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Month: March 2023

Disappeared

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Yesterday in an antique online copy of the old ARAMCO newsletter Sun & Flare, I came across a photo of my grade-school pal, a boy named Ennis, one of the very few kids who was friendly to me when we lived in the dreadful oil company outpost called Ras Tanura.

Ennis! What a nice kid. Last time I saw him, he and I were pushing adulthood. It was someplace north of Santa Barbara, where his parents had gone when they retired. How fun would it be to track him down and say hello?

Well. None, as it develops. I could NOT find him for love nor money. Nor could I find any trace of an obituary. So, dead or alive, he’s nowhere to be unearthed.

In fact, his tracks are so thoroughly covered, it’s hard to escape the sense that he had a professional hide his identity and location. I’m pretty damn good at navigating the Internet and finding folks who think they can’t be found — as a researcher, that little skill comes with the job. But there was NOTHING, not a single mention anywhere.

On one level it’s interesting and reasonable — how much would you pay to bring an end to the blitz of advertising and spamming email messages? Just this morning, I’ve already deep-sixed seven nuisance messages in 45 minutes or so that I’ve been reading the news, and that doesn’t count the spam that’s automatically sent to the trash.

On another, it’s alarming…why would you care enough to erase yourself altogether? Is he a federal agent? An international spy? Maybe a crime boss? Or…a nut case?

I block phone calls from most area codes but my own, by way of limiting the number of nuisance phone solicitations. But erasing your identity altogether? That’s different from blocking those who pester you.

Could he have died? Possibly. He was only two or three years younger than me. And as a male: yeah, he could have keeled over from a heart attack by now. Plus the very air in Rasty Nasty was carcinogenic: filled with fumes from the refinery, long before anyone thought about limiting air pollution. Stinking air was just part of life, back in the good ole’ days.

But there are no obituary notices for him: not that I can find. No home-town papers or remarks in the Aramco Brats pages to the effect that he croaked over. Weirdly, I found an obituary for his father Tom, which goes on and on about the family members…but does NOT mention the son. WTF?

Nor does it mention his stint in Arabia…it mentions his wife and provides her photo, so yeah: it’s the same Tom. But an entire era of his life — including mention of the son who made up part of that era — is missing. And the obit was written by his niece, who surely would have known the family members.

Weird!

Memories…of pure terror…

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You’ve been watching the coverage of the tornadoes scouring their way across the south, no doubt? The best reporting, IMHO, is coming in over YouTube — especially from the storm chasers. Fox has also had some first-rate coverage. What hair-raising stuff!

My Texas aunt and uncle lived on the fringe of tornado alley. Once Aunt Audie described standing on the front porch of what no doubt was a wooden or brick farm house and watching a funnel cloud pass by a mile or two away.

Did they not have a storm cellar? Dunno…at the time she recited this story, I’d never heard of such a thing — we were Californians living by the mild, pacific shore of the Persian Gulf — so it didn’t occur to me to ask. But they probably did: rural families had root cellars in which they stored food and other perishables, a category that presumably would have included themselves if a tornado touched down in the front yard.

Rarely did we see much rain, there at the edge of the Rub al’Khali, a desert whose barrenness it would be hard — maybe impossible — to describe to a comfortable, untraveled American. But once we did see such a thing.

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It was late in the afternoon. I was a little girl, maybe eight years old (give or take), and all excited and amazed to watch the afternoon skies suddenly turn almost as dark as night as heavy clouds barreled in. What my parents thought, I do not know: they were not given to sharing their concerns (if they had any) with a kid.

A dune landscape in the Rub al Khali or Empty Quarter. Straddling Oman, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Yemen, this is the largest sand desert in the world.

We lived in a strip of company houses, two- and three-bedroom brick  bungalows that the Company (that would be ARAMCO) had lined up in tidy rows, extending from the beach about…maybe…a third to a half of a mile inland. All of them housed White, mostly American company employees and their families.

This particular afternoon, a truly fierce rainstorm blew in, sometime on the far side on noon. The sky grew dark…that was fun. And then…gosh! It grew more than dark. Black, it was: almost black. Dark, dark gray. Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled, and the wind began to howl. I thought it was evening.

But it wasn’t.

My mother tried not to look scared. But she looked scared.

She told me to stay back away from the windows. I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but knowing that disobedience meant getting swatted into the middle of next week, I stayed back away from the windows.

It got darker outside.

My father was a stoic sort of a guy. In his world, any display of emotion other than amusement was unmanly. But you couldn’t miss that he was watching. That he was quiet.

The rain thundered down, torrents of water falling out of Ras Tanura’s normally soggy blue air. It poured by the barrel-full off the house’s eaves.

Lighting flashed.

Thunder roared.

A waterfall tumbled out of the black sky.

It didn’t last very long. At least, to my kiddish mind it didn’t. Shortly the storm ceased. The rain stopped pouring down. The lightning flashes drifted away.

I wanted to go out and play.

“NO!” came the answer.

We hung around in the house.

Before long, though, neighbors began to call.

Did you know…?

Did you see…?

Did you hear…?

Are you OK?

The wind blew down trees.

The water flooded roads. And parking lots. And yards.

The Hatches’ roof blew off. No, they weren’t hurt. Yes, they were all OK.

Other homes lost their roofs, but those houses hadn’t belonged to the families of a childhood pal like my friend Ennis Hatch.

The docks were OK.

No tankers had run aground.

Rahima, the Arabs’ nearby native village, was flattened.

The airport was shut down.

The road to Dhahran was closed.

. . . and . . . how CAN i count the ways i’m glad i don’t live there anymore?

We had to stay in Arabia because my father had a contract with Aramco, renewable every two years. He was paid handsomely to wrangle oil tankers in and out of the docks there. But sometimes I wonder about Americans who live in the path of horrific storms like the ones we’ve seen this week, here in this country.

True: one gets sot in one’s ways when one is born and raised in a given place. But after you’ve seen one set of storms like the ones that hit this week, wouldn’t you be inclined to move out of the area? Why stay where your home, your livelihood, and even your life are at risk from something as ubiquitous as the weather?

This, I suppose, is why we have so many people in California, Chicago, New York, and waypoints. But still…sometimes one wonders.

Yea verily: what a thing to see! What  thing to contemplate!

Monday: The Only Pretty Costco Day?

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Here’s an experience of note: This afternoon I made a Costco run — normally a trying project plagued with crowds and fraught traffic. But today, for the first time in memory, it was not bad!

Monday.

Got there around 1:00 p.m.

  • No problem parking — not far from the door. No crazies in the parking lot.
  • Plenty of shopping carts (but then, there usually are).
  • No gotta-get-in-the-door-firsters (usually plenty of those, too).
  • Navigable aisles, for a change. Few chuckleheads parked smack in the aisle, holding everyone up as they gaze slack-jawed at the piles and piles and piles of offerings. No cranky crying babies. No wild-a$$ed kids running up and down the corridors.

A miracle.

Snabbed the stuff I needed quickly and without hassle. (Another miracle!)

Short lines at the check-out counters: yet another miracle!!! Got through the line and out the door in a matter of minutes. (Are we sure we’re in Costco????)

  • Got a package of totally GORGEOUS lamb chops. A box of delicious quinoa salad. A package of doggy dental chews! Found THE cutest little casual top that will look pretty awesome with my cranberry-red jeans.
  • And made my way back to the Appliances aisle.
  • There I found that yes. Yes, indeed. I got ripped off ROYALLY by the inelegant B&B Appliances. That unholy outfit charged me almost twice as much for the crummy rip-off GE fridge as Costco is charging for a comparably sized LG refrigerator, the latter highly recommended by reviewers. And they have microwaves that probably out-quality the laughable GE micro by about ten to one.
  • Whenever the dust settles from that fiasco, I’ll betake myself back to Costco to replace the rip-off junk with LG’s.

But later. Got enough to deal with right this instant.

  • Left the Costco in time to hit the main homeward-bound drag around 3:00 p.m. This is the start of rush hour here in unlovely uptown Phoenix.
  • But interestingly, the traffic was not too bad yet. Got across town to the freeway. Entered the freeway without obviously risking my life or anyone else’s. Traffic started to thicken when I got off the freeway, westbound on Main Drag South, but it wasn’t too bad. Got into the hood with no major incidents, no major frustrations.

Yet another miracle.

So…

Lesson #1: Never buy local!

If I’d gone to Costco from the git-go in search of a fridge, I would have come away with the highest-rated model on the market and would not now be in a clench with American Express as we do battle with the noxious local dealer, B&B Appliances. By now I would have a nice LG refrigerator, no argument engaged, and I would know nothing of the elaborate workings of American Express as its lawyers take on miscreant local marketers.

Lesson #2: Avoid the rush hour!

If there’s any way you can swing it, try to surface at Costco’s entrance along about 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. If you can hit the homeward leg of your trip home by 3:00 p.m., you have a shot at getting home without too much torture.

Driving in Phoenix is, in general, just that: torture. But because I’d managed to skirt the afternoon rush hour, most of the trip to and from the store was…well…not too, too bad.

Phoenix, whose city parents pride themselves on having created a clone of L.A., is — like the beloved Los Angeles — a perfectly horrible place to drive in the rush hour, the pre-rush hour, and the post-rush hour periods. If you can contrive to get on the road after 10 a.m. and before 3:00 p.m., you have a shot at preserving your sanity and your life. Otherwise…well…hang onto your marbles!

Whilst perambulating, I noticed that Costco has nice new iMacs for much better prices than Best Buy’s. As advertised, the damn things are much shrunk in size, so if I have to get one to replace the sickly unit, using it as a television will not be good.

Yeah: I ain’t a-payin’ for cable TV, which is now the only way you can get television reception here in lovely uptown Phoenix. After our honored City Parents installed that innovation, I started using the iMac to watch the few TV offerings that are worth watching — news programs, PBS and BBC dramas, and whatnot. Those go away if an iMac can’t be persuaded to work. That, we’ll see about tomorrow, when a Best Buy fella is supposed to come over and connect the expensive new iMac to the Internet and upload data from the MacBook.

 

Update: B&B Fridge Fiasco

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Just realized, whilst putting away mounds of paper and updating the calendar, that AMEX, even though they suspended the $1500 charge for B&B’s half-baked refrigerator for the nonce, in fact did not cancel it. The charge is in a state of suspended animation, being “disputed,” until May 26. If in fact B&B prevails, then yes, I will have to pay the ba*tards for what so far has been (in effect) a free refrigerator. Albeit a free piece of junk…

That’s right. The operatic GE fridge remains in my kitchen, humming and rattling to itself, while the matter is settled. And indeed I was on the cusp of buying a new LG refrigerator (handsomely reviewed!) at Lowe’s and giving B&B’s piece of junk to Gerardo for his workshop.

Somehow I failed to grasp that detail in AMEX’s workings.

Wow!  Lucky I couldn’t make up my feeble little mind while I was cruising around Lowe’s. By now the noise-maker would be outta here!

Hmmmmmmm….. Godlmighty but that sounds batsh!t, doesn’t it?

Think I’ll call American Express — or wait! maybe inquire in writing — to confirm whether B&B has until May 26 to make good on this damn thing. And then what? If they give up , what do we do with this fine piece of equipment? But if they persist, am I still on the hook for almost $1500? Can B&B be forced to take it back, despite their “no-returns” policy?

In the meantime, we have this half-baked (heh!) GE microwave that B&B peddled to me at the same time. You wanna talk about piece of junk? Lemme tellya!

My old microwave, which I should evidently NOT have dispensed with, would cook 2 thick-sliced pieces of bacon to a state of crispy done-ness in 2 minutes flat. The new thing takes exactly twice as long to do that.

True: the earth does not shatter into a a pile of meteoroids just because it takes four minutes to cook one’s breakfast bacon. I don’t do a lot of cooking in a microwave, because I eat mostly real foods — “whole foods” as they’re dubbed here in the 21st century. So really, it doesn’t much matter that the thing makes a nice noise and goes round and round whilst it does…next to nothing. But if I’d known, I would never have gotten rid of the other machine.

The new GE fridge still runs noisier than I would like — but at least you can’t hear it all the way back in the bedroom at the far end of the palace. So it’s now tolerable…if I have to keep it, I could do so without vast suffering.

Though this refrigerator was clearly damaged goods — a workman found a couple of dents on the side and noted that one its “feet” has been broken and fixed — it runs OK. Don’t think I should have to pay full price for it. But my world won’t end if the thing stays here. Or ends up in Gerardo’s workshop.

Big message here, though, is one that I should have remembered before the whole fiasco started: DO YOUR HOMEWORK BEFORE MAKING ANY MAJOR PURCHASE. And assume nothing. Yes: that’s nothing.

Having grown up with General Electric as a major American manufacturer of high-quality appliances, it never crossed my mind to spend an hour (or less…much less was all that would have been required) in exploring consumer reviews on the Internet. By way of experiment: Google this phrase:

why have GE products gone downhill

Holeeee shee-ut!

No, I wouldn’t have thought of quite that wording. 😀 BUT if I had simply googled “GE appliance reviews” I would have known not to buy what is now a Chinese product with an American brand name slapped on it. Any search for consumer reviews of GE products brings up rant after rant after furious rant.

The fall of GE has been big financial news for the past several years, too. Truth to tell, if I’d been reading Forbes and the Wall Street Journal and their ilk, I wouldn’t even have had to look for consumer reviews. I would have known the company and its products overshot China and went straight to Hell quite awhile ago.

And also truth to tell, I was just plain stupid about B&B Appliances. I’d dealt with them before with no problem. I liked the saleslady who peddled this thing to me. It never dawned on me that they were ripping me off.

Guess the message is…always assume that everyone is trying to rip you off, and proceed accordingly!

Stop the World…..

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Developed a fine sore throat during the night. And a keep-you-awake-till-dawn cough. Just got back from a junket to the corner Walgreen’s, where I grabbed a bottle of Robitussin DM.

Tbe generic stuff that was in the medicine closet last night did exactly nothing to soothe the hacking. Or much of anything else.

Today the bark has subsided pretty well, but I have a sore throat from Hell.

Can’t gag a whole aspirin down, so much does the throat hurt. So I had to cut it into quarters and choke down each quarter with an unwelcome swiggle of nasty-tasting Phoenix water. Yech.

I do hope this isn’t a strep throat!

So here we are at the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest — to wit, the Internet, first recourse of the neurotic. CDC says these fine symptoms typify strep throat:

  • Fever:  Nope
  • Pain when swallowing: Yep!
  • Sore throat that can start very quickly and may look red: Yep
  • Red and swollen tonsils: Sorta
  • White patches or streaks of pus on the tonsils: Not that I can see
  • Tiny, red spots on the roof of the mouth, called petechiae (pronounced pi-TEE-kee-eye): Nope.
  • Swollen tonsils. Who knows? How much time do you spend in front of a mirror gazing at the reflection of your freakin’ tonsils?
  • Swollen lymph nodes in the front of the neck: Not much

Hmh. Soooo…I’m hoping it’s “just” (heh!) a virus.

Awful, awful night. Coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed. CDC says symptoms do NOT include cough…so, paradoxically, the night of hacking is sorta positive.

I guess.

Problem is, I get preternaturally sick with bugs that make most people, apparently, only mildly ill. The next time some idiot says to me “ohhhh, it’s just a little cold,” I swear I’m gonna brain them.

That “just a little cold” does NOT  apply to me, most of the time. This one, given how much the throat hurts as compared with previoius experience, is gonna lay me out flat for a good week or ten days, and leaving me coughing and gasping for breath for about a month.

The Walgreen’s down at the corner of Conduit of Blight and Main Drag South changed hands about a year ago. WHAT an improvement!! That place really was a dump — you had to dodge a phalanx of panhandlers to get in the door. Now there’s not a single sponger pestering you between your car and the door. They totally cleaned the place up inside. Where before it was dingy and depressing, it’s now brightly lit, clean-looking, and well organized. THANK YOU, whoever bought the place.

It’s across the street from the Albertson’s supermarket, which has a full-service pharmacy…attached to a gigantic grocery store. So one wonders WHY people would go to that Walgreen’s, when you not only can get your Rx there, you can also pick up a cartful of groceries. WhatEVER: lots of folks were there. A long line extended back from the cash register by the door. Luckily, they let me buy the cough med at the pharmacy counter, so I didn’t have to stand and stand and stand.

That’s something.

I guess.

How D’you Know When It’s Time to Go?

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When the response to a call to your doctor’s office in which you remark that you hurt so much you’re contemplating a flying leap off the North Rim elicits, in response, a telephone call from a machine(!!)…that’s when you know you’ve outlived your time on this earth.

Yep: Time to go…we’re definitely gettin’ there.

My mother killed herself. Not in an obvious way: she smoked herself to death. Quite deliberately. She knew better than to puff down six packs a day. She knew exactly what she was doing. She worked at it for years after the U.S. Surgeon General explained to the American public, in words of one syllable, what any amount of tobacco smoking will do to you. With that knowledge in hand, did she cut down on the puffing?

No.

She doubled up.

I’ve thought for a very long time that she killed herself on purpose.

Do I think my father’s father was murdered out on the side of a rural Texas road, early in the 1900s, as the story has it? Or did he commit suicide, too?

My money’s on the latter. He ran away from his wife because she refused to abort a late-life pregnancy: my infant father. Apparently he regretted not only having impregnated her (if indeed it was he who did so) but also having abandoned her and the yet-to-be infant.

That’s one way to look at it.

He’d been a prison guard. If you know anything about what US prisons were like at the turn of the 20th century — especially in monstrously backward venues like Texas — you could easily imagine one of his former wards stumbling across him as he sat by his campfire. Doing him in. Making it look like suicide.

Through early morning fog I see
Visions of the things to be
The pains that are withheld for me
I realize and I can see

That suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it
If I please

How have I had it? Let me count the ways.

We live in a dystopia. No doubt he did, too.

It must have been difficult, living in a dystopia out on a remote frontier, wedded to a Choctaw woman in a society whose leitmotif was hatred of the Other.

Dirt road in the Texas boondocksBut one never knows. There he was, sitting by a campfire out in the middle of nowhere, noplace much to come from, noplace much to go to. Offing himself would have made sense. But, given how brutal my father could be, it makes just as much sense that some guy the old man had made an enemy of happened along, out there in the middle of nowhere, and took advantage of the opportunity. If the guy treated his prisoners the same way my father was given to treating children…well…yeah.

HowEVER…the story my mother told me — and presented as the story she’d heard from him — doesn’t add up. She said the father ran off after he learned his wife was pregnant and she refused to abort the pregnancy. However, it would appear that he didn’t die until 1927.  If that’s true, my mother’s bit of folklore doesn’t make any sense: my father was born in 1908. By January, 1927 he was 19 years old.

Isn’t that weird? I wonder where she got that tale.

She said that was what he had told her. Did she never question his story? Did he lie to her? Did someone lie to him? Why on earth would they have told a child a thing like that?

And if that old cowboy offed himself, how did he know it was time?