IL MONDO

 A soft, whiny voice sang the Italian classic song "Il Mondo" during the Closing Ceremony of the Olympics. As I've loved that song since 1966 when you gave me a 45rpm record of it sung by Emilio Pericoli when we were in London together after we both left Bahrain, before I was sent away. I brought the record back to Washington and played it on an endless loop until one of my brothers took it off the record player and hid it when I wasn't looking. I never found it.

Years later, the young Italian trio, Il Volo, recorded it and they taped a performance on our Public Broadcasting System during the twice-yearly PBS fundraising campaign. I fell in love with their version, waiting for the reruns of that program. Those three young men, now at least 10 years older, have made signing that song a part of every performance.

I've since learned how to find the lyrics, find the translations, find out who else sings it and ... sing it myself with my guitar. I prefer it in Italian but today I heard a version sung many years ago by Engelbert Humperdinck with a translation I don't believe, as if it's a love song, rather than a love and lost love song.

The performance during the Olympics today had me once again looking for the more beautiful version sung by Il Volo as well as an impulse to log in here and write a bit about the melody of this song which has always tugged at my heartstrings. I used to cry and cry as I felt that we were ripped apart by your family, at the realization that we were star-crossed lovers. I don't cry about it any longer, but I remember, when I let myself, that there was a time when I thought my world had ended.

Happy 76th Birthday with some remembrances

 Well, it's that time again. Another year of life has passed and you've just turned 76 years old. How do you feel? Do you look back on your life each year on your birthday?

Can you look back to 1965 when we met? To spring1966 when I had to leave Bahrain because I would graduate that June from high school in the U.S. and you had to return to the U.K. for your next school term there? 

Do you remember that you and I had to take separate flights out of Bahrain to London because your late father, may he rest in peace, had found out we were madly in love and it was an unwelcome complication for the Al Khalifa regime? Do you remember how we'd settled into a deeper relationship while staying at the Dorchester? Do you remember how Uncle Shaikh Khalifa arrived to lay down the law, to force me to return to the U.S. earlier than we'd planned?

Every year on your birthday, when I write to you, I look back on our history over many years. No matter how I feel about what you've become, my memories from those days still bind me to you. I wasn't just a passing fling, no matter the efforts of some in your family to downgrade me and the words you slung at me in our last meeting. We loved each other. We were lovers. Every time we met again over the years renewed love, even the last time when you said that you didn't have time to fall in love with me again. 

There's a quote which I believe. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. This year, which is my 77th, I remember that you are the only man who ever truly loved me. I wish you a very happy birthday.

#Bahrain #HamadBinIsaAlKhalifa #FirstLove #TrueLove #Birthdays

#TheDorchesterHotel #London

Nothing Is Ever Finished

 I was 17 and you were 16 when we were first in 1966 London together at the Dorchester Hotel after we left Bahrain in September on separate planes, both of us returning to school. I went back to Washington for a few months and then, a few days after my 18th birthday in Seattle,  you cabled me that a ticket for my return to London had been arranged.

I was tonight watching a movie about a writer named Colette, thinking about my early writing, about the gold dress I'd brought from Beirut and wore one evening when you and I and Danny O'Leary and your cousins went to Annabel's for dinner and disco dancing.

I was upset about Christine, a blonde German floozy who sat at our table and made googly eyes at you as we ate avocado pears with a piquant dressing. Later you danced with her on the tiny tiled floor and told me that it was a social necessity. 

Now I'm thinking again and this came to me while I washed my hands in the kitchen:

        You were fucking her when I was away.

         Of course you were, clear as night and day.

         I was 18 and unaware.

          She was in her 30s and couldn't care

          That you were a child

           Running amok, thinking you were wild.

           

Then there would be a war

            And Uncle, Shaikh Khalifa showed me the door.

           

Honestly, I need to find my diaries from those early days and link them to the wars which always happened in the years between our visits. We need to get together again to stop the wars. It's a bit Vonnegut. When will we next meet?

            

#Bahrain #HamadBinIsaAlKhalifa #CrownPrinceHamad #Annabels #DannyOLeary #TheDorchester #London #Seattle #ShaikhKhalifaBinSalmanAlKhalifa #LongestServingUnelectedPrimeMinister

         

     

Worthless Men

Sometimes women love worthless men. Men who lie to them. Men who break promises to them. Men who put them in mortal danger, like you did to me. Men who don't have the fortitude to make things right.

Shaikh Khalifa put my life in danger, in grave danger, sending a goon to bribe the guard at Rainbow Flats, a goon who tried to break into the apartment Major Johnson had told me to rent, not telling me that most of those apartments were rented to whores.

Ali's father, the aging Salim with pearls and wisdom, with whom I sat in the court complex many days listening to history and stories related to my doctoral thesis, listened as I told him about that goon, what the goon had said to me as he tried to break down the apartment door, how frightened I was that your private secretary had suggested I stay in a place of such ill repute and danger. 

Ali's father, an important man during Belgrave's years, not only listened to my fears, but having his own daughters, knowing how vulnerable I was, he cared enough about my well-being to take action, to try and protect me from the Al Khalifas. He asked Ali to help me get out of Rainbow Flats into safety in an empty apartment across from Ali's. It was natural to take comfort in safety and to trust.

Salim was not a worthless man. He saw a young woman working on a worthy goal, a scholar, being harassed by a man who'd twice run her out of London. Do you remember when Shaikh Khalifa did that? Twice. Does it surprise you to know that he'd put me in danger in order to get me off the island and away from you one more time?

Khalid said to me in my last moments leaving your old office at the BDF, walking through his office to return to Adliya and get out of Bahrain before Ali found out that I'd named him as the father of my unborn child, when I didn't even know if it was true but needed to escape from both of you, "It's fine if you want to blame me for Hamad's decisions to end support for your studies at SOAS, and for anything else that you think I did rather than he did."

So I blamed Shaikh Khalifa because of my history with him. I always wanted to find you blameless, but now, knowing how little you care for the lives of others, I've begun to wonder if it was you who sent the goon to Rainbow Flats. After all, it was your private secretary who sent me there, wasn't it?

Worthless men. They may have power, fame, worldly unearned wealth, but they're worthless when one gets to the heart of them.

#Bahrain #ShaikhKhalifaBinSalmanAlKhalifa, #PrimeMinisterShaikhKhalifa #HamadBinIsaAlKhalifa #KingHamad #SOAS #BDF #Manama #Adliya #AliBinSalimAlArrayed #AttorneyAliSalimAlArrayed #MrSalimAlArrayedRIP #RainbowFlats #London #KhalidBinAhmadAlKhalifa #ChiefOfProtocol #MajorJohnson

 

Year of The Snake and Red Envelopes

Happy Birthday and Happy Year of The Snake!

You will be "70-something" this time, but I see no need to be specific since you forgot how old you were when we first met and fell in love and claimed it was 14 when you were nearly 16 and I was 17 a few months earlier. We carried on in between wars over the course of many years!

I play mahjongg with three Chinese ladies once a week and this week our game date falls on Wednesday, the 29th of January, which is Chinese New Year. It is celebrated in Seattle's Chinatown district with large crowds enjoying the great costumed dragons and lions and snakes in the streets, lots of red and yellow decorations and hordes of excited people waiting for the annual red envelopes with cash inside from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, lovers and friends.

Your birthday on the 28th of January is known, on the Chinese calendar, as New Year's Eve since the Chinese New Year starts on the 29th in 2025. The Year of the Snake is a year of wisdom, intuition and transformation.

Of course, since you promised me that you'd love me forever but pushed it down to the lowest part of your heart,

promised me a villa and didn't provide it,

promised me that I'd never be without a piano and a home in which to play it and broke those promises, 

promised that you'd provide scholarship for me to have the highest educational credentials but then cut the funding in the midst of my studies and I had to leave London before I could complete it, not having the tuition for SOAS when I returned from my studies at the courts of Bahrain, 

because of the promises you made to me and then broke, I have logically concluded that you are a knowing and serial promise-breaker, lacking honor.

I hope that you do indeed acquire wisdom in the New Year, that you are transformed into a man who keeps and honors rather than breaks his word, that your word means something to you, that you have the intuition to know what you should do and then do it.

I hope that you have a lovely birthday.

The Heart of Me

 I just watched a film starring Helena Bonham-Carter called "The Heart of Me" about a star-crossed love affair, betrayal, family interference and tragedies of war, things which I know very well from personal experiences.

 The male lead in the film was killed during the German bombing of London during World War 2. He was outside mid-day in the middle of a street strewn with debris from bombed buildings and there were policemen in tin hats doing their job of shepherding humans under cover. 

It was the tin hats which set me off tonight, thinking about the small collection of military paraphenalia which I brought you over the course of years and visits to you in London, Bahrain and Fort Leavenworth. One of those things was a tin hat from a former British officer's collection of WWII items he'd acquired. The man who gave it to me, now deceased, was a neighbor who lived in a flat in Dalmeny Court on Duke Street, St. James's, where I'd rented a flat while studying at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies just a 20-minute walk away.

From the U.S., I'd brought you a soldier's helmet from the Vietnam war which was from my father's collections. 

More importantly, I brought you a 3-stemmed pink glass lamp made from a giant brass shell casing from WWII which had been turned into an exquisite piece of art with a crescent moon and a woman who looked as if the artist was imprinting a Greek-goddess with a flowing gown. The casing was reported to have come from an important naval ship based in Hawaii during the war.

I'd spent the wages of a whole summer's work to buy it for you just before I left Seattle and brought it to London when I moved there in the late 1970s for graduate studies at SOAS. I had it packed and crated again in London, in Mayfair actually, by a helpful business acquaintance of your family, Mr. Moore, in late September 1980 days before I embarked on my final trip to Bahrain just a few days after Saddam Hussein attacked Iran.

Major Johnson, who designated himself as your private secretary, collected it from me and said he would see that you received it. It needed cleaning and he said he'd designate "an Indian chap" for that task. 

I suggested that it may need rewiring due to electrical current differences between the U.S. and Bahrain. My suggestion was interpreted by the good major as a hint that some "delicate wiring" may have taken place in transit at some point. I told him that I'd imagined it in a war room such as I'd seen in films with a green-felted pool or snooker table covered with maps and toy-sized military hardware and men gathered around it re-fighting WWII as you and other chaps did at Command and General Staff School in Fort Leavenworth.

You never had the kindness to acknowledge my gift to you, but you should know now, if you ever did, that every gift I gave to you was from the heart of me, starting from the biggest gift a woman has to give the man she loves.

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.

Caviar and Coups

Just remembered that when I left Bahrain last and returned to London in March 1981, I had a tin of iced Iranian caviar with me. It was a gift to me from a merchant in the Suq, that I'd hunted up specifically as a gift for my upstairs neighbor at the grotty garret. 

I had to laugh today thinking that it was so easy to get Iranian caviar at the very time when you chaps were practicing your fictional terrorist operation (which I used to call your phony coup) and cooking up some blame for Iran. It's funny, that.



#FalseFlag #Coup #FictionalTerroristOperation #Bahrain #Caviar #BlameIran #London #Helpfromspecialfriends 

Guitars Take Trips, But They Ain't No Piano

(Blah, blah, blah. There was text here, but I cut it, need it for something else. Summary: a guitar works in a limited way for a singer and musician who loves the piano, but better than nothing, and my guitar went from London to Damascus to Bahrain to Santa Monica and Seattle.)



And now I'm blaming you because I don't have a piano or a house in which to play it. Try and make sense of that.



(Meanwhile, tomorrow is the first day of November and NaNoWriMo, so I'll be busy writing 225 pages of the next book over the month and this is likely the last post for a bit.)



#Bahrain #NaNoWriMo

Speedy Retirement for Shaikh Khalifa in November

Golly, I hope it's true, no matter the catalyst, that Uncle Khalifa will finally be retired in November as the longest-serving member of the Al Khalifa dictatorship. He won't need the golden parachute or a new gold watch as he's probably stashed a substantial portion of Bahrain's wealth into Swiss and Lichtenstein banks. 

His departure is the best gift to Bahrain imaginable if you don't replace him with his two shadows, the Khawalids, but with the (supposedly) more agreeable Salman.

I have a lot to say about him in the book that I'm planning to finish next month in the annual NaNoWriMo sprint to complement the one that I wrote last November. Every day that I write a paragraph, a page, a chapter or more, I bless the many diaries that I wrote and kept and you've been unable to steal, despite the Major's attempt in my old London flat. For just one example, I'd like you to think back to the threats Uncle made to me in the Mayfair Dorchester when I was 18. You heard them, all wrapped in honey, Sherry Brandy and talk about your destiny. I wrote them down.

I wish him well.




#Bahrain #KhalifabinSalmanAlKhalifa #PrimeMinisterShaikhKhalifa #Dorchester #London #NaNoWriMo #NaNoWriMo2018 

It's My Birthday, So Some Thoughts on Gifts

Today's my birthday. 70. It rained this morning, even when I walked outside to accept delivery of a Tuxedo cake from a couple of my former neighbors. Seattle needs rain, so it was a gift. I took a bit of metaphysical credit, too. My birthday, my rain.

Then some good political news made for another special moment. Paul Manafort pleaded guilty to serious charges for which a Trump pardon will be ineffective and which will surely implicate Fat Nixon's lard ass in conspiracies and obstruction. Because I pay close attention to D.C. politics, I was happy for a bit that my birthday was the occasion on which it happened, so I thought of it as a gift.

Yesterday afternoon I made a decision not to do what I'd planned for this morning, to go and watch the new version of "A Star Is Born" with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, even though I don't like the venue where it's currently showing. I know the story line and my daughter suggested in Messenger from abroad that my mood wasn't compatible with a tragic film where the male lead dies in the end, so I had a rethink. Her excellent advice was a gift.

I needed to get out, it was sunny and so I walked down to the Majestic cinema on Market Street to watch "Crazy Rich Asians" instead of Cooper's film. 

I wanted comedy rather than tragedy, the reviews were good, some of the actors have been on the late night talk shows and it seemed like it might fit my needs. I didn't know when I walked in that it would be a stereotypical plot, only played out with Chinese and other Asian actors rather than white folks in the previous three versions. (The cinematography of Singapore is stunning in it, which I was reminded this morning watching Free Practice 3 of the Formula 1 Grand Prix going on there this weekend.)

In summary of the movie plot, a well-educated young woman from an ordinary background who's fallen in love with a young man from an extremely wealthy family -- much to her surprise -- is rejected by his family as unsuitable for them, despite her best efforts to please them. It is all so familiar and has a happy ending, though, unlike ours. I was in tears through half of it, but that's the sentimental me. I cry easily, too often, as always.

Today I thought about all the years that I've written you letters for your birthday, over 50 years now, albeit they've moved from hard copies to here, and some that I wrote and saved as I could not send them while keeping a very low profile and didn't care to have them intercepted. It was probably a gift to you that I didn't send them all, but perhaps you will have the opportunity to read them one day in a different format.

I thought about the fact that you never had to do a thing for any of the small gifts which I accepted from you, other than ask someone else to fetch them. 

Then I thought about the fact that I worked hard, all day long, every day, for a whole summer to save up the money to buy for you the last gift that I brought to Bahrain, the tall and beautiful vintage brass lamp made from a World War II battle shell, carved with a lighthouse and a lady in flowing robes, with the three fluted, matte pink lamp shades at the top. The major said that he'd have it polished for you.

I wondered if you appreciated it for one moment, let alone the gift of my efforts to acquire it, ship it to London and then bring it to Bahrain for your military treasure collection, just like the WWI battle helmet that I brought you in a prior visit and the helmet from Vietnam in an even earlier visit. Of course, our gifting cultures are entirely different. We say "Thank you."

I've never had a new car and quit driving over 20 years ago because it's expensive to maintain a car and I wasn't driving much. I don't like traffic and Seattle is one big traffic jam. I laughed at fast cars in the film because it reminded me that you just throw cars away. Out went the E-type. Out went the red Thunderbird. Out went the navy blue Rolls with our names on the inside doors. Not having to drive is a gift to me, most of the time.

I've never owned a grand piano or a house to put one in. I remember talking with you about pianos more than once, about you buying one and bringing it to Bahrain, then gifting it to one of your sisters. I remember you saying that I'd have a grand piano some day, ah yes, and you'd build me a little villa, that you'd get for me what my heart desired. I had to give up my little piano with the move here in May because the management won't allow it. That's been very hard on me, perhaps worst of all the negative things associated with this place, because playing the piano and writing music has been my saving grace for a long, long time. My music is a gift even without the piano.

I don't even have a decent kitchen with the latest move from the rat-infested house to this cubbyhole apartment that would fit inside the reception room at Safriyya where we spent so much time together. I'm still dreaming up and inventing new soft, frosted cookies for my artisan collection, but now must do half the preparation in my dining/living room/office space rather than the teeny kitchen, but I don't care because at least there's an oven. 

So, there are gifts, things for which I'm grateful today, moments and imperfect people to treasure.

The First Marriage

You asked me every time we met if I've married again.

I did not. I never married anyone but you.

I love this photograph which you sent me along with a love letter after I was sent away from you (one of the times when I was sent away from you.) You didn't like the photo because you'd shaved off your mustache and felt that it made you look like a monkey with a cigarette in your mouth. Remember?

Chapter

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.

Tea and Chess

Oh, the irony. I just found this as I was packing curios into a box for the move out of this house. My daughter brought it home to me at Christmas time when she visited from London. Fortnum & Mason is just up the road a bit from where we lived for the first three plus years of her life, in a "grotty garret" as the Major said.

The grand chessboard. Remember how we used to play? My last move was providing cover for you.

Here's the closeup. Can you read it?

Stockholm Syndrome, A Twist

You know, Bill, (and you should definitely be reading this, double O-J) it was a mystery to me as to why you left in the bathroom of the "grotty garrett" where I lived in London, a white terry cloth bath mat (slightly frayed in the middle around the identifying Dorchester name, therefore not in likely use at the hotel), several small soaps favored by the Arab men who stay there and two in lovely cobalt blue plastic soap savers from the Stockholm Hilton.

It was the Stockholm Hilton Soap Diversion Syndrome.

And it worked, too.