Can you help it?

On today's show, Kelly Clarkson sang her version of the Four Tops song "I Can't Help Myself" and it brought back memories.

1965 and 1966 we were in love and dancing to it, weren't we, Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch?

And now you're getting ready to dance with the fucking Israelis. I suppose that you can't help yourself.

Piano Welsher

When we get to thinking about one thing and it reminds us of another and teaches us something ...

I've been without a piano now for over a year and a half because the grotty apartment could not take the weight and I was not allowed what I love most after my child.

 I miss it every day and it rips up another little piece of my heart, as it did today when I heard a piece on classical KING-FM that I learned from Mildred Coleman's patience with an untrained, grown student after my six free lessons.

I thought about when I bought my first piano having never had a lesson. Age 19 while being a nanny to four children for a local celebrity family. Wrote songs on it starting 1972 after you and I  rendevoused when you were graduating from Command and General Staff School in Ft. Leavenworth. I had to sell it during university years in Seattle to pay tuition one term for the B.A. in Arabic language and literature, Near Eastern Studies before leaving for London and graduate school. 

I thought about the passing of a fellow student at S.O.A.S. who gave me a full-harp upright piano when I was living in the Duke Street 5th-floor flat which Major Johnson called a grotty garret. I played that piano for years, until I left London in 1985 with my child and returned Stateside.

And then ... I thought about the fact that you didn't give me a piano to play all those months I was in Bahrain. When you were 17 and I was 18, we talked about my longing throughout the entirety of my childhood for a piano and was not allowed to have one. You promised me that I'd never be without one again.

You welshed on that promise, too. You even welshed when I was in Bahrain for five months in 1980 and 1981. There was no piano in the apartment, admittedly which you did not provide for me, but that is not the point. It really is the least that you could have done while you were busy planning a fictional terrorist operation and blaming it on Iran. 

I deserved the fun, damn it. I still do.

I gave up my music to study what pleased you, years and years of it. You couldn't even keep your word about the fucking piano.

I want you to be a peacemaker, but you're welshing on that too and it could be the best thing you could do in your life.

#Bahrain #HamadbinIsaAlKhalifa #London #Seattle #Piano #Welsher #Liar 

Abdications

Coincidences. PBS is rerunning a program about spying on the royals, tonight about King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. It jogged my memory about the date of an event in 1972.

I remembered that Edward died right around the time you were completing a program at the Command and General Staff School in Ft. Leavenworth. At the graduation dinner with the late Paul R. and others, we talked about abdicating the throne for love of a woman. Do you remember that conversation?

You may recall that in the birthday letters several years in a row (but not last year) I've recommended that you abdicate. Other than 1965, 1966 and 1972 recommendations that you abdicate for love of a woman, me, those suggestions were unrelated to my heart. Maybe this year would be a good time for you to really do it.

I was recently asked if you have any filters. Nope, not any more. You are now and have been for a long time led around by a brass ring in your nose pulled by Uncle Khalifa and the Khawalids, and now Bonesaw's got you by the short and curlies. 

(I'm discounting that President Trump is being led around by a brass ring in his nose by John Bolton, except Bahrain is a sand spit and U.S. rules the world. Trump is a corrupt, whining ninny.)


#KingEdwardVIII #SpyingOnRoyals #WallisSimpson #Abdicate #Abdication #CommandAndGeneralStaffSchool #Bahrain #FortLeavenworth #SheikhKhalifabinSalmanAlKhalifa #Khawalids #PresidentTrump #JohnBolton  #Bonesaw #UnelectedPrimeMinister

Hindsight

Hindsight becomes even more clear with age, but photos and diaries plus education and interest provide not only clarity, but understanding, an important aid in writing a memoir.

It doesn't surprise me at my age to discover documentation appearing to show that various intelligence agencies, both British and American, had an interest in our relationship from the onset when we were teenagers of 15 and 16 to the last meeting at your office in the Ministry of Defense over 15 years later.

It did surprise me to identify some of those involved over 50 years after the fact, and I'm not referring to your uncles, whose sources you were well aware of.

Home Videos

          I just found out something that I did not know, or if I did, that I'd long forgotten. It's so exciting. I will try to figure out how to make a CD out of it and send you a copy, for Old Times' sake, if you want one. You won't have to share it with anyone else. It's between the two of us, and as you could recall from context, we were still innocent teenagers. You were 16 that January. I was 17.

Even though I don't like you at all anymore, I cannot resist looking back at the photos and diaries and such, especially since I've been writing these letters to you as well as working on The Project. They bring those warm feelings rather than the others described over the years in this format. I like reverie. I look at the earliest photos and can still sink into love again. It's ridiculous, I know, but it is the nature of star-crossed love. Even broken promises, betrayal and abandonment cannot change it. Old photos.

Remember just before you went back to England for spring term in 1966 and we were at my family's house and we were having fun behind the long curtain between the living room and dining room? Mother filmed us that day! I knew that she'd used her video camera sometimes, including at the horse races and the stables, and that she'd made photos and home movies of what I think could now be considered all "The Players." I don't really give a hoot about those, but I'm happy about the one that is you and me in Manama. Perhaps it will take the pain of Now away for a moment. A home movie!

Trust Me

Do you remember what you said when I asked you if you trust me? You'd taken my purse from my hand, opened it and looked through the contents before handing it back to me. 

"I trust you very little, my dear, and that's more than I trust most others."

I remembered what you said today as it hit me that my biggest mistake in life was directly the opposite. I trusted you more than any others, right from the beginning.

I thought the depth of our love, first love, true love, ages 15 and 16 and 16 and 17 and 17 and 18 and 25 and 26 and whenever we were together, was more than sufficient for trust. You put me in danger at 32 and still I trusted that you would keep your word subsequently.

Tell me this, please. Did you think, knowing me all those years, that I would take a story to the National Enquirer? Even understanding the recent surprise I gave you, did you honestly think at some point that someone whose heart you knew so well would join the ranks of women who'd had private relationships with foreign leaders and sold a one-page story to a supermarket tabloid?

(By the way, either your oldest son or someone acting as him expressed to my daughter a concern that details could end up in the Seattle Times. I pointed out no such thing had happened in decades and was unlikely to happen then.)

Maybe there was only one page to those stories. Maybe they weren't as intriguing as ours, mixed in with politics and world affairs. 

How's your trust level doing today? Do you still trust me more than most others, my dear? 

I do wonder sometimes if you've appreciated my discretion all these years. You didn't ask me for it. It was a gift from me to you. Some gifts wear out over time and cannot be repaired. 

Photo of Hamad from summer, 1965

Yes, it is you. I shot this photo in Bahrain in the summer of 1965. So cute and chubby.

Shaikh Isa at the Beach

How about another entry idea for The Isa Campaign?

Imagine this great bit of the Shaikh Isa period:  photos of him sitting in his little chair under a large umbrella on the beach in front of the palace in the summer, his gold phone sitting on a tray, holding his binoculars in front of his eyes to gawk at the European and American women in their teeny, tiny bikinis playing in the waters of the Persian Gulf. No Bahraini women, no locals, for Heaven's sake. Forbidden. Caucasian, okay.

Next up, servants bring to the ladies who've made themselves comfortable under beach umbrellas (and to their families, if the ladies brought their children) individual trays of tiny slices of Sara Lee cakes, usually banana cake with icing, almost cold, probably sliced while near frozen, and bottles of cold Pepsi and Fanta sodas with moisture beads rolling down them. Cold soda and cake, gifts from the Amir. Some of the ladies got watches and some, pearls. The Amir got his kicks.

I was so impressed with the spectacle the first time that I saw it as a 16 year-old girl in her own not-so-tiny two-piece swimsuit. American cake.