To be honest, a few things here make me unhappy, such as the weather, and the fact that I have had a bloody nose for the past week, but let’s stay positive, shall we?

 

1. MY BOOKS. My books are all in boxes in my parents’ front hall, acting as extra insulation until the renovation is done. I opened each one, as I do every time I visit, and fingered each and every Modern Library dustjacket. They have a little more foxing than I remembered but no mold. My other books (the dictionary I won in tenth grade for being my school’s top English student; the Harry Potter books I collected for Henry; my old Three Investigators mysteries; my read-to-pieces copy of Dress for Success) are all fine. Oh for a bookshelf; they look so forlorn in their boxes.

 

2. MY DAD’S COOKING. My father, expert cook, has been making us supper for the past two weeks and we are all getting fat off his soups and biscuits and salmon burgers and fried tortillas. Also, he serves wine with his meals. Did you catch that? WINE, the kind with alcohol in it. One or two glasses of a nice Sonoma red, and the whole cold-day-bloody-nose thing gets magically better.

 

3. THE POST OFFICE. I don’t know if I have ever complained about it here on the Box, but the PO I use in Dubai is an extremely crazy place. For example, the last time I was there, the man in front of me has an issue with the clerk, so he took off his shoe and threw it at the clerk. Also, they will not frank your package; they will only sell you stamps, and the largest denomination is five dirhams, so if you’ve ever gotten a package from me with a hundred personally licked falcon stamps and wondered if I have some kind of a fetish for stamp glue, the answer is no, I am a victim of outdated technology. So, anyway, using the post office here is a luxury experience. There is no shoe-throwing allowed, and you can get a little Priority Mail sticker without any licking at all. The price of a stamp seems to have doubled in the time I’ve been gone, but I am sure the extra money is being well spent.

 

4. CHEAP BOOKS. I am not going to make any lists of all the secondhand books I have invested in over the past few weeks, but only because I don’t have that kind of bandwidth or typing skills. Highlights include Modern Library editions of Pale Horse, Pale Rider and Best American Humorous Short Stories ($3 each); I also splurged on a brand-new copy of What People Wore When ($29) because the book I really needed for research purposes, Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales – the early, darker versions of the stories – was $1. $1! Oh, America. You had me at “Sale Books Upstairs”.

 

5. FRIENDLINESS. In all the other places I’ve visited, people regard Americans as gun-mad tasteless hedonists. Having lived here most of my life, I can kind of see their point, but I must also assert that most Americans are, basically, nice people. After two years of being stared at but not spoken to, it is kind of a relief to get “What a cute baby!” or “Are ya lost? Where ya headed?” A few days ago I went to the dentist and listened to the hygienist talk about motherhood for an hour while she cleaned my teeth. It is such a pleasant novelty to be around people who look and talk just like me, and who can be counted on to smile when they say, “You gotta bloody nose there. Kleenex?”.