7:45 a.m., back to shack
Ruby and the Human shoot out the door at the crack of dawn. A somewhat muffled crack…the sky is threatening….
GORGEOUS rainy-day weather: high fluffy clouds, soft air, people out strolling around the park.
Tony the Romanian Landlord is among them: out there proselytizing. He’s a religious nut: wants to convert everyone to his faith.
Ruby trots right along.
Weather is keeping most people in, so we don’t have to dodge any neighbors’ dogs. That’s refreshing.
****
Back at the house: COFFEEEEEEE!
Browsing the news reports… Gosh, am I glad NOT to be living in the Middle East anymore!
I grew up in Saudi Arabia — a less-than-sylvan venue. My mother was terrorized most of the time. My father had a pistol stashed on the top shelf of the hall closet… Heh! He imagined I didn’t know where it was. 😉
Not only did I know where it was, but in his absence I was given to hauling it down and fiddling with it. Luckily, it never went off.
My mother barely survived our ten-year junket out there. She came down with amoebic dysentery, which damn near killed her. She was in the hospital for weeks.
But…the upside was that she demanded to come home — that is, back to the States — and my father didn’t have it in him to decline. My guess is, she threatened to divorce him if he didn’t agree to come back to the States. But…that, really, I do not know as fact.
What I do know is that after she got out of the hospital and went through some grueling treatment, she and I flew back to California, where we stayed with the maternal relatives in Berkeley until my mother could get a job and land us a place to live.
When his contract with Aramco ended, he got a job shipping out of northern California — and later, out of Long Beach, the grody urb where I had been born some 16 years before.
Driving back across the country from New York, they discovered Sun City, here in Arizona. My father was enchanted: NO KIDS!
He really did NOT like kids. Hated the sound of kids playing outdoors. Highly resented their presence.
At any rate, this glorious discovery brought us here to Arizona, the minute he figured he could retire.
***
He figured wrong: a recession raped his savings and so he had to go back to sea. But my mother and I stayed here, and I ended up going to college at the University of Arizona in Tucson…not Cal Berkeley, where I’d planned to go.
Thank you, Daddy…
To be fair, he really didn’t understand that there are differences among higher education institutions. To his mind, the UofA was the same as Cal Berkeley. I knew better, but there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
After I graduated, I landed a Mickey-Mouse job at a law firm in downtown Phoenix. Yeah: answering the phones.
Everyone needs a four-year degree and a Phi Beta Kappa key to do that, eh?
So my prospects, as I’d imagined them, were mightily fu*ked up.
Married a lawyer by way of making my living. 😀
Well. To be fair: back in the Day, that’s what women were expected to do.
Ahhhh, the good ole’ days!