My Theory of Loss

Francine and I met Lubna when she married our friend Syl and moved to the United States to be with him twelve years ago. She was Syrian, from Damascus, and being fifty at the time, she found the transition to Chicago a culture shock, even though she’d always been cosmopolitan. She’d met Syl at a conference in Lausanne, and for the first eighteen months they followed each other at conferences in Europe, in South and North America. Living in America, however, surprised her. It was the little things, she told me. She couldn’t figure out why everyone went to bed early. That was her number one grievance. I explained that I did because I would be exhausted the next day if I didn’t have enough sleep, to which she replied that she would as well but she napped every afternoon. She couldn’t understand why siesta was not more popular in Chicago. She trained Syl to nap daily. They were both university professors and refused to schedule classes in the afternoon.

Yes, she was a woman after your own heart.

The little things she missed. Even though she was Christian, she missed the adhan at dawn, what she considered the most beautiful symphony as one mosque after another called the devotees to prayer. She missed the smell of verbena. Why did few buildings in the United States have balconies? She wanted to drink her morning coffee on a verandah. With neighbors. She’d lived in the same building downtown for years and the neighbors hardly acknowledged each other in the elevator. They were too busy staring at the floor numbers lighting up one by one. She was grateful that she’d been in Chicago for years when her city was bombed mercilessly, but why couldn’t she find cotton candy that didn’t taste like chemicals?

We were going to cook lunch together one day, and we visited Whole Foods to do our shopping. She told me that the first time she tried to make kibbeh, she bought the wrong kind of mint, since in Syria, there was only one kind.

“Here I was trying to show off to my husband and his friends, and instead of making kibbeh, I ended up with Chiclets.”

I remember that Whole Foods excursion because she saw small jasmine plants at the entrance, about twenty in all. She quickly grabbed two and began calling her Syrian friends in Chicago, and her friends called friends. By the time we left the store a little more than half an hour later, there was only a tired one left. A Syrian contingent had descended upon the store. She insisted that I buy the last plant, as droopy as it was. Didn’t I miss the scent of jasmine?

Of course I did. Of course I bought it. Of course I killed it within two months. Jasmine in Chicago?