Aging in place

Ugh!  This morning: hot, wet, sticky. Reminiscent of an early-morning summer day in Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia…where I was (un)fortunate enough to grow up on the shore of the Persian Gulf. What a hole! My father called the camp Rasty Nasty: a sobriquet that neatly describes life there.

And Lordie, I did hate living there! Not because of the Arabs or because of the eye-searing, brain-dulling scenery, but because of the nasty brats who populated the camp’s grade school. Ugh! Those creatures were truly little monsters. If you were “different” in any way, they ganged together and worked to make your life miserable.

And they were very, very good at making an outcast kid’s life miserable! If you were a girl who failed to grasp that the sole purpose of your life, other than spawning children, was to stand in the kitchen and bake cookies, you didn’t belong.

I didn’t  “belong,” with a vengeance. Back in the 1950s, when conventionality was the style of the day, I failed to grasp that I was supposed to grow up to cook and to sew clothes. Noooo…stupid me! I wanted to grow up to become an astronomer.

You know: a person with a Ph.D. and a lifetime career in astrophysics.

No. Bad, bad girl!! Females did NOT go into the sciences.

So growing up in Arabia meant nine years of utter misery for me. GOD, how I hated that place and hated those kids! The feeling was mutual on the brats’ part. What an awful time in an awful place!

Finally, when I was nearing the end of the sixth grade out there, my mother’s best friend — a camp nurse — persuaded her boyfriend — a doctor in the camp hospital — to convince my father that my mother had to be sent home, lest she die from the amoebic dysentery she’d picked up out there.

So. That got me and my mother out of that hell-hole and back to San Francisco, whence we had emanated. And it led me into a decent school where my classmates didn’t know I was the Weird Little Kid. So my life kinda sprang back to almost normal. My mother, after some weeks in a hospital, recovered from the amoebic infestation. And so there we were — at least in much better living conditions — until my father’s current contract ended and he joined us in the City.

From there we proceeded to Southern California, where he shipped out of a port down there. My mother’s dearest friend lived in Long Beach, so she — my mother — and I rented an apartment in that dreary garden spot. After several years there, my father retired and they betook themselves to Sun City, Arizona (talk about dreary!!). By then, thank God, it was time for me to enter college. Instead of sending me to Cal Berkeley, where I’d planned to go, they stuck  me in the University of Arizona.

This parked me in Tucson, the home of the bourgeois and the mediocre. But at least it was a good long way from Sun City! 😮

Rehearsing these events…well…it sure frosts my cookies! Where I had a promising start — a strong likelihood of entering UC Berkeley and then going on to graduate school from there — they got rid of that. Instead I got a bachelor’s degree from a third-rate school, and from there proceeded to marriage and graduate studies in an even lesser school.

What kind of people do that to their kid?

Well. Uneducated people, of course. They hadn’t a clue. I think they really didn’t know there was much difference between universities around the country. And they really didn’t know a Ph.D. from some third-rate school in the middle of the Southwestern desert was not the same as a Ph.D. — or any degree — from a four-year California university. And why should they? Neither of them went to college, and I don’t think my father even graduated from high school. From what I can tell, he ran away from home to go to sea before he finished his senior year.

So…yeah. I guess I managed to steer my life in the right direction. But still…I’m not fond of  being reminded of growing up in Saudi Arabia. And a wet, rasty-nasty day like today does exactly that.

Ugh!