Whew!!! It is BEYOND hotter than the Hubs of Hades out there!! In the deepest shade of the back porch: a hundred and eleven degrees!
My father would have called this a Rasty Nasty Day, after Ras Tanura, the hideous American oil outpost where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Twelve long years in that unholy dive!!! He had figured he’d make enough to retire, if they saved every penny, in eight or ten years. Yeah…
Well…he almost made enough to retire on.
He wasn’t a real educated fella. Inflation, for example, was kind of an alien concept for him… So, when he made his calculations for how long he’d have to work out there before he could retire and take us home to the States, he missed his goal by some six years.
About the time this projection unwound, my mother came down with a horrific case of amoebic dysentery. The doctors out there told her she needed to go back to the States –ASAP — to be treated for that fine ailment. This gave her an excuse to grab me and flee back to California, where her relatives lived. It also accelerated his retirement plans: he stayed for another year and a half, until his current contract ended, and then came back to join us in the States.
So that was a blessing (big-time!) for me and my mother. Couldn’t have been great for him, but at least she and I got out of that Hell-hole.
At any rate, where we lived on the shore of the Persian Gulf, the climate was hot, muggy, humid, and hotter than the Hubs. Just a HORRIBLE place, certainly for the gringo set. As a little kid, I didn’t know any better. But my mother, raised in Upstate New York, suffered terribly — from the climate as well as from the endemic disease.
And now, here on August 23 of Two Thousand and Twenty-Six, I indeed have been around long enough to know better. And believe me: if my son weren’t here, I would not be here in steamy Arizona. No how, no way!
But he persists, because his dad is here. His dad persists, because Dad’s job planted him here…and because his present family is also planted here.
Well. Arizona ain’t as grim as Saudi Arabia was. But…it does have its trying moments.
And right now, we’re in the middle of them!