speaking. My luggage makes the transfer from
turbulence, and just dead tired. My cousin Josette
Rome to Beirut despite the tight layover:
and aunt Marcelle are picking me up at the airport
unbelievable. Even the customs and immigration
on this hot August afternoon to take me to my
lines at the Beirut airport go fast. I notice for the
family’s old apartment.
first time, as I walk through that legendary airport—
wrecked by bombs again and again before, during,
and after the civil war— that it’s been spiffed up
recently into a gleaming twenty-first-century
international hub and now seems to run more
smoothly than JFK; not saying much, but
impressive for a war-ravaged country with a lessthan-stellar record for bureaucratic efficiency.
As I walk out of the airport terminal onto the
sidewalk, breaking a sweat in the late-afternoon
heat, my cousin Josette, a stunning and trim
brunette in her late forties, sees me and calls out my
name. She’s always been one of my favorite
relatives, warm but bitingly witty, a creative and
successful interior designer who never married. I’ve
often thought of her as exhibit A in the “see. it’s
okay not to marry” campaign I’m forever waging
silently against my relatives and against an
imaginary Lebanese chorus, or maybe just against
myself. My paternal aunt Marcelle, Josette’s mom,
shy and soft-spoken, widowed when her husband
died young of a heart attack during the war, is here,
Beirut
too, her chin-length dark hair neatly groomed, her
dark purple skirt suit giving her olive skin a warm
My luggage, despite the uneventful journey,
arrives in better shape than I do. By the time I step
off the plane, I’m zonked from all the emotional
glow. We pile my bags into Josette’s trunk and
drive off to my old family apartment in Hamra, part