Mwa hah ha! The LAST thing a reasonably rational person needs is a mud-bath in sentimentality…
Seriously: The Internet, being a repository of all things remembered, forgettable or not, presents a serious threat to your sanity. It invites you to wallow in memories best left forgotten,
- We have my friend Bruce Macalvanah, about a year ahead of me at the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School. We were about in the fifth or sixth grade at the time.
- Next: my father’s hatred of Macalvanah Senior. I do not know why my father loathed Macalvanah with such passion. They worked together on the docks, both of them harbor pilots. My father considered Macalvanah to be a dangerous idiot…what happened to create that opinion escapes me.
- Then we had the awful, mean, vicious brats at the school, and the stupid teachers who couldn’t seem to bring the little darlin’s under control. With the exception of the first grade and the third grade, I was freakin’ miserable all the way through the six grades I spent out there, until we came back to the States and the kids and my new school had no idea I was the Weird Little Kid.
- But let us not forget the kid who lived halfway down the block… Ennis Hatch. The only other little darlin’ out there who didn’t create a hobby of making me miserable.
Bruce was one of the three kids in Rasty Nasty who didn’t torment me. Why, I never understood. When we came back to the states, none of the li’l darlings in the San Francisco school’s sixth grade seemed to know that I was cut out to be a pariah. They were all pleasant to me. None of them made it their business to make me miserable. I had friends. We played together after school. No one seemed to think I was weird.
But in Arabia? Dear God, was I hated! Hated and hated and hated and hated. The little darlin’s out there did everything they could to trash my life…and they were good at it. Over some six years, only three kids out there were not just acidly mean to me. One was a little girl named June B. The second, another girl child about my age. And the other was Bruce MacAlvanah. He was a year older than me…but didn’t seem to recognize that meant he wasn’t supposed to have much to do with me.
For reasons I never did know, my father HATED MacAlvanah, Bruce’s father. The guy seemed like a nice enough fellow to me. But my father thought he was a dangerous idiot. Apparently something had happened down on the docks to inspire lifelong scorn in my father.
They were both harbor pilots, steering tugboats to wrangle tankers and freighters in and out of the docks — one false move, as you can imagine, could lead to a grim and fatal catastrophe.
But where our family was concerned, the one who allegedly was a menace was MacAlvanah’s wife, Luella. She apparently poisoned my mother, and I do believe she did it on purpose: deliberately served up contaminated salad greens that gave my mother a roaring case of amoebic dysentery.
My mother very nearly died from the infection. But oddly…none of the rest of the people at that dining table came down with it. I can tell you that my mother would never have served herself contaminated lettuce or cabbage: she sanitized every single bite that went into a bowl, a plate, or a pan.
As we kids lingered in the kitchen, Luella handed me pieces of the leaves she was cutting up for that salad. I scarfed it all down merrily…and I never got sick.
So…wha??? Either the produce wasn’t actually contaminated, or somehow Luella managed to dip specific pieces of produce into some bug-infested water and then drop them into my mother’s bowl. I dunno. What really happened there, I dunno. My mother was damn near psychotic about raw produce while we were out there: most assuredly, she would not eat anything that hadn’t been sanitized. So…I have no proof of what happened there: only the experience of watching my mother get sicker and sicker in a hospital bed, and almost die as she lay in the hospital.
None of the rest of us at that table got sick that night. So as episodes go, it was freakin’ weird.
***
If you were one of the little darlin’s in the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School during the early 1950s: Be assured that I have not forgotten your meanness — and I never will.
Ohhh well. There’s a lot one should forget but never will.