I found a letter of mine stuck in with photos I’ve been scanning. I obviously “borrowed” Mom’s typewriter for this, but judging from the folds, the letter was never sent. Still, it is another “long lost” piece of history. I’m not sure if “down to visit you” means down from Alaska, but it probably does. Oddly, though, opening with “How are you? I am fine” is how I learned to begin my letters from boarding school, so I’m not sure when this was written other than a long time ago.
Mark was a dear friend in Bethesda, where we first settled in 1967 after being forced out of Libya in the violent wake of the Arab/Israeli war. Though Libya wasn’t directly involved, the Arabs went on a rampage, targeting the Jewish community and any “infidel” they came upon. Dad was out of the country at the time, so Mom had to deal with having no power, little food and few supplies alone as our once friendly and helpful neighbors now cursed us for being alive. Fortunately, Mom was resolute and Dad creative, and we were able to eventually escape, first to Malta, then Ireland, and eventually America.
I met Mark when his mom found me wandering around our neighborhood with a plastic bag over my head (which probably explains a lot – the plastic bag bit I mean). Amazingly, I knew where I lived, and she returned me to Mom. They became friends (a good thing, too, as Mom was a bit lost at first in this new country), and so Mark and I became friends, too.
Mom probably did get “the” job, but I did not return to Bethesda to visit my friend. Instead, the extra money was saved as Dad’s job in Alaska was ending with the company shutting down. Being proactive, Dad contacted a friend from the old Libya days who said he should come to Saudi Arabia. And that is how we ended up there in 1978.
I did get to see Mark once more, in August 1979 when we returned to the US for my grade equivalency assessment to satisfy some company bean pusher who thought I could have gone to school in Saudi for a year and thus deducted all school fees and travel costs from Dad’s paycheck. There’s a lot more to it, but suffice to say Dad won, and I went back to Northern Ireland to find that a friend had been blown up in the Mountbatten “assassination” just days before. That is another story.