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Patricia J.
Geister

Life After Morocco

Touching bases with a pal
from those Morocco days

By PATRICIA J. GEISTER
of TheColumnists.com

Life just handed me a bouquet of good memories. I found a website called Moroccan Reunion Association, a group for people who lived, worked and served in Morocco during their tenure in or with the Air Force. My grandson Ian can take the credit. He needed data for his homework, which led me to this wonderful discovery.

Tom Bennett (now a retired Colonel, or a full bull, as he calls himself) is the president of this association. I remember him as a young captain--handsome, ramrod-straight, by-the-book, rules-are-rules, serious career officer. Tom was all business during duty hours, but let the sun get over the yardarm, and he could laugh with the best of us.

He and I had a very limited social contact, but we did smile and speak when we met outside the office. One thing stands out in my mind, and I'll bet he doesn't remember because it was so insignificant. I had gone alone to the base movie house to see Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho." When I came out with the rest of the crowd, I was pretty rattled. Tom saw me and offered me a ride. He was all charged up and laughing about the movie, while I was weak from short-lived fear. All he could do was laugh at me, all the way to the Officers Club. I thanked him for the ride and he drove away.

Now, 40 years and a lifetime later, we're both happily married to different spouses, living on opposite sides of the United States. Our happy memories of being (considered) rich Americans in a foreign country now are being shared via the Internet. Tom has told me things about our good friends and colleagues that I wouldn't ever have known. He's an actor on stage and screen. I was surprised to see that he's sporting a genuine full beard, playing Dickensian characters--looking good as Robin Hood, a Union army officer or whatever the script calls for.

Finding that website was truly an act of fate. Tom has given me links to our good friends and colleagues. I'm thoroughly enjoying their contact.

I'd like to share with you what I've sent him. He asked me to "confess" all my life and times since we left Morocco. No, not gonna do it. Notice that I'm not telling him about my failed bid for the Senate. Nor have I expounded about how my modesty kept me from accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace and the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Of course, none of these things happened. My contact with government is at the ballot box and I only write (sometimes) about actors and other celebrities.

Tom,

Aren't grandchildren wonderful? Gotcha beat there, though. I'm a great grandmother. Hannah, the gg-child, is a three year old sweet little menace. Donald, my oldest grandson, is finishing his Master's Degree in TV and journalism and plans to make a career in investigative journalism. Ian, my youngest grandson, is quite the little character. (Photo taken during his recent 11th birthday party attached.)

Ian clowns it up
for Grandma's camera
on his 11th birthday

Here's more of my family:

From left, in back: Son Tom, son Larry and St. Rupert, the husband; from left, in front: Tom's wife, Denise; Larry's wife, Brandi,
and grandson Ian.

So, what have I done over the past 40 wonderful years? Well, I've been living in Washington State. First I was at Larson AFB outside of Moses Lake. When Leigh (the one I married in Morocco) got out of the Air Force, we moved here to Seattle, where I've been living in the same house ever since. We parted company in 1978. In October, 1986, I met Rupert. He proposed to me in our first four hours together. We got married four months later on Valentine's Day 1987 and are now living happily ever after.

I gave 22 years of my working life to Uncle Sam between jobs with the Army Corps of Engineers, the Air Force, and finally the Department of the Interior. Midlife crisis hit me on March 17, 1978, when the judge signed my divorce decree. I left civil service, took a job with Ma Bell and started making real money. Know what? Money's nice, but I missed my buddies. I took an early retirement in 1989 and have been writing up a storm ever since.

The first thing my writing did for me was set me up in business as the world's first mail and phone order personal ad writer. Really. A personal ad was how I met Rupert. USA Today did a nice article on me and my venture. That hit the streets on Valentine's Day 1989, our second wedding anniversary. I spent the next six years doing radio and TV interviews, writing ads, being a matchmaker, and having a ball. For five of those years my work was published at least once a day somewhere in the world, and I got paid. My clients were from the U.S., parts of Asia, Europe, Australia, India, and a few Alaska commercial fishermen. Along came the Internet, chat rooms, online dating services, and I drifted into a retirement of sorts.

I got the idea to write a book about my mother and the women in our family. Now it's published under the title "Say Good Night to the Moon." The time frame stretched over nearly 10 years because Mom, Dad, Rupert's dad, and my duty to keep the surgeons in Seattle in business, slowed me down. I don't know if you've had any experience being a caregiver to your parents, but I can tell you, you drop everything else when they need you. Mom got to read all but the last three chapters of my book prior to her death, thank goodness. She liked it so much she agreed not to sue me. You can check out my website, www.wordsmithlady.com, to read a little of it.

Life is good, Tom. I've had a lot of frustrating adventures in my personal life, but we all do. Sometimes fate plays tricks on us before we get what we need. My time in Morocco led me to Leigh, who brought me to Washington. We were given custody of his children from another marriage. That was how I became a mother and eventually a grandmother. I had a sometimes lonely, sometimes interesting single life before Rupert. He's a wonderful, loving, perfect husband for me. Had I not chosen Morocco over Greenland I wouldn't be in Seattle. If I hadn't come to Seattle, well, I have no idea, but it gave me the happiest of all worlds.

Even though I'm battling arthritis and spinal stenosis and now walk with a cane (big deal), we have managed to see and enjoy a lot of this planet. I introduced Rupert to cruise ship travel with a weekend between Los Angeles and Ensenada, Mexico. He fell in love with the sounds and sights of the ship. That's the influence of his former life on submarines and then shipbuilding for the Navy. Since then we've been to the Bahamas, parts of the Mediterranean, trips to Italy, more of Mexico, off to Alaska, two weeks in Rome, and this winter we'll visit the Maya Indian ruins on the Yucatan Peninsula. Our travel agent loves us.

You see, there is life after Morocco.

Pat

Stepping back into my own history is giving me a lot of laughs and attacks of nostalgia. For instance, today I talked to Major Johnson (now retired, of course), who was my last boss in Morocco. We reminisced about the lion that was found roaming on the aircraft runway. Nobody ever expected to see a big cat on the loose in North Africa. Names came up that we hadn't thought about in all these decades.

I've found my own time machine and it's operating at top speed.

©2004 by Patricia J. Geister. The drawing is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. The photos are by the author, all rights reserved.

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