On Conversations We Have (Part IV)

Lebanese cowboy (in the end he did it with one hand).

It is evening; I am sitting on my balcony and read. The weather is wonderful. There is some shooting in the distance. It is not fireworks (different sound), it is not constant enough to be celebratory fire, it is too little to be a full-scale gun fight, and it is too far away to worry about.

Later, a friend calls from Broumana (her town); she needs to go down to Hamra (my neighborhood), and is wondering whether there’s fighting going on.

“Fighting?” I say.
“Yes, fighting. They say they’re shooting on Hamra,” she replies.

“No, no fighting. I’ve sat on my balcony all evening, and there’s no fighting. Maybe some shooting. Who says they’re fighting?”
“Who says they’re fighting?” you hear her ask someone in the background.

“It was on the news,” she comes back. “On the news they said they were fighting on Hamra.”

I ask hubbie, who watched the news, whether they were fighting on Hamra. He says that no, they were not fighting on Hamra.
“No, no fighting. Just some shooting,” I tell her.
“Oh, okay. So I’ll come down then.”

When she hangs up, hubbie says dryly: “They’re fighting in Aisha Bakkar.”
Aisha Bakkar is the neighborhood next to Hamra. You’d think these men had some more sense, no?

'I am going to the beach, and I am taking . . . .'

(Apart from the chairs, notice the tool he's holding in his left-hand; it is a (don't know the name) with which you prepare the coals for the argileh, the water pipe. You cannot see the waterpipe on this picture, but it is between the legs of the driver).