TURMOIL IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Dearest Friends,

After my boss finally came back from her lengthy trips to London and Paris, there was a noticeable chill in the air whenever she and her partner were in the same room.  It may have had something to do with a notation I came across in my diary the other day.  I wrote about having had "some unpleasantness with S. while M. was away", but didn't elaborate.  I don't remember for sure, but I seem to recall her trying to pump me for financial information, or I may have caught her going through papers she shouldn't have been going through.  Whatever it was, M. was more than irritated when I told her, and it meant we were no longer one big happy family at the shop.  A short while later, someone told me M. had sold out to S., and was going to do something else.  Then later I heard, "No, no, that's not right.  They split things into two separate businesses."  A few weeks after that, I was told that M. had rented another space.  Needless to say, I never knew from one day to the next whether I would still have a job for long.  Even worse?  No more freebies at the salon!

On top of all that, there was the fact that several of our friends had taken home-leave to the states over Christmas, or had gone on nice vacations to places like Greece and Cyprus, and were now back and talking about all the fun they had.  Since we had not budged off this tiny desert island in almost a year, and since the only place John was going any time soon was back offshore -- not just occasionally, but as his full-time gig -- it was a tad depressing.  Speaking of this tiny island, know what was really bizarre?  Seeing cars with luggage racks on them in Bahrain.  This was before the causeway to Saudi had been completed, so the furthest you could drive in any direction was thirty miles.  Why would you need a luggage rack?

What really put us over the edge though were the pictures and tapes that started showing up from our families, of all their holiday festivities.  We loved looking at them, and yet, we hated them.  For the past twenty one months, I had been so caught up in my newlywed adventures, I had never given much thought at all to the fact that life was continuing on without us back in the states.  These tapes and photos brought it home in a big way, for I saw that new nephew Geoff was now the same size that his older sister Meg had been when we left, while Meg was running around and jabbering away like a mini-adult!  It set off all kinds of strange feelings that I had trouble identifying.  Could it be possible, that after all this time abroad, I was just now beginning to feel a little, well, there's no other word for it, homesick?  Even more disturbing was the way I could suddenly go all mushy at the sight of an infant.  Was it my imagination, or had something set off the very faintest of tick-tocking sensations, somewhere deep inside me?