Memories of Beirut
My memories of Beirut, where I lived between the ages of four and seven, are clear but disconnected. I can picture the apartment where we lived, where each room was, including the room that I shared with my brother as well as a fort that we built together one day. The apartment was on the bottom floor of a building on the campus of the American University of Beirut. There was a small garden, which I can’t picture at all except that I remember sitting there once when I had the mumps, wishing I could eat what the rest of the family was eating, which I think was Spanish tortilla de patatas. I also remember a park on the other side of the street, and beyond that the Mediterranean. I remember going to swim in the sea with my parents and brother. We would walk through a tunnel that went under the corniche, the road that ran along the sea, and reappear on the rocky shore. There were large tide pools and a rocky inlet where everyone went swimming, although I was scared to do so because it was connected to the wide open sea.
A few friends lived near by and we played around the apartment building. I remember the honeysuckles that grew behind the house and the single drop of sweet nectar that each flower gave up. Nearby, there were large metal tanks. We would climb them, but if it was warm out they would get too hot to climb and we could put crayons on them that would then melt and run down the curved edges of the tank.
I went to school close by, to the American Community School, but do not remember anything about what I might have learned there, with the exception of how to count to three in Arabic, something which I think I can still do, although it is possible that the knowledge of how to say those numbers has changed in the almost fifty years that have passed since I learned them.
I have even more distant memories of venturing further from home with my parents and brother: to the corniche where we would get a hollow baked bread from vendors on the sidewalk, who would crack open the bread and pour in spices. I also remember my dad’s physics lab, especially the smell, which I smelled again many years later when walking through a physics lab thousands of miles away in Berkeley, California. I can also picture the tank of liquid helium that he would use to entertain my brother and me by putting pieces of rubber in the helium and then throwing them on the floor where they shattered into many discrete but disconnected pieces, like my memories.