“We’re going to Egypt!” said Mom.
She was an army brat who’d attended 22 schools worldwide before rocking 18. Her prince, my dad, was a Mississippi preacher man with a PhD and appointments for two to a university antiquities team excavating and translating a collection of ancient documents found deep in the Egyptian desert.
They were Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood.
Indy and Marion had been into the Egyptian sand many times. This trip included the kids.
They put furniture into storage, rented the house and placed bills on hold. They garaged the car, sold stuff.
I’d like to say I was thrilled. But I was 15: the inflight movie was boring. I couldn’t eat that; I was on a grapefruit diet. And oh, what about my hair! Did they sell my shampoo in Cairo?
The plane began its descent. “Look out the window,” said Marion.
Two strips of green flanked a wide blue ribbon centered on miles of sand. Off in the distance, three triangles of stone: the pyramids.
There were men in flowing robes, covered women, donkeys pulling carts in traffic – and buses so packed that people spilled out the windows and clung to the roofs.
Inside the airport, men squatted on the floor, children cried, women shouted. Marion dragged me through the din and into a jeep.
Our driver motored at warp speed – on the sidewalk, across the median, through lights – while faced backward to talk to Indy and Marion.
But outside, diamonds glittered off the Nile and a boat – a filuka – floated, sail raised: peaceful, quiet, serene.
I rode camels, drank sugary coffee and sweet hibiscus tea. I crawled inside Tut’s tomb, explored an ancient city and watched the sun rise from the top of the great pyramid.
I did not get fat. And my hair? Ponytail.
Years later, Indy and Marion arranged for me to visit a tiny Upper Egyptian village where a group of women took me deep into the bowels of their mud hut compound. Inside, I washed a young girl’s hair with Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo.
Teenage angst is not peculiar to American culture.
Recently, my husband took a job in a faraway Middle Eastern country.
“We’re going to Qatar!” I said.
Indy wielded his warm passport; Marion donned a pocket covered vest. My daughter rolled her eyes. “Do they sell my shampoo there?” she said.