Dear GOD, how I hated living in Saudi Arabia!
I grew up there, in an American oil camp called Ras Tanura. That means “Cape Brazier”…and they ain’t kiddin’! It was a horrible place, hot and humid all summer long (add the spring and fall to that, to get the total length of the season…). Some days, it was so humid that rain would start to pour out of a clear blue sky!
This jolly memory was spurred by a moment of reminiscence: was remembering some of the kids I went to school with, what our lives were like (ugh!!), some of the teachers (double-ugh, to most of them!).
Well…hold that thought for a second or so. I was very lucky to have had an utterly brilliant first-grade teacher (no kindergarten out there). Her name was Miss Woods, and that lady DID know how to teach the urchins to read. The astonishing result was that by the time I walked out of her class at the end of the first year, I could read and I could write — fluently.
When we got back to the States a few years later, I was even more astonished to find kids who could barely read. No joke: that is NOT an exaggeration. This was at the end of the sixth grade. And no, they were not learning disabled or special-ed types: they were the normal kids in the normal classrooms.
In Arabia, the teachers ranged from decent to excellent — with the exception of one nitwit who must have been some executive’s girlfriend. By and large, by the time we students got back to the US, we were well ahead of our respective grade levels. Kids who had been in stateside schools all that time often struggled to read a grammar-school book.
But…in Arabia, the social norm among the kiddies was Conformity with a Capital C.
Because I was a little girl who wanted to grow up to be an astronomer — not a secretary or a mommy or a grade-school teacher — I was The Weird One. Make that the Target.
The little monsters teased and tormented and tortured me all the way through grade school…never was I so glad to get away from anyplace as I was when I left that horror show in the 6th grade. And THAT was why I hated living out there. With all my beady little heart…
When we got back to the States, I was years ahead of grade level. I loafed my way through junior high and a year or so of high school. Then was pulled out of school and sent off to a university. YAY!
That was a slice of heaven.
For my father, too: it allowed him to retire a year early. We decamped to Southern California and they stuck me in a school there.
His “retirement” didn’t last long: Before long we hit a major recession, my father’s investments went down the drain, and he had to go back to work.
But by then he and my mother had fallen in love with Sun City, an Arizona tract for the elderly and the white, and I was at the University of Arizona. I managed to stay in school there, drifted into graduate school and into marriage with a lawyer who could support me in the manner…and now here I am. Not married any more, but comfortably ensconced, with a Ph.D in my résumé.
Life is strange, eh?