Free Xmas Wrapping Paper

View at You Tube Direct

Free - Download the Xmas Wrapping Paper PDF

NB - The PDF is sized at 11 by 17 inches. If you don't have a larger printer available, you can easily have a few sheets printed at Kinko's. 

Otherwise, you can download the PDF and print it on a regular sheet of paper. Select Print to Fit. And you can wrap a small present in tiny riyals. 

 

CHRISTMAS in KHOBAR

Scavenger Hunt

CHRISTMAS in KHOBAR - Excerpt from the story of the same name.

I walk into the hospitality suite room to see two bachelorettes drinking Miranda orange soda on a sofa. Oh…oh, I know the red-haired woman.

     A month or so before. Milt and I are wandering around after dinner in some alley when he tells me that last week the teenagers had a Scavenger Hunt party. A what?

     Apparently they would meet at someone’s house, be paired into teams and sent out with a list of stuff to collect. They had two hours to scavenge and then come back. Whoever had the most stuff won. 

     My first question is, “Won what?”

     Milt replies, “A hamburger and milkshake at the Fiesta Room.”

     Not too shoddy, I think to myself. “And what did they have to collect?”

Clark Randall's Big Break

CHRISTMAS in KHOBAR - Excerpt from Clark Randall's Big Break

... Clark Randall had never considered Chevron’s Arabian venture before, but a seed was planted. He asked around and was quickly hired by Aramco. Not much later he arrived in Abqaiq on a single-status contract for a provisional year before his family could come over. 

Where did Jebel JInubi go?

CHRISTMAS in KHOBAR -  Excerpt from the Introduction

This map pinpoints the locations of the first 40 wells drilled into the Dammam Dome, the geological name for the oil field that started everything in Saudi Arabia. It shows the Dhahran camp and the basic topography of the surrounding area to Al Khobar on the Gulf coast and toward the much older port of Dammam to the north.

     To the west are the twin free-standing jebels: Jebel Midra Ash-Shemali at 509 feet tall and Jebel Midra Al-Junibi, which was two feet taller. Almost everything between these two landmarks and the Arabian Gulf is untouched desert, the same as it has always been.

This map was published in 1947, the year I was born in Dhahran.

Tequila!

When Tequila was legal in Aramco - 1950

ARABIAN SON - Excerpt from Tequila!

...School was okay and all that but the best part was that Tommy M. lived on Third Street, directly across from the school. Sometimes Milt and I would loiter at Tommy’s house after class. He was an excitable kid with an enviable brush-cut that stood straight up about 3 inches high. Enthusiastic about life, Tommy was the only kid in camp who had a mini-motorbike and, better yet, his parents weren’t home during the day. 

We’d hang around his room and discuss the world seen through the eyes of a 9 year old. We talked about the latest war movie, the dead jackal we saw on the road to Khobar, the kids at school and gross teachers but mainly we discussed the proven fact that girls were from another galaxy. Completely mystifying. You wanted so much to amaze them and hear their laughter but they were working from an entirely different script.

Tommy had an older brother who never seemed to be around. He always had the latest 45 records, so one day Tommy comes up to me just before the end of class and says, “You’ve got to hear this.”

“What?”

“You’ve got to hear it,” he said and then dashed off.

Minutes later, Milt and I breathlessly knock on Tommy’s door. He opens it with a giant grin, “Gentlemen, right this way.”

The air conditioning is humming throughout the house. The shades are drawn as we silently walk past the classic Aramco thick-bodied maple furniture in the living room and follow Tommy into his room. He goes over to the dresser and intently drops the needle on the record player.

And there it was for the first time in Saudi Arabia!

A hand clapping rhythm, a guitar, a building Latin beat, a blasting saxophone that couldn’t be resisted and then, “Tequila!” After the first riff, we are all up moving around in some unidentifiable dance. Laughing and gyrating, getting ready to shout “Tequila!” at the right time. We have no idea what Tequila is but it sure sounds like a good idea....

ARABIAN SON @ Amazon

Christmas in Khobar - Excerpt from Salt Tablet Lake

Half Moon Bay! What can I say? 

Living in 1950s Aramco, it was paradise. Not as much for the Ras Tanurans who lived at the beach, but for those us in Dhahran living on the rocky jabal or the citizens of Abqaiq, planted deep within a vast sand dune field thirty miles from the coast, Half Moon Bay spelled happiness.

From the beginning its warm, unspoiled waters lured us all: toddlers, mud castle builders, swimmers, fishermen, sailors, water skiers, snorkelers and beachgoers of every age. 

The shore was completely undeveloped and the beaches as far as you could see were absolutely as pristine as they always had been – not a speck of plastic litter anywhere. Just clean sand bleeding off into the waist-high water for a few yards until sharply descending 15 or 20 feet at the drop off. 

In the summer the water temperature can get into the high 80s but go out to the drop-off and dive under about six feet and you’ll hit the thermocline, a sharply defined layer of cooler water, and the temperature will drop to the 70s. Cool and refreshing. The entire coastline of Half Moon Bay was pretty much the way it had always been for thousands of years, if not more. 

A road had been built across the head of the bay, maybe in the 1940s, leaving to the north a lake a couple of hundred yards long that was cut off from the bay. Salt water kept seeping in, but it never left and the lake kept getting saltier and saltier. The water was much greener than in the bay, so we called it Salt Tablet Lake in honor of the hallowed salt tablet and the ubiquitous hunter green salt tablet dispensers that were everywhere in Aramco. Every weekend hundreds of adults drove past the Salt Tablet on the way to the Yacht Club. Hardly any of them bothered to check it out, but we did. 

The Salt Tablet was probably saltier than the Dead Sea or the Great Salt Lake in Utah. We’d wade out into four feet of water and sit down to float around as if we were seated in chaise lounges. Go out a little deeper and try to dive to the bottom and you couldn’t do it. No matter how hard you swam, by the time you got past your knees you‘d come bobbing back up like a cork.

We’re all sixteen. Ben, Landis and I are floating around in the Salt Tablet with Marie and Sheila. Splashing each other, trying to dive down, bobbing around talking about the party tonight at Barclay’s. It’s August around two in the afternoon. The temperature is about 125 degrees and the UV Hazard Index is about 20 points over death ray, so we are obviously having a great time....

Christmas in Khobar @ Amazon

Close Call

Excerpt from Another Close Call at Jebel Shamaal

The fellows have finished exploring the base of the jebel and are making their way back up to their camp on the peak...

Eventually the sun begins to set, and we drift back to the jebel. Billy K. is still a little antsy. By now he is shooting at large boulders that are impossible to miss. Ben and I take the lead and are about forty yards up the slope when K-Man shoots Ben in the back. 

It’s not really a big deal. The range was long, and it didn’t more than sting him, but it ignites a pellet-gun war.

Ski Half Moon!

Excerpt:

My dad loved water skiing. He was really good at it and, though he was in his mid-forties and wouldn’t have risked the ski jump in its heyday, he became quite agile on one slalom ski. Slashing back and forth across the wake as my godfather Steve Furman laconically sped us across the bay. Eight years old and the size of a tall, rhesus monkey, I was the spotter. 
     A bright-eyed, lanky 14-year-old, my sister Annie was a natural athlete and terrific horsewoman with plenty of Gymkhana blue ribbons to her name. She was eager to water ski and mastered it almost immediately. 
     To a passing Bedouin the sight of our speeding boat trailing a very long rope held by a ninety pound girl who waves as she passes, would make no sense at all and definitely provide much food for thought.
     But Annie is having a great time. Tom is chilling at the wheel. The motor is purring, the Grumman is slicing through the water and Half Moon Bay salt spray mists the air. All is good. And then it isn’t.
     I had just turned to look to the bow and we both saw it at the same time. There was really nothing we could do. It was less than a fifty yards ahead of us and there was nowhere to turn. Tom couldn’t stop or even veer off because Annie might lose her grip. And fall into a giant swirling pod of jellyfish.
He has to steer straight through it and Annie just has to hold on or else.
     Near the end of summer, the jellyfish bloom. A very pale, almost translucent blue they are about the size of half a soccer ball with a feathery fringe and a bunch of stubby tentacles covered with hundreds of spring loaded stingers that fire on contact.  
     They aren’t too bad to swim around because they are usually just one or two, here or there. However under certain tidal and current conditions they would be swept together into a swirling pod. A hundred and fifty foot circle packed tight with thousands of jellyfish caught in a strange and deadly Sargasso Sea.
     I spin to watch Annie. She hasn’t seen the jellies yet, but then the water turns pale with their multitude. She realizes what’s happening. My heart is in my throat. My sister will certainly die if she falls...

Christmas in Khobar is available at Amazon.

Christmas in Khobar

Another collection of wonderful stories about early Dhahran from a veteran of it all.

To follow up the success of his first book of short stories Arabian Son, Tim Barger, the imp of Satan as his mother used to call him, has returned with more stories set in the almost mythical days of Dhahran in the fifties. A small, bare bones oil company town surrounded by miles of desert in every direction, it was home to about two thousand American employeess, maybe six hundred families and several hundred children.

     These tales are about the barely supervised exploits of Tim and his friends as well as some of the colorful characters of the era: the pioneering Abqaiq housewife Martha, the driller Clark Randall, the stoic Gil Strader, and the legendary John Ames.

     His stories take you to places that few have even imagined. He offers a glimpse of the often unseen: the pure, but orchestrated chaos of the used car suq in Riyadh, the solemn quiet at the bottom of a 50 feet deep artesian well in Qatif, the rocky slopes of Jebel Shamaal or the splendor of Half Moon Bay at night with a crackling camp fire and a full moon rising.

    Careless can mean care free, “without a care in the world,” but it is mostly used to describe reckless decision making i.e. stupidity. Barger was both care free and prone to ill-conceived adventures in which the only possible upside was that he would survive to tell the tale.  And he has.