To follow up his first book of short stories Arabian Son, Tim Barger, the imp of Satan as his mother used to call him, has returned with more stories set in the almost mythical days of Dhahran in the fifties. A small, bare bones oil company town surrounded by miles of desert in every direction, it was home to about a two thousand Americans, maybe six hundreds families and several hundred children. Tim was one of them. These tales are about the barely supervised exploits of Tim and his friends as well as some of the colorful characters of the era: the pioneering Abqaiq housewife Martha, the driller Clark Randall, the stoic Gil Strader, and the legendary John Ames. Barger’s stories take you to places that few have even imagined. He offers a glimpse of the often unseen: the pure, but orchestrated chaos of the used car suq in Riyadh, the solemn quiet at the bottom of a 50 feet deep artesian well in Qatif, the rocky slopes of Jebel Shamaal or the splendor of Half Moon Bay at night with a crackling camp fire and a full moon rising. Careless can mean care free, “without a care in the world,” but it is mostly used to describe reckless decision making i.e. stupidity. Barger was both care free and prone to ill-conceived adventures in which the only possible upside was that he would survive to tell the tale. And he has.

Christmas in Khobar: More Stories

Humor & Entertainment

Barger, Tim

Goodwin, Ellen

Humor

Selwa Press

<p>Living in a house on 11th Street in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Tim Barger grew up in the 1950s thinking that blinding heat, humidity and howling dust-storms were normal. By seven he had already experienced several locust plagues and was looking forward to the next one. Arabian Son is a collection of stories about Barger and his friends’ misguided attempts to amuse themselves in an oil camp lean on amenities and devoid of movies and TV. Crawling through hedges frosted with DDT, climbing hundred-foot radio towers, spelunking through a subterranean maze of air conditioning vents, ten-year-olds, they made the most of the world they had. Neither they, nor their parents, had the vaguest idea that Aramco would soon become the anchor of the global petroleum economy. The boys riding their bikes off of rooftops into dense hedges only knew that they were laughing themselves silly. They could not have realized just how soon their Dhahran would recede into the rear-view mirror to vanish into progress.</p>

Arabian Son: 21 Stories

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

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