Where Sorting Papers May Lead, 1972 to 2021

 

I've been helping with the care of my 92 year-old friend who was released from the hospital a few days ago after she fell and cracked her skull. I usually bake bread or make some cookies for her every week and, until a few months ago, I would ride to the grocery store with her. She'd caught pneumonia and cannot drive again until she recovers. Her fisherman son is now staying home, taking full-time care of her. The whole neighborhood loves her and is helping, all of us taking precautions because of COVID-19.

Anyway, I was just wondering about what else I could do to help her besides the normal things and remembered she's got a huge pile of correspondence and bills and so forth, and her son has asked her to sort and file them. 

I'm going to volunteer to do the sorting and filing, just the same as I did for you after your graduation from Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth! Remember?

At that time I had an excellent photographic memory, so while I was readying your papers for your return to Bahrain, of course I read many of them. I was not surprised that the teaching staff used prior military campaigns both big and small. It was the fictional military operations such as carrying out coups and countercoups which interested me the most. 

It won't be nearly as much fun sorting an old lady's stack of papers, but while I do, I will be re-thinking a certain fictional terrorist operation you carried out in 1981 and how the U.S. military helped it along. Most people don't know there were two 1981 coup attempts.

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