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Showing posts from March, 2020

#3: The Boy Who Took Out His Eye

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#3, Tripoli, Libya We lived just outside Wheelus Airforce base in the '50s.  That's me on the back of the camel holding onto my big brother, Russell, for dear life. An expanded form of this story was published in the South Bay Reader in Torrance,  California almost thirty years ago when it won an Honorable Mention in a teeny, weeny writing contest. The Boy Who Took Out His Eye We lived in Tripoli when I was five years old, just outside Wheelus Air Force Base in Libya. We weren't military, we weren't even American but my father, formerly with British Intelligence had been hired to infiltrate the PX as a manager and investigate the cause of the store's outstanding financial losses. My dad turned out to be a great manager, in fact, he was responsible for bringing the hula hoop to North Africa, holding a big promotional party with hula hoop demonstrations, clowns, balloons, and lemonade in the parking lot. And he found the embezzler too, a good fri