They Had Cable, Intercoms, and Glass Tables

I loved going over to Granny and Boompa’s house as a kid.
Especially for weekend overnights.

They had cable TV.
We didn’t have cable TV at home.
Mom wouldn’t get it.
“Her shows didn’t need cable TV,” she once said.

But Granny and Boompa had it.
They had HBO.

I would stay up all night watching TV when I was there.
Okay—I mean until around 10 or 11, when I’d just pass out.
But to a five-year-old, that’s basically all night.

They also had a huge house, with dozens of rooms,
and a swimming pool in the back.
Boompa would always say it was an Olympic-size pool.
I didn’t really know what that meant.

Boompa had worked in the oil industry in the 60s and 70s. I still had a Fouad-Abdul coffee mug well into my early 20s. He had helped them put the deal together to sell oil to the U.S, and helped create a new company for them. The Arabian-American Oil Company.

Their house was decorated from his and Grannies travels. I remember there was an Ivory elephant tusk carving, and so many curious from their travels through Arabia and Asia. There was this wooden table with a glass top was my favorite. It had these four triangular stools that tucked under it, and under the glass top was this most intricate carving of a temple and bridges and a nature scene.

One year, my uncle Frank told me they hid my birthday gift
under the cobblestone walkway around the pool.
I spent hours looking for the opening.
Surely, if this was true, there was a seam that would give it away.

Turned out, that was just a lie.

There were also intercoms throughout the house, and I would play with them—pressing buttons, talking through them,
pretending to run secret missions or make announcements.

One afternoon, I was kneeling on a glass display table while playing with one of the intercoms. It had this red velvet interior and was locked, the top would swing open when unlocked. Boompa kept a small collection of The glass shattered beneath me.

A massive shard, three or four inches long, lodged deep into the inside of my left knee.

No one took me to the doctor.

Boompa pulled the glass out,
put glue into the open wound to stop the bleeding, and taped it closed. He told me that’s how they did it when he was a Marine, and that it would toughen me up and turn me into a man.

That was it.

I still have the scar.