A Christmas Story

On the Corniche in Beirut

I had intended to write this Christmas Freakshow on the Blessed $600 Million wedding Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez have reportedly planned for Aspen. I still might guide you through that spectacle when it happens. But as today is Christmas, I’m giving myself - and you, Gentle Reader - a break from MAGA-times grotesquery.

In lieu of that, I’m sharing a personal Christmas story from the so-called “holy land” - the realm around the Mediterranean where the three western monotheistic religions were born. We have no religion in our family, but we are culturally Christian. I have dim memories of coloring Baby Jesus and the wise men while singing “Jesus Loves Me” on a few occasions when our neighbors in rural Michigan brought the hippie kids to Sunday school. I squirmed, and couldn’t wait to escape.

Over the years, though, two statements attributed to Christ (by his Apostle Matthew) have stayed with me, even through this era of gun-loving, Trump-worshipping Christian hypocrisy ascendant.

1. “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

2. “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

The meek don’t look likely to inherit the earth anytime soon. Gaza has taught us that we are no better than the people alive during and aware of the 20th Century genocides, who did nothing. The jury is still out on whether Musk, Bezos, Ackman, and the other oinkers of Trumpistan will meet the camel’s fate at the needle’s eye. But the fact that those ideas have persisted for two millennia gives me hope. I remain on the side of the meek and I’m pretty sure about the camel.

Lost and Found in Beirut

I had traveled a lot in the Middle East, but never before to Beirut, the “Paris of the Orient.” I went just before Christmas that year, to interview a famous, beautiful woman. I had a half-day to see the sights. Out on the Corniche - the once elegant edge of the Mediterranean now rimmed by bombed and ruined art deco beachfront high-rises, lodging rats not VIPs — you can still rent a bike. The mid-December sun was warm and it seemed a shame not to pedal around the city on my free afternoon.

Seeking the bike shop, I encountered two boys on a bench by the sea. One was smoking, holding his cigarette between flesh stumps where his hands had been cut or burned off at the wrists. Judging by the hair on his lip, he looked a very small 14. A smaller boy next to him pointed at, but did not open, a plastic bag on his lap. He was not a high-pressure salesman, but when I seemed receptive, he pulled out a plastic and cloth toy, a Chinese-made quacking duck hand puppet.

He was asking 1,500 Lebanese pounds, the equivalent of about a dollar. I only had large bills. I went across the street to a little shop to get some change and bought a bag of chips and some Pepsi. I gave the boys the treats and bought one duck.

Eventually I found the bike shop, behind a McDonald’s beside a mosque. I pedaled into the stream of cars on the Corniche. There were no bike lanes, but by following the toxic fumes of the mopeds slaloming through the traffic and dodging piles of rubble from recent bombings, I made quick progress.

I pedaled in the shadows of corrugated metal walls set up to prevent people from falling into holes where buildings had once stood, holes with great big cranes replacing war ruins with new ugly boxes. The Paris of the Orient is a city of hundreds of small ground zeros, apparently.

A sign in French, “Quartiere de caractere originale,” marked the edge of Achrafieh, a wealthy Christian neighborhood. The hideous concrete box high-rises briefly gave way to a few leafy streets, a last remnant of Ottoman glory. I found “downtown” Beirut: a little outdoor mall of sleek cafes, luxury stores, tourist shops, Christmas shoppers and the Ministry of Finance, all encircled by massive concrete blocks to repel car bombs. I bought a map, and I stopped for an Italian coffee and looked around. Soldiers everywhere. A massive yellow mosque hovered nearby, beside an equally massive Maronite Christian Church. Armed men between them guarded a white-tented memorial to assassinated politician Rafik Hariri, whose slaying has been linked to Hezbollah.

By the time I finished my coffee, the winter sky had darkened early. The prospect of nighttime traffic was alarming. I plunged into the traffic and pedaled in what I thought was the direction back, stopping to ask for help at least six times, getting six different sets of directions.

I wished I had bothered to refresh my memory on the Arabic for “right,” “left” and “straight” before I set off. People kept directing me onto one of the highways that linked the quarters, and as the sun set, a soaring highway bridge seemed the only route back to the seashore. Walking my bike along its wee footpath, four lanes of cars whizzing by, I encountered a few other pedestrians, African laborers mostly, souls equally lost. Beneath us, the twilight call to prayer coincided with the silvery sound of Christian vespers from the big church beside it, a reminder of the religious co-existence for which Beirut has been wrecked again and again.

Back at my hotel, I opened my purse and spilled the haul of the day: a few cheap pretty rings for friends, the street map of Beirut; at the bottom the duck puppet I’d forgotten all about.

I examined it. The cheap orange cloth was printed with random English words: “baby” and “three” and “happy” and “love. The duck’s eyes were plastic, glued unevenly into a pelt of fake gray fur. The plastic quacker in its throat was already falling out.

The goofy little assemblage suddenly suggested a chain of global sorrow, from the Chinese laborer on the plastic quacker assembly line, to the one who sewed and glued it, to the boys on the Corniche selling it, to Beirut babies yet to be born that might someday play with one. What had happened to that boy’s hands? Land mine? Bomb? Islamic law? Kitchen accident? I should have asked. And why hadn’t I bought his entire bag of ducks, which would have set me back no more than 20 bucks?

Later I realized that I could probably go back out onto the Corniche in the morning and find those two boys. But I didn’t. I got my interview and went home. For a long time, I tried to write about those boys and the duck but I couldn’t get it right. Why did they and that particular bit of toy flotsam move me so? Because it was Christmastime and I was lonely and far from home?

I see people every day in New York who need help. They seek warmth in subway trains; sometimes they offer the equivalent of duck puppets, but more often they just hold out their hands. If coins are handy sometimes I give. More often I turn away. One gray-headed old guy was standing on the 1 train with his pants falling to his knees the other day, eyes shut, oblivious to the riders smirking at his naked thighs and none of us offering aid.

This Christmas, the handless Beirut boy’s duck puppet hangs on my tree in New York, joining the pink lacy globe that belonged to Grandma, the red strawberry that was Dad’s favorite — another bauble of memory.

(Originally published in the Los Angeles Times)

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