Ellen Goodwin

Christmas in Khobar Ellen Goodwin

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.