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For
some unknown reason, throughout my life various circumstances have led me into
unusual situations. Perhaps the drummer I was marching to played Stockhausen on
the snares, but it began early in life. I was born in Dhahran in 1947 where I
lived at 1134. Hamilton House, the palatial, by Dhahran standards, company
guest house was on the next block to the north. It was the only place with a
lawn covered hill in town. Rolling down the slope was
great fun and you’d always come home with grass stained jeans, itching like mad
from the bugs in the grass.
At that time Kindergarten was held in a portable adjacent to the pool – it later achieved infamy as the Teen Canteen. I showed up and was amazed to find all these kids that I didn’t know running around before class. Dhahran was small, but my circle of acquaintances was even smaller. I wasn’t there long that day before I noticed the cutest girl with jet black hair cut in a page boy. The other boys noticed her too, called out her name “Stephanie,” and chased her and her friends around the play area. Of course, when she and her friends stopped, the boys froze and didn’t know what to do next. The girls would laugh and scurry off to be chased some more.
To the
south was a large median with two bachelorette portables. The bachelorette
portables were terrific. If you were a kid, you could go and knock on the door
and almost always some lovely single woman would answer, invite you in and
spoil you with cookies and maybe a Pepsi. A block further on was the recreation
complex: the pool, the bowling alley, the Fiesta room – a snack bar and coffee
shop, the tennis courts, the ball field, the movie theater, and unfortunately
the school.
I
didn’t really have anything against school, my brother and sister went there,
but it did seem somewhat constricting as you had to go every day at the same
time. So when I turned six it was off to the Gulag. However my family was on a
short leave, so I started Kindergarten a week or so late.
At that time Kindergarten was held in a portable adjacent to the pool – it later achieved infamy as the Teen Canteen. I showed up and was amazed to find all these kids that I didn’t know running around before class. Dhahran was small, but my circle of acquaintances was even smaller. I wasn’t there long that day before I noticed the cutest girl with jet black hair cut in a page boy. The other boys noticed her too, called out her name “Stephanie,” and chased her and her friends around the play area. Of course, when she and her friends stopped, the boys froze and didn’t know what to do next. The girls would laugh and scurry off to be chased some more.
In the
middle of all this confusion we heard someone yelling, “Help! Help!” from the
pool area. A dozen or more of us poured through the picket fence gate to see
someone that I knew, hollering helplessly, upside down in a tree. It was Jimmy
R. He had been climbing a young Ficus about ten feet tall, had slipped and was
suspended four feet from the ground by his ankle that had caught in the crook
of a branch. He was red faced, screaming in terror and like a band of munchkins
we swarmed around him with not the slightest idea of how to save him. After a
minute or two, Sebastian, the big Goanese lifeguard, strode in like King Kong, grabbed
Jimmy’s ankle and plucked him out of the tree like it was the simplest thing in
the world. We were amazed and all crowded around Jimmy to congratulate him for
his escape from an untimely death.
After
the melee subsided a bit, I was talking to Jimmy when Stephanie appeared to ask
if he was okay. He talked to her for a minute and then in a moment of humanity
and compassion that I’ll always cherish him for, he introduced her to me. She
smiled at me with dancing eyes and said, “So nice to meet you sir.” Laughed and
bounded off. I didn’t know if she was joking or being sincere or what, I didn’t
care. I was in heaven. Now she knew my name.
The
bell rang and we all marched into class. Everyone but me seemed to know what
they were supposed to do, but I bumbled along and the teacher told me that I
was to bring a rug the next day for Nap Time. Looking back I can imagine that
the teacher couldn’t wait every day until she could call for Nap Time.
So on
my second day of Kindergarten I trooped off to school but for some reason I was
late. When I got to the portable the door was closed and class had already
started. I sort of panicked, if I went in now everyone would laugh at me. Not so
bad, but what would Stephanie think about me? After about thirty seconds of
careful deliberation and deep soul searching, I dumped my rug and fled. Thus
began my descent into a life of criminality known as playing hooky.
I
didn’t know where to go, so I first went to the bit of jebal that remained
behind the fenced patio of the Kindergarten portable, next to the hobby shop.
There was some unspoiled ground there with a gnarled acacia tree on the slope.
I sat under the tree and watched lizards doing push-ups in the heat. Satisfied
that blood hounds had not been unleashed on my trail, I circled around behind the
bowling alley and made my way to the library.
At that
time the library was situated above the Fiesta Room. It wasn’t a really big
space but it was crammed with bookshelves, presided over by three very
good-natured Indian librarians. They recognized me from past visits and it
never occurred to them that I should be in school. I couldn’t read, but on the
bottom shelf for oversized books there were dozens of volumes of cartoon books.
I especially remember the cartoon annuals from The New Yorker. Aramco must have had every edition from 1940 on. So
I sat on the floor and ate it up. You didn’t have to read to enjoy the cartoons
and that is probably where I began a life-long addiction to desert island and
“take me to your leader” cartoons. If I got stuck, one of those Indian librarians
would be happy to read me the captions.
After a
few hours of cartoons I’d get restless and roam around the camp. Along the
perimeter fence it was still pretty much desert. Walking along the chain link fence
I was always attracted to the fly traps placed intermittently along the length.
They were painted bright red with warning signs stenciled on the side, but you
could smell them way before you could read the warning, if you could read. They
smelled god awful but how could you resist getting as close to them as possible
without throwing up and wondering what horrible brew they contained. How could
something that smelled that terrible attract anything, even flies?
Of
course the fence wasn’t exactly perfect, walking along you could find places
where jackals and feral dogs had burrowed underneath it. So I’d wiggle under
the chain link and be in the official desert. In those days Dhahran was
completely surrounded by desert. You could walk from camp all the way to the Persian Gulf without seeing a fence, a wall, a road, a
house or anything but sand and rock. Nowadays Dhahran is part of a sprawling
megapolis that extends to Khobar and the Gulf, there isn’t a square yard that
isn’t developed. I’d putter around for a while, living it up in the knowledge
that I was free in the wild, slightly puzzled because the desert on this side
didn’t look any different than the desert behind the fence.
By some
sixth sense I always knew when Kindergarten was over. I’d show up in time to
meet the other kids coming home from school and ask them what they did that
day. When I got home, my mother would ask me what I did in school that day. I’d
mumble something about playing with blocks or reciting the colors of the
rainbow or whatever. I quickly learned that if I burst in the door and said “We
sang Old MacDonald today,” that was plenty enough information and I could
escape into the backyard to hunt for caterpillars in the hedge or play with my
Dinky toy trucks in the dirt.
This
went on for days, and then weeks, until I had convinced myself that “Yes, I was
going to school every day” – just in a different classroom. No one else in
Kindergarten was doing advanced arithmetic such as fractions, but I was doing
them every day. The refund on a Pepsi bottle was a quarter riyal and a Pepsi
was a riyal. It was easy to scrounge through a few alleys to find four empty
bottles, the hard part was getting the refund at the commissary. The place was
swarming with moms and if my mother’s friends, or worse my mother, saw me I was
sunk.
Once I
was sure that the coast was clear, I’d sneak into the commissary, get my
refund, buy my Pepsi and hot foot it out of there, slinking behind the Mail Center
to the Barber Shop. Another portable raised about six feet high, it had a
wooden staircase up from the sidewalk where I could crawl under the stairs and
sip my Pepsi in shade and perfect safety. It’s funny that looking out all that I
could see were people from the knee down which fittingly reminded me of the Tom
and Jerry cartoons where adults were always seen only as legs walking in and
out of the frame. When I was finished, I’d stash the bottle and know that I
only needed three quarters of a riyal to get my next fix. I was a whiz with
fractions.
A lot
of times I’d hang with the gardeners. They were an odd group of people because
they just appeared out of nowhere. Completely unofficial, I don’t know how they
even got past the main gate into camp, where they lived or even who paid them,
they were just there. I’d find a guy working in someone’s back yard and just
hang around. In retrospect, I imagine most of the gardeners were
semi-indentured agriculture workers from Qatif or Hofuf, but to me at the time
they were just cheerful men in once white undershirts, with white head-dresses
and wrap around waist sarongs. They mostly wore sandals but some of them wore
sort of virtual sandals, cheap shoes with the backs crushed down so you could
slip into them. Every gardener seemed to have only two tools: a hoe and a hand
scythe. A crescent shaped blade about a foot long with a wooden handle, the
wicked-looking hand scythe was of particular interest. The gardeners used it to
trim hedges, cut back branches and even mow lawns. They’d let me use it and
show me how to handle the thing, but I was too little to wield it effectively
and even then came to appreciate how strong you had to be to use it.
Occasionally
they would take a break and invite me to share from their lunch pail. In those
days most of the Saudi workers had a cylinder-shaped aluminum lunch pail that
was segmented into three sections that nestled into each other with a handle
that locked the parts together. The top section held their Arab bread called khubz, the second section was for gravy
or sauce and the much larger bottom section packed the rice. I usually just had
a few nibbles of the khubz as we sat
together in the shade chatting back and forth. I say chatting but I have no
idea of how we communicated save through sign language, and various expressions
and gestures. At the time I only knew a few Arabic words, Na’am meant “yes,”La
meant “no,” “Wajid zain” meant “very
good and “Kaaf halaak” meant “how are
you?” Shortly thereafter I learned that indispensable and always useful phrase,
Inta simak wajeh which means “You are
a fish face.” Nonetheless we got along famously.
One day
a gardener and I were in an alley behind some houses that were situated much
higher than the alley level, so the company had built a high retaining wall and
back filled the void to make the back yard level. The gardener pointed to a
clay drainage pipe set in the wall. He motioned for me to put my hand in the
pipe. I stuck my hand into the pipe, which was drifted with fine sand, and
wiggled my fingers around until I felt some small objects that were smooth and
round. I pulled out my hand and in my palm were three lizard eggs that
glistened like pearls. Perfectly spherical, white as fine alabaster, they
seemed to glow in my hand as I rolled them around, mesmerized by their simple
beauty. After a minute he gestured for me to put them back in the pipe. For
many years after that, heedless of the possibility of vipers, scorpions or
spiders, I thrust my hand into countless pipes lying abandoned around the
outskirts of camp in search of those precious lizard eggs.
Dhahran
was still being built in those days and I discovered the Saudi work crews
finishing houses on what I’m guessing was about seventh street. All about there
was a flurry of activity, plumbers and painters, roofers laying down shingles
and plasterers slathering stucco over the lathe. This was some real action.
Initially they ignored me but after awhile they warmed up and offered me dates
and pantomimed each other. I’m sure that I was more of a novelty to them than
they were to me. They noticed that when an American supervisor would appear I
would make myself scarce until he left. Eventually they warned me when the big
boss was approaching. The second day on the job site a plasterer took me aside
and, using some plaster on a shingle, deftly shaped a fish and then shaped it
into a bird as if he were some primitive Saudi Picasso.
Again
I’m not sure how we communicated but he told me that if I came the next day, he
would show me how to make a bird trap out of a piece of garden hose. There
couldn’t anything much better than that, so I went home high on the next day’s
prospects. I opened the door to my house to be greeted by my mom’s voice from
the living room, “Timothy, is that you?” She only used my full name when I was
in trouble, so I knew I was doomed.
My
teacher had spotted my sister Annie at school and said, “Oh, are you back from
vacation?” It turned out that, without even meaning to, I had set the world’s
record for truancy in the Dhahran school system grades K through 9. I had
played hooky for a month.
My
mother Kathleen was so angry that she could barely speak, but she managed, and
basically I was grounded for my entire life, just after she introduced me to
Mr. Hairbrush.
When he
came home from work, my dad wasn’t too amused either and I got another tongue
lashing and a few raps on the head with his knuckles. I was sent to bed without
dinner too. All in all it wasn’t the most successful day but what really
bothered me was that I was never going to learn how to make that bird trap out
of a garden hose.
The
next day my mother escorted me to class. The same kids were milling around but
to my great dismay Stephanie (not her real name) wasn’t there. Her dad had been
transferred to Abqaiq where she reigned for many years as one of the prettiest
girls in a town overflowing with pretty girls. She still is beautiful. I see
her once in a while at reunions and can’t help but to remember that day when
she called me “Sir.”
This whole remembrance was triggered one day when I was at my daughter’s house and my bright-eyed granddaughter Beatrice arrived home from kindergarten. Looking at her, I was struck by just how very short six year-old kids are. My daughter would have an apoplectic seizure if Bea was unsupervised for a few hours, let alone a month. My mother wasn’t mad at me, she was out of her mind with worry about what terrible things might have happened to me while wandering around on my own. She really shouldn’t have been worried, I wasn’t. Because somehow I knew that Dhahran in the fifties was probably the safest place on earth.
This whole remembrance was triggered one day when I was at my daughter’s house and my bright-eyed granddaughter Beatrice arrived home from kindergarten. Looking at her, I was struck by just how very short six year-old kids are. My daughter would have an apoplectic seizure if Bea was unsupervised for a few hours, let alone a month. My mother wasn’t mad at me, she was out of her mind with worry about what terrible things might have happened to me while wandering around on my own. She really shouldn’t have been worried, I wasn’t. Because somehow I knew that Dhahran in the fifties was probably the safest place on earth.
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