul.

It's also the only engaging wax museum I've ever visited.  (By the way, I've come to the conclusion everyone should plan a wax museum of their life.  Even if you can't produce it, it's excellent therapy to identify the events that shaped you...and give the world around you the opportunity to share it with you.  Some who see it may take responsibility!)

Some of the wax figures really moved.  Many didn't.  But they all were alive with emotion, interaction, commentary--nostalgia as well as regret, memories to remember and some to forget.  Every scene was supported with a  mass of original, authentic props, detailed and expressive of the artist's Arabic-Turkish-Muslim-Orthodox-and-more world:  His parents.  The family home and the market place.  The cleric's visits and prayer time.  Holiday gatherings and contraband sips from the keg.  Childhood games, mischief, sweethearts.  And school.  

Memories have feelings

I stood by the school scene, struck by my own urge to grab the scowling school master's muscled arm and shush the taunts of the grinning guys around him.  It's not like a movie, where the camera cuts from trauma to relief.  It's a frozen moment pressed onto a child's world.  A moment--probably one of many--that shaped his life and that he spent the better part of his life rising above.

Evidently he chose to do that by inviting the rest of the world to share those shaping  moments.  I found myself confirming the injustice.  Validating everyday sort of pain.  But he didn't stay there.  As  the scenes changed, I realized he had better to share! 
  
The very process of capturing the difficult moments must have released him from them, because he carried us away from that shame to humor, gentleness, curiosity.  And mischief.   Even the ending was a whimsical experience, a live love song in the trappings of old Lebanon, delivered with the personal Lebanese touch.  

"Do you love me?" with tea

It didn't take much to read between the lines.  A middle-aged gentleman accompanied himself in a three-note harmony as he crooned in heavily accented English:  "Do you love me?" 

I couldn't help but think that the only one who might have a problem answering that would be the old girlfriend who thought he'd come to no good.

We laughed about the subtleties of the artist's message and shared the ambience at the end with a gregarious group of young Australian Lebanese visiting their cousins in Beirut.  (So happened, after sharing notes on Sydney and Beirut, we met up with them four more times as we moved up the mountain to the cedars of Lebanon.  By the end of the day, we were fast friends!)

Friends worthy of a pose.

But....getting ahead of the story...on the way out of the castle, a rush of whispers informed us that the artist himself was coming to visit us.  The advantage of being first in the day.  

It was classic Lebanese--a personal museum experience where introductions and explanations and connections are established like we deserved to leave as part of the family.  Whether it was a marketing ploy or not doesn't matter:  The old artist showed up at the door to bid his guests off.  (Does the Smithsonian offer that touch?)  But in the cordial mix of being introduced, he singled out a geologist in our group. Maybe it was because in a crowd of tall Americans, they could look each other in the eye.

Translated:  I appreciate you more than the hat

"I like your hat," the grinning artist said in accented English.  

The geologist, a transplanted European with a few Middle Eastern friends himself, patted his head like he was trying to remember what he was wearing.  Then, without breaking for breath, he lifted the khaki canvas off and extended it ceremoniously.  "Here, you must have it!"  

The artist grinned, looked around with satisfaction.  "I am honored!"  The trade took place.  In real Lebanese fashion.  In typical Middle East tradition.  That's what you do when someone tells you they like something of yours.  It's an expression of your friendship to give them what they admired.  The meaning was not lost on either men.  

The artist inspected the flimsy khaki hat with obvious pleasure.  Why shouldn't he?  He'd said he liked it!  And by anyone's standard, the hat matched his jacket and pants far better than the stiff white canvas hat.  It fit perfectly.  As for the geologist?  He now owned an artist's hat.  And he could claim a hug.

In the end, everyone's better off.

It was an endearing exchange for any two strangers.  But it carried even more meaning because of the person we'd gotten to know within the castle museum.

Not a shabby exhibit at all.  Not a tourist trap either.  Especially when the slow kid in school could say to himself, to his wife of 60 years, and to a circle of curious Americans stopped on the side of the road, "See.  I'm not a nobody.  I have a new friend...and a new hat!"

We all have different ways we express our value.  We all have been blessed with different resources to use.  But in Lebanon a nice hat, a shiny car, and a beautiful villa are a significant measure of what a person has accomplished with his life.   Even from across the valley, the artist's life looked impressive.

Not shabby:  Castle on the left.  Home on the right.  The hillside is his.