Sunday, the 26th of September, 1999

Layla came home Friday night. A girl from Dearborn who has a car drove her, with a bag of laundry as big as Karim.

Today I left the store to my nephew Ali for five hours, which I have not done on a Sunday since the Eid. We ate all together, Mona's kibbeh and tabbouleh and a whole chicken, with my father at the head of the table. After lunch he told the story of the olive harvest in our village: how the whole family went out in October with sheets to spread under the trees and sticks to shake the branches, and how the first oil from the press was green and bitter, and they ate it on hot bread with za'atar, and nothing in America has ever tasted like that. I have heard this story perhaps two hundred times. Layla wrote all of it in her notebook. It is for her English class.

Then, at the table, she told us. She will not study pharmacy. She wants to study English, and to write.

Mona looked at me. My father looked at me. Karim looked at the chicken.

I said, "Writing. What kind of a job is writing?" She said, "Baba, you have a web page now. You're a writer too." My father laughed so hard he coughed.

I did not say yes. I did not say no. I said we will talk at Thanksgiving. Inshallah, God willing, we will. She is eighteen. She is her own person. She was always her own person; I only did not notice until she left.

Last night the moon was full over the parking lot of the store. My father says in the village the harvest moon meant the olives were almost ready. Here it means that it is nearly October, and the leaves on Warren Avenue are turning, and my daughter is choosing her life.

Friday, the 17th of September

Today Ali came in at noon so I could go to the Friday prayer. I do not go every week. I wish I could write that I do.

In the mosque, standing shoulder to shoulder with men I do not know and men I have known for twenty years, the doctor next to the taxi driver next to the man who owns three gas stations, I felt for a while that my feet were on the ground. The sermon was about patience. My father will say he told me so.

After, I sat in the car and called Layla's room. Her roommate answered. Layla was at the library. I said, "Tell her Baba called. Only that. It is not important." The roommate said, "Oh! You're the dad with the grape leaves!" It seems I am famous in Ann Arbor.

Monday, the 13th of September

People ask what a day is like in a party store. Here is one.

7:00. I unlock the gate and start the coffee. The men from the construction job on the next block buy coffee and donuts and talk about the Lions.

9:00. Miss Hattie, eighty-one years old, buys the newspaper and one lottery ticket, the same three numbers for twenty years, and tells me about her grandson in the Army. She calls me "baby." I call her Miss Hattie.

2:30. Between customers I go to the back room, put down my small rug beside the cases of pop, and pray, facing east and a little north. God knows the hours of a party store. I pray when I can. Sometimes late. I believe He understands late.

3:15. School lets out. Twenty children at once for chips and candy. I know most of their names. I know their mothers.

Midnight. I count the drawer, lock the gate, drive home to Dearborn. Mona is asleep. My father is awake, always, with Fairuz on the cassette player, low, waiting to ask me how was the day.

Layla has not called in four days. Mona says this is good; it means she is busy. I say yes, it is good. I am lying, a little.

Tuesday, the 7th of September

Today was her first class. She called at nine at night from a hallway full of noise, very fast, very happy. Ali handed me the telephone across the lottery machine and I could hear only half. It was enough. Alhamdulillah. Thanks be to God. Tired now.

Saturday, the 4th of September

Today we took Layla to Ann Arbor. The van was so full that Karim rode with a lamp on his lap and a pot of Mona's grape leaves at his feet. Mona packed enough food for the whole floor of the dormitory. When I said this, she said, "Good. Then they will be her friends."

The room is small. Two beds, two desks, one window that looks at another building. Her roommate is a very nice girl from a small town in the north of Michigan, with a father in a hunting cap. The girl said she had never met anyone from Lebanon. Layla said, "Now you have," and gave her a grape leaf. She ate it and said it was good. Her father ate three. We shook hands and talked about the Lions. This is how it begins, I think. With food and football.

I had planned to say something wise when it was time to go. I had it ready in my head for a week, something from my father. When the moment came, I said only, "Call your mother." She said, "Yalla, Baba, go, before you cry." (Yalla means "come on, let's go.") I did not cry in front of her. I cried in the parking structure, and Mona held my hand, and Karim pretended to look at the cars.

Habibti. My darling. My heart walked into that building today and did not come back out.

Sunday, the 22nd of August

On Sundays my father comes to the store and sits on the stool by the window with his coffee and his prayer beads. He says good morning in Arabic to everyone, and everyone says good morning back in English, and somehow they understand each other.

Today, because of last week, he told me again about the day I left, in 1976. The fighting had come close. He rode with me in a taxi as far as it was safe, and at the last place he put in my hand a small bag of za'atar from our own hills and said, "Al-sabr miftah al-faraj." Patience is the key to relief. It took me eleven days to reach Detroit. I kept that bag until there was no smell left in it.

He came himself in 1984. My mother, Allah yirhamha, God have mercy on her, would not leave the village, and she is buried there.

I asked him today if he thinks I should sell the store. He said, "You ask me? For forty years I grew tobacco and sold it to the government, and not once was it my idea." Then he said, "Ask your daughter. She is the one with the future."

Monday, the 16th of August

I will write this plainly, because Mona says I must not make it bigger than it was, and she is right.

Saturday night, about 10:40, a young man came in with his hood up and his hand in his jacket pocket and told me to give him the money from the register. No one else was in the store. Ali was in the back for a case of pop.

I looked at him and I knew him. When he was nine or ten years old he came every day after school for Now and Laters and a bag of chips, and one time I let him pay the next day, and he did pay the next day. I said his name. Only his first name. He looked at me as if I had caught him stealing from his grandmother. He said, "Mr. Sam, I'm sorry," and he turned around and walked out, and that was all.

I called the police, because many years ago I promised Mona I would always call. They came and wrote it on their paper. The officer asked if I knew him. I told the truth. Then I went in the back and said the night prayer, late, and I prayed for him also.

No one was hurt. Alhamdulillah. Sunday Mona said again that I should sell the store. I said, sell it to who, and do what? She did not answer, and I did not sleep much.

Sunday, the 1st of August, 1999

This is my first diary since I was a boy in school, when the teacher made us write one in French. Layla made this page for me today on the computer in her room. She said, "Baba, you tell the best stories and nobody writes them down." I said I tell them to the customers. She said the customers do not write them down either.

She chose the colors, green and white. Then she laughed and told me these are the colors of Michigan State, and she is going to Michigan, and the two schools do not like each other. I told her that for me, green and white are the cedar on our flag and the snow on our mountains. The name Lebanon comes from an old word for white, for that snow. She wrote this down. She writes everything down. So we keep the colors.

The store is open from seven in the morning until midnight, seven days. I am there most of those hours. My nephew Ali works the evenings with me, and Saturdays. Mona says I spend more time with the lottery machine than with her. She is correct, and I do not like that she is correct.

In five weeks Layla goes to Ann Arbor. Forty minutes away. It might as well be the moon.