Dear God!! It just dawned on me — here in 2025 — how my mother got herself and me out of Hellish Saudi Arabia. Only now, lo! these many gerjillion years later!
Jayzuz! WHY did I never see this before? It was so obvious…
She and her best friend, Angie — a nurse in the camp clinic — convinced my father that I was too sickly to stay out there. That I needed to come back to the United States and be cared for by a stateside doctor at a stateside hospital.
That, my dears, was unadulterated bull puckey.
I was sick, all right: with social problems that made it virtually impossible to get along with the little sh!ts who were my classmates out there. Not that I wasn’t a little sh!t myself, after all. What kind of eight- or ten-year-old girl dreams of growing up to become an astronomer (no kidding! in the 1950s!!) and fantasizes that she lives in the jungles of India with Mowgli, Bagheera, and Akela?
Nope: I was never a normal little girl. But then, I was never treated like a living, feeling human being, either: not by those idiot teachers nor by the brats in their classes.
So…yeah. I was SO miserable in the fine Ras Tanura Senior Staff School that I dreamed up every ailment I could invent. And my mother bought just about every one of them. She let me stay home…and stay home…and stay home. When we left Arabia and took up residence in San Francisco, I was YEARS ahead of grade level, mostly because I spent most of my time reading and playing scientist.
I believe that she and Angie worked together to persuade my father that he needed to quit his job with Aramco and take me and his wife home.
Which, eventually, he did: He shipped out of the San Francisco Bay Area on tankers owned by Standard Oil — which was affiliated with Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company). Eventually, he got another deck officer’s job working for Union Oil out of Southern California, and that’s where I escaped from high school a year early and made it into college at the age of 16.
Thank the heavens and all the Moslem angels above…
Eventually, as it developed, my mother and Angie did come up with a scheme to convince my father — and probably at least some of the doctors out there — that I really was SICK and needed to come back to the States to be treated. And eventually my mother managed to pile herself and me into an Aramco plane and head back to New York.
They did it by insisting that I was too sick to go to school. By keeping me out of class, claiming I was sick. SICK sick Ohhhh gawd, SICKER THAN SICK.
Apparently my father fell for it. Either that or he didn’t want a divorce. WhatEVER.
And thank God!
What a horrible place. What a gawdawful childhood. What a joy to hit that grade school in San Francisco!
