No Complaining Now

It’s almost Easter. It is one of the coldest Easters in Holland in a long time. 1ºC. Now that is cold! A friend of mine who I used to work with just flew in from Korea for the holiday. She said it was snowing there only last week.

And here we sit, in Beirut, on the balcony at 9:15 P.M., still in T-shirts, with Joao Gilberto in the background. It is 22 ºC here. We had a typical Lebanese dinner, with something like 20 little different dishes. We watched the moon rise above the mountains. The city is quiet (we have electricity tonight; no generators). Lights shimmer in the mountains. You can hear water running; someone’s water tank is overflowing.
I smell the apple tobacco of someone’s argileh, outside. We’re laughing at what a socially dysfunctional family we must appear to be to others, as we all sit at the dinner table and surf the web in the open air. You don’t hear me complain now.