Sisters Pat (in top photo) and Dorothy (w/me in bottom photo), wonderful friends when I lived in Michigan and wonderful friends still. They are part of a large extended family of Lebanese descent; if you were lucky enough to get invited to one of their family gatherings there would be thirty or forty or fifty people there, and it would probably be a backyard picnic, and the sun would be shining, and the food would be southern Mediterranean, and though you might be pretty much a stranger to most of Pat & Dorothy's relatives, each and every single one of them possessed extraordinary warmth and made you feel welcome and made you feel special. It was enough to make you want to move to Beirut (which in bygone days was thought of as the Paris of the Mideast) or at least to have Lebanese blood flowing through your veins.
I want their sweet and beautiful niece Julie to be my Valentine also, but I have no photo of her.
Eating some baqlawa might help...might help with the imagining the Lebanese blood flowing through veins...
ReplyDelete"The Chinese, by their favourite system of dwarfing, contrive to make it, when only a foot and a half or two feet high, have all the characters of an aged cedar of Lebanon."
Robert Fortune
I love Lebanese food. I had friends from Syria and Friday night at their flat was amazing. I have never ate so well.
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