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:
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.
