Common sense

Ugh!  This is where my parents and I used to live, on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

Hard to describe how richly we were hated by the locals, who considered Americans to be emissaries of Satan. So, SOOO glad not be there anymore.

My father was paid some ludicrous amount of money to shepherd tankers and freighters out of the Ras Tanura harbor. He was an ocean-going pilot of some prominence, and when he hired on out there, he figured to earn enough to finance a spectacularly early retirement.

Didn’t quite work out that way. I was a weird little kid who couldn’t get along with my normal, very sosh’ classmates. Imagine: a girl child in the 1950s who wanted to grow up to be, of all things, an astronomer! 

😀
not to say
🙁

So the kids hated me and tormented me every day from the fourth grade on, day in and day out of awful misery.

My mother realized how horrible life had become for me out there, and she managed to maneuver my father into retiring from ARAMCO and coming back to the U.S., whither he shipped out of California for Standard Oil.

Whew! She saved my sanity with that. 

Didn’t do his career a whole lot of good, though…

So I was in the 6th grade when we landed back in San Francisco. Couple years later, he got a higher-paying job with Union Oil shipping out of Southern California, and that allowed him to retire permanently much earlier than planned.

Thence, it was off to Arizona, where he had discovered the phenomenon known as Sun City. They shoehorned me into the University of Arizona a year early (skipping my senior year in high school), bought a house in that dreary old folks’ suburb, shooed me off to Tucson, and lived happily ever after.

Well… Until my mother’s incessant goddam smoking habit caught up with her. After it had made me sick (and sick…and sicker) for several years, it gave her cancer and killed her.

My father was soon glommed by one of the predatory women in the old-folkerie to which he had recourse after my mother died. She maneuvered him into marrying her — one of the biggest mistakes of his life — and he lived miserably ever after with her, in that dreary retirement home in uptown Phoenix.

Hafta give him this: he was a far stronger human being than his daughter was or is. I would have picked up a pistol and blown out my brains if I’d been stuck with that lady in that hideously depressing prison for old folks. She was mean, meaner, and even meaner, and she openly hated me because my husband and I were traitorous LIBuhrals. (She was a right-wing crazy; my hubby was on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union, if you can imagine anything so Communistic!). I soon learned to detest her, and so I stayed away from my father most of the time.

Grand way to wrap up a life of amazingly hard work, eh?

Poor man! His life should have been better than that…especially the last few years of it.

He spent those last few years in misery, because he refused to divorce the Dragon Lady. This, despite urging to do so from me and from my husband, one of the most prominent lawyers in the American Southwest. “She’ll get all my money!” wailed he. Forgodsake, Daddy: some things are more important than money. 

Well. He thought not, having toiled throughout his adult life to collect that retirement fund. So he stayed married to the witch, on and interminably on. He predeceased her, which meant the last few years of his much-coveted retirement were passed in glum, tedious depression.

Ugh! What that said to me is no matter how much you covet married bliss, NEVER remarry in old age!