Did Angie Pangia and her doctor boyfriend tell my father that I had a mental problem and so needed to be removed from Saudi Arabia (where we had lived for the prior nine years) and brought back to the States to go to school? More to the point: did they tell him my mother had amoebic dysentery and had to be treated for it in a Stateside hospital?
I think most likely the latter…he wouldn’t have given a damn that I was a weird, depressed little kid. But he sure wouldn’t have wanted his wife to die.
Angie, a registered nurse working in Aramco‘s Ras Tanura clinic, was one of my mother’s dearest friends. She surely would have known that my mother direly wanted and needed to return to the States, and she would have known that my mother’s unhappy child was pretty much off the rails out there.
That I was miserable to the point of neurosis wouldn’t have mattered to my father. But that my mother’s health and possibly her life were threatened by a case of amoebic dysentery would have mattered very much.
And that would have been enough to spur him to send us home. My near-suicidal depression barely registered with him — if it registered at all. But my mother’s biological disease certainly did register.
On the other hand, it was entirely likely that my mother DID have a roaring case of amoebic dysentery, potentially fatal.
A neighbor in Ras Tanura had us over for a celebratory farewell dinner, a week or two before we were slated to fly out. This one was named Luella. I watched her prepare the salad, and saw that she opted soaking the cabbage leaves in Clorox — as all the wives were instructed to do in classes required by the Company.
Being a kid and not the brightest of all kids, I failed to tell my mother that Luella had failed to sanitize the cabbage before serving it up to the assembled company… And that was a BIG mistake.
So my mother spent spent weeks in the company clinic before she was sent home to spend more weeks in a stateside hospital.
The treatment for amoebic dysentery was, at the time, incredibly fierce. It — or the disease itself — made her deathly sick, indeed…and, I gather, could even have killed her. But then…the infection itself could have done her in.
Yes: my mother almost died just because a stupid woman couldn’t be bothered to sanitize the salad greens adequately.
At any rate, would my father have sent us home because my little peers’ meanness was driving me bonkers? Probably not. But my mother’s near-death experience did spur him to ship us back to California, whence we came.
A few months later, he arrived at the end of his Aramco contract and came back to the States to join us.
There he shipped out of the San Francisco Bay Area until he managed to retire, allowing himself, my mother, and (reluctantly) me to settle in lovely Arizona. He bought a house in Sun City, and there the two of them dwelt — free of the Brat, since young people were not allowed to live there. So it was off to the University of Arizona for me…allowing me to spend the next four years in Tucson.
Had a pretty good time there. Graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Got a job in a law firm and loafed for a spell before going on to graduate school.
Would I have settled in Southern California, given an opportunity? Probably not. I never liked it much. Smog is not my thing.
Instead I enrolled at Arizona State University and went on for the Ph.D., thereby rendering myself damn near unemployable. But….what the Hell…it was a good way to loaf away several years of youth, eh?
My father and mother stayed in Sun City: they loved it. Until her tobacco habit caught up with her and gifted her with a roaring case of cancer…. Shortly, she died.
He sold the cute little Sun City house and moved to an old-folkerie, where he met the Dragon Lady, whom he unfortunately married. Not given to divorce (“she’ll get all my MONEY!!”), he stayed with her until he dropped dead of a stroke: not the best way to wrap up the last few years of your life.
Poor guy.
Oh, well…
