In the early 1970s, before the civil war, our little publishing office was in West Beirut, sort of between Musaitbeh and the Basta. In the corner of the building we had a small book store, a very quiet bookstore, because we had not been there long and the area had very little foot traffic. Besides that we had a green director—me—fumbling toward learning how to run a publishing house. My office looked out on a major street (its name escapes me now), with one really nice feature—across the street, an old twisted snobar tree.
There were not many trees on street corners in West Beirut, a city of apartment buildings, already on the verge of becoming a concrete jungle, in spite of the fact that all Lebanese loved vegetation and idealized the rural life. So I felt privileged that from my desk I could glance out the window and see this lovely tree. But one day when I looked up I noticed that men were digging beside the road and throwing the dirt around the base of the tree. It crossed my mind that they would kill that tree.
Often I walked to work in the mornings, just a pleasant walk from our apartment on Mar Elias St. I enjoyed seeing uniformed children dashing to school, and I liked exchanging greetings with friendly women sweeping their doorsteps. So shortly after noticing the ditch-digging project, I paused before crossing the street to my office, and said to one of the men, “I wish you would throw your dirt somewhere else, because I am afraid this tree will die.”
The man was very courteous, even sympathetic as he told me, “Madam, we are building a new road, a big road, and the tree is going to be cut down.”
For a few days I watched the pile of dirt growing around that precious tree and grieved.
It must have been in the fall of the year, because we were planning our annual calendar. The calendar was always very simple, just one nice picture and under it a leaf for each month of the year. On the back of each leaf we put a brief review of one our books. This was a promotional item; we gave it away, primarily in churches. The only big choice we had to make was a picture, something that people would want to hang on their wall. On my desk I had a small pile of options. Outside my window was my favorite tree doomed to die. “If only,” I thought, “if only I had taken a picture of it before it was too late.” And then an idea came to me.
I knew an artist, a British man, a Mr. Kemp. He lived in the area, had been to our office, had to have seen this tree a hundred times. I called him; he came; he said yes, he would paint me a picture. In a few days he brought it, a lovely watercolor, a true picture of the tree and its setting.
My idea grew. I would share the calendar all over the neighborhood. It would put us on the map. I wrote a leaflet offering the calendar with a picture of the old tree as a gift to all the people whose apartment buildings were in sight of that tree. They only had to come to our store and ask for it. I printed the leaflets and hired two high school boys to deliver them to the door of every apartment in the community. They distributed 800. The result blew us away.
We were inundated with visitors. There was no time to count them, but when it was over, 700 of the calendars were gone. I know this defies all statistics on the effectiveness of advertising, but I am sticking with my story. In a way, it was actually an advertising failure. I had envisioned that people would saunter into the store, and we would be friendly and detain them, and they would see the books on the shelves. Nothing like that happened. There were too many people, too fast.
Sometime after Christmas I realized that between me and the printer Mr. Kemp’s painting had been lost. The printer said he had returned it to me, but I could not find it. Now the tree was gone and so was my painting. I turned the world upside down looking for it, felt robbed and stupid, probably ranted a little. And then on some special occasion, a birthday, an anniversary, (I’m not sure anymore) my husband Wayne brought me a gift, an oil painting, not exactly but almost the same picture that we had lost. This painting hangs in my living room in California beside another, a rural Lebanese scene, by the famous Hammoui. It is one of my most precious possessions, because it brings back this little piece of my life, and it preserves a little piece of the Beirut that is gone. The “big road” they built there is now a freeway, the main artery from downtown Beirut to the airport. I have passed the intersection where the tree used to be without even knowing where I was.
Besides all this, the picture speaks to me about the Lebanese and what they love and why I love them.
Now there is a footnote to this story. Recently Wayne was rummaging through the contents of a very large manila envelope, something he had moved around the world without knowing anymore what it contained. And among other things, would you believe? The original watercolor, the one we thought we lost. He scanned it for me, and it is this picture that accompanies my story.
I have chosen to tell all of this today, because yesterday the Lebanese were viciously attacked by ISIS suicide bombers. They are hurting and in imminent danger. I need to remember and want you and the world to remember that these are precious people who love fun and freedom and beauty. They can grieve for a tree.