Watching reruns of Star Trek, Dhahran, 1978. Smooth floors - great for my skate board. Love the decor. Then again, can't complain - we didn't own it.
One of the more interesting, albeit frustrating, aspects of revising is the discovery and opening of a treasure trove of long forgotten memories. I say frustrating but that’s not really correct because it implies a certain negativity that is undeserved. Perhaps I should say it’s laborious because I thought the book was done, done, and done, and now I’m having to essentially rewrite whole chunks from scratch. Yet I remind myself that it’s not such a bad thing.
These memories have awakened a world of senses I thought I’d lost. The chapter I’m working on now, my first trip to Saudi Arabia, deserved more than a simple list of things I did over the summer of 1978. I went to the pool – so what? I went to the city – so what? I bought coffee and pastry at a coffee shop – again, so what?
What I’d mostly left out in the original text were certain subtleties of sounds, the sights, the aromas, and especially the little quirks that make these events stand out in the first place. And, of course, the motivation. The result is the difference between telling a story and engaging the reader. Changing the presentation to grab the reader, and if I succeed, transport him or her to where I was all those years ago – that’s the goal. In this chapter, they’ll taste the fresh-squeezed orange juice in the Byuni cafe, savor the aroma of cardamom-infused Arabic coffee in the Modka, and come to understand the pleasure of sitting on a curb and eating a humble shawarma.
Of course there’s more to this chapter than an introduction to Saudi Arabia. I had just come back from a very unpleasant first year of boarding school in Northern Ireland. I wanted more than anything to stay in Saudi, go to school there and find some friends. My parents told me I couldn’t, that because of the way schools were set up in Saudi, I’d only be able to stay for one year and then have to go to boarding school anyway. So, they said, it would be best to just stay in Northern Ireland, and that’s where I went at the end of the chapter.
My brother, on the other hand, had been expelled from two boarding schools in Ireland and asked not to return to a third. While he also couldn’t stay in Saudi Arabia, he didn’t have to go to boarding school, either. Instead, he got to go to the American School on the resort island of Majorca, in the Mediterranean. Beaches, beautiful girls, live at home (well, apartment, at least, with Mom) – he couldn’t have asked for a better situation. And yet even then he wasn’t satisfied.
…but that’s a different chapter.
