David and Lorin's Garden

Ex-pat life can be many things. Lots of interesting people are met from lots of different countries who are living here for lots of different reasons. You meet a lot of people who are here one year and then gone the next. It’s been my experience that you keep a small core group of friends who become your extended family and support group and you feel lucky to have them there for you. Phil and Enma, Steve and Leah and Hannah, David and Lorin—they are my family here. Birthdays, Christmas, Thursday evenings, among other events, are spent together. Laughing and drinking and eating and smoking and talking about what’s what.
A couple of weekends back I went up to visit David. Lorin was away in Canada for what I call the Festival of the Dead. It’s a Ukrainian Orthodox religious festival, okay. They live in a two-floor flat on the American University of Sharjah (AUS) campus in University City, Sharjah. I well and truly hate the drive up from Abu Dhabi. I always leave Sheikh Zayed Road at the Jebel Ali South exit and take Emirates Road, fighting the traffic up Emirates Road to Sharjah. It can be a dangerous drive, as most can be here in the UAE, but I’ve been driving here for a long time and I know the tricks. Timing is important. If I can get away from work a little early, then I can miss the rush hour traffic and just have to deal with the long line of huge cargo trucks, which by law are supposed to stay in the right lane. But, once I arrive at David and Lorin’s place at the AUS campus, it’s like being on holiday. I joke with them that the faculty at AUS, like Embassy employees and W., live in a bubble, and they do, but it’s a very pleasant bubble.
The spare bedroom is called “Jack’s room” and that’s where I dump my stuff and change out of my work clothes and then go down to have a quick bite of lunch with David, along with a couple of beers, and then return to my bedroom for a nap.
Hey, I love my afternoon nap. For one thing, I wake up at 5 a.m. every workday and when I get home from work I want a bit of sleep. I wake up from my nap about 5 p.m. and have the rest of the evening to run errands, work on the computer, watch TV, read, etc. Besides, when I first came here to the UAE, everyone napped in the afternoon. Nothing was open. The country basically shut down for the most part from about 1 – 5 p.m. That’s not the case now. The shopping malls and the business urge have changed all that. Anyway, after I wake up from my nap at David and Lorin’s, I wash my face, push down my hair with a little water and head down to the back garden for a cigarette and a jar of Starbuck’s mocha latte that I picked up at the little petrol station near campus.
David and Lorin will be moving to a different flat soon and I’ll lose that garden. I love their garden. I sit on the little covered patio and smoke and watch geckos and birds and just relax.
We have shared so many wonderful times in that garden. A few months back we returned from dinner in Dubai about midnight just as a storm was hitting. They followed me to the garden so I could smoke and we watched this amazing lightshow of jagged, Hollywood-perfect lightning hitting all around us in the outlying desert and the rain washing down everything. Lorin said she loved the smell of rain on dirt and that it reminded her of the village in Canada where she grew up and where her family had a farm. One night Lorin and I sat on the patio and watched a major wind storm wreak havoc with the fan-leaved palm trees which loom tall just outside the garden wall. It was beautiful.
We’ve gotten so drunk in that garden. Continuing on from dinner and sitting outside and drinking and talking. Talking about the past, the future, our jobs, our friends (the ones still here in the UAE and the ones who have moved on) and everything we’ve shared over our 15 year friendship. We’ve laughed until we’ve had tears running down our aging cheeks and sometimes we’ve just had tears running down those same cheeks because we also share our problems.
I’ve told Lorin that we need to do something special and memorable to give the flat and the garden a proper goodbye. I’m hoping that works out. I want to spend a little time alone in the garden one last time, having a few cigarettes, a few drinks, and remembering all the great memories that rest inside the walls of that garden and the decaying cells of my brain. If it works out, I’ll take pictures.

Just a couple things more.

Bushies Behaving Badly by Holly Allen, Christopher Beam, and Torie Bosch
http://www.slate.com/id/2165980/fr/nl/

This is a handy guide to all the various Bush administration scandals. It’s a truly amazing list of sleaze.

Also, I’ll post the link here and on the list to the side for the website of an Abu Dhabi-based artist. His paintings are truly original, refreshing and reflective. You can order directly from his website. If anyone based here in the UAE knows where he could have a bit of free exhibition space for a short time, I’m sure he would appreciate it. The website address is www.artspositive.com and its user friendly. Check out his paintings as well as his sculptures. He’s going to be famous one day and buying one of his paintings now will prove to be a good investment, I’m sure.