The City of Secretary - Part II

Don't get me wrong.  It was not all gloom and doom at dad's office. In fact, dad's office was the most interesting and colorful from all the offices I have worked in since.  And I have worked at:

Thos. Cook & Sons, Merck Pharmaceuticals, American Lebanese Shipping Company, Electrolux, Singer Sewing Company, Lipschutz Organization, Conseil 2000, William Morris Agency, Occidental Petroleum, City of Beverly Hills, Northrop Corp., Motown Corporation, State Bar of California, Avazian & Avazian, Saro Trading Company, Ivy Ligue Cleaners, Partridge, Snow & Hahn, St. Illuminator's Armenian Apostolic Church, Edart GTI, Circle Tree OA to name a few.  In order of appearance they were in Lebanon, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Hohokus, NJ, Providence, Rhode Island, New York, NY, River Vale, NJ and Mesa, Arizona.

Arizona, where I am now, has a reputation of being a huge retirement center.  Older people come here to retire.  So the story goes.  It is not exclusively retirement communities galore though, although they are plenty.  People here are still free to retire or not to retire.  It is apparent, upon close scrutiny, that in Arizona, there are more people who have not retired than there are people who have.

I might have retired from a certain habit, misconception, addiction or have let a character trait retire, but I have not retired.  Neither are the people who have retired for goodness' sake.  They still have to wake up and go about their businesses.


The little radio, right behind my chair, up on the filing cabinet, was my most loyal companion.  It took close to a minute for it to warm up but once it did, Radio Liban, the Lebanese radio station with its variety of programs with no commercials was on almost constantly. When the girls would visit after school, we would have a mini-party.  It was a party when we could be somewhere, anywhere, with friends, music and...Pepsi Cola, preferably without the presence of adults.


Dad kept a pack of cigarettes in his desk drawer for visitors although he himself never smoked. They were called Philadelphia and they were made in Jordan.  I would offer them to my visitors and we would sit there, smoking, drinking Pepsi Cola, listening to music, being funny and laughing. 

These parties were rare and could only happen when dad was not there.  If he was there, the visits were, at the most, cordial.  Dad would ask us what we wanted to drink and he would telephone "downstairs" and place an order for delivery.  Coffee, sandwiches, juices, yogurt drink, Pepsi Cola and Orange Crush, the latter being my favorite.

I was afraid that he would find out that the cigarettes in the pack were getting low.  If he knew, he never mentioned it.  He did say "there is too much smoke in this room" once, as he opened the window upon entering the office where I was smoking a minute ago.

For decor, the wooden cabinet and some walls were covered by calenders with pretty geishas that the Japanese companies would send.  Behind us, there was another, smaller room where all the product samples were, labeled and ready to be promoted.

Dad's visitors, local and international saw the same kind of hospitality from him that my friends saw from me.  When the telephone "downstairs" kept ringing busy, we had to go to the top of the stairs and holler down "ALI!"  Ali would make himself seen.  "TWO COFFEES PLEASE. WASSAT."  Wassat was the Arabic word for a medium quantity of sugar.

Apart from the two grocery shops in my neighborhood which were owned by Arabs, my life so far had been confined within the perimeters of the Armenian school, community, clubs and neighborhood.  It had not left room for integration into a Lebanese world.  Now that I was smack in the middle of it, here come also the Indians, the Swedes, the Japanese, Pakistanis and others.

There was a radio program I never missed called Liban Jeunesse, Youth Lebanon.  Cecile Gedeon presented French songs that the listeners would ask for.  I don't know what prompted me one day to take the pen and write to her (look up boredom) but I got a call back from her.  She said that she could use my help if I wanted to help her.  I went to visit her.  When my parents found out they wanted to meet her.  She was kind enough to come to our house and meet my parents.

It was such a breath of fresh air to be involved in something, anything to do with the arts.  I went once or twice a week, in the afternoons to answer letters, file, and...type.  Once I took the calls for the Liban Jeunesse program when Cecile was under the weather.  She was also a member of a theater group which did skits in French at the famous Casino du Liban every night.  They were the Theatre de Dix Heures, the Ten O'clock Theater.  When Cecile got sick and could not perform, they looked for a replacement and found a girl who came and rehearsed at Cecile's flat.  While I was having difficulties sitting still because I knew I could do a far better job than this girl, I also could rationalize because she was French and therefore better at her own language while I was...well, let's not talk about that. After she left, I got up and did her lines word for word in front of Cecile with much joy and energy.  She said "Mon Dieu! You are better than Claudette."  I knew that but I thanked her anyhow.

This is when I realized that looking at poor me, people cannot possibly guess what I have repressed deep within myself. When Cecile heard me do her lines, she invited me to go to the radio station with her.  That afternoon, I presented the songs on the program, in French, forgot one, told the listeners so and continued unperturbed. Cecile was able to exhale.  

This exposure to Lebanese culture gave me a little confidence but we are not home yet. 

Before long, my attention shifted elsewhere when I started working at Thos. Cook and Son.  There were boys and girls in a big room, in a circular sitting, working. I could type and throw glances at the handsome young man sitting across from me.  There was also a cute guy on the second floor, the Accounting Department.  You can say I dated them by talking to them from time to time.

This company's employees were the nexus of the ethnic tapestry that was Lebanon at the time.  The ethnic diversity was mind blowing.  For that, Thos Cook & Sons takes the second prize for the most enjoyable working environment in my life.

To make a long story short, after the six day war and the partial closing of Thos. Cook & Sons, I returned to dad's office and found a part time job in a pharmaceutical company.

In the afternoons, I was still helping dad.

One afternoon, the phone rang. 

The City of Secretary

Yesterday, while driving my car on Chandler Boulevard on my way to the library, I heard a talk on NPR radio about General MacArthur and how he had been instrumental in averting a nuclear war during WWII.

 

His name was familiar to me, although I did not know what he was famous for until yesterday. I listened to the talk, riveted, while another tape from the past was simultaneously playing in my head.

 

I am sitting behind a typewriter in my dad's office in Beirut.  My desk has a drawer in which there are items a secretary will need, like an eraser, and a book.  The book is about General MacArthur. I don't know who it belongs to.  I am assuming the previous secretary left it there and am very impressed as I have never read it.  Even when there was nothing to do and I was looking for something to read, I would pick it up, look at it, turn some pages and then put it down because, it was in English, and therefore hard for me to understand, and I didn’t want to expand extra energy on someone I had never heard of. He was a military man as depicted on the cover, and secondly, at the time, I mainly read French novels, magazines and the close captioning of American films. I am 17 years old.

 

My classmates are continuing their high school years while I am sitting in a small office on the second floor of a building in the center of Beirut, where, if you opened the window, you would encounter strange odors from the restaurant in the adjacent building.  It wasn’t terribly offensive but it wasn’t one that would whet the appetite either.  It was just strong and unknown.  Sometimes dad, having had enough, would shut the window with attitude.

 

Our desks are two feet away from each other, side by side, and when he is in the office, we work.  We had no schedule.  It was very zen.   Sometimes we started work as most people were closing their shops. I would be ready to go home when dad will show up from the market and start writing letters that I had to type.  Since I was his daughter and had failed in high school, he gave himself the permission to make me work on his schedule.

 

As if on cue, yesterday, while watching a video of Sir Ken Robinson giving a talk on TED TV, I finally realized that I had not failed at school.

 

Mornings were the same way.  Whenever we got there was just fine.  When he traveled, often for as long as a month, I actually ran the office. And I managed not to run it down.

 

Two days after receiving my report card, dad had brought a huge iron typewriter home accompanied by a book on how to learn to type.  On a French keyboard, the second row from the top, the sequence of letters was A Z E R T Y U I O P.

 

After a week of practicing where to put which finger and how hard to push the keys on a steel-iron typewriter in order to hit the paper with the impression of a letter, dad took me to his office.  Both of his previous secretaries had left to better pastures and I was now to be the secretary, for starters. 

 

On our way to Beirut from the mountain village of Broummana, where we were vacationing that summer, dad told me of his plans for me.  I was to go to secretarial school in the afternoons at the Mouthany Institute (Mteiny in Arabic) in the building across from ours.  After that, I was to learn his business and travel to Europe on his stead to meet suppliers of the different products he imported for customers in Beirut, and thus got a commission as payment for his impeccably written letters.  He was the intermediary between supplier and buyer, and I typed letters that went to every corner of the world, with two carbon copies; one for the general file, and one for the manufacturer's file.

 

He wrote those letters in long hand on every piece of paper he could find.  He was the recycler par excellence. The back of envelopes were used for drafting letters as well as the back of a letters I had typed with revision marks on it.  Once or twice I got a paper bag with his handwritten draft to type from.

 

If he was not out to see customers, he was writing.  He wrote even at home.  He could type too and later, when they came up with lighter typewriters, he carried one with him while traveling.  He had bypassed secretaries well before the personal computer.  Seeing him type, it never crossed my mind that I was looking at the future.

 

Our office was the last one in a long corridor on the second floor.  Other units were occupied by a medical doctor, an architectural drawings duplicator, a men's tailor, and an attorney who had three offices and three secretaries who would step out into the corridor during breaks and chat, their voice echoing throughout the corridor that had no carpet.  They typed in Arabic.  I knew how hard that was. In Arabic, the character is written differently in the beginning, in the middle and at the end of a word, and thus the keyboard is very busy to say the least. I thought I had it hard typing in French and English!  These girls were typing pleadings and complaints and who knows what else in Arabic. 

 

To my astonishment, my sister Hourig tells me that when she replaced me at my dad's office a few years later, she was paid a weekly salary.  I asked her what had changed?  She told me that she had asked for it.  Whereas moi, would ask for bus fare, movie fare, this and that fare when I needed it, and would have to put up with his words of wisdom informing me that I should start thinking about my future before he would actually hand me any money.

 

What does he mean by future I would ask myself.  

 

It was a sobering moment of self recognition when my sister revealed how strong she had been in taking care of herself while working with dad.  In contrast, I was suicidal.  I just didn't know what method to use to end it all because I was aware that somewhere I had lost my mind, my logic, my sense of self and my zest for life.  

Boys were attracted to my physique but would soon find out that there was nobody home, although the lights seemed to be on.

 

Is it synchronicity when I am writing about this period of my life and I see Sir Ken Robinson give a talk on TED about how schools kill creativity? I shed tears after watching the video in the library and sent an email to my family and close friends saying that I had not failed in school.  My school was not ready for me. They all knew of course. So did I.  But hearing it confirmed by a professional made a difference. 

 

Here is the link to that video: 

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

In January of 1967, when I was 20 years old, dad, seeing how disinterested I was in his business and how interested I was about music, books and film, allowed me to go work in another company, Thos. Cook and Sons, where I worked until the start of the six day war in June.  My department closed.  We could not send tourists to Jerusalem anymore.  They let us go. 

 

I was back in my dad's office until further notice.