Yech!!!!! This morning Ruby and I plowed through the heat and humidity reminiscent of the weather in Rasty Nasty, the horrid seaside oil & shipping colony parked on an Arabian shore along the Persian Gulf.
My father was a merchant seaman. Shortly after I was born, he got himself a handsomely paying job in Saudi Arabia, as a harbor pilot steering tankers and freighters out of the port at Ras Tanura. Horrible — truly horrible — place to live: hot, dangerous, disease-ridden, unwelcoming to the Yankee set. Hence, my father’s nickname for the place: Rasty Nasty.
It truly was awful, from an American’s point of view. My mother caught amoebic dysentery out there, which led to the enteric cancer that ultimately killed her. My father and I managed to escape it…apparently because neither he nor I ate the infected salad that an idiot neighbor served up to us for a farewell dinner.
No kidding: we were slated to go back to the States, permanently, when she came down with this horrible endemic disease…because one woman was too goddam stupid and stubborn to soak the goddam lettuce in Clorox before tossing it into a salad!
This was a habit the Company tried to instill in the ladies: when the wives got out there, they forthwith had to attend classes designed to protect Americans’ safety and health. That particular lady really was blindingly stupid…and she just ignored everything the Company tried to teach her.
Result: she killed my mother.
Think of that. We’d been out there 10 years, during which my mother duly sanitized every bite we put in our mouths, and in the LAST WEEK before we were to go home permanently, that bitch murdered her by failing to clean the goddam produce.
Her laziness killed my mother.
The treatment for amoebic dysentery, at the time, was fierce. And it was carcinogenic. Not surprisingly, then, she came down with cancer. By the time her doctors discovered it (women’s complaints of abdominal pain in those days were discounted as signs of hypochondria), her abdomen was filled with columnar growths. There was nothing they could do to save her.
As you can imagine, I could do without weather that reminds me of that horrible place. {chortle!} I can do without anything that reminds me of Saudi Arabia.
At any rate, those fine adventures were brought to mind as Ruby and I plowed through the swampy heat this morning, and passed men working like Arabs at a house where they were building an add-on.
Yeah: out there at the crack of dawn, climbing ladders and hauling lumber and pounding nails…augh! Surely there’s gotta be a better way to make a living?