The best thing I've ever done with this blog

For people who associate this blog mainly with thinking more about words, it may be a bit surprising to learn what I think is far and away the best thing I've done here. And it really has nothing to do with what I wrote, but the incredible number of great comments it generated. Way back in March of 2011, I wrote a post about Wheelus Air Base in Libya, where my parents met and married. This had something to do with the fact that my mom had died a few months before, and that Libya was currently undergoing a revolution. It was also triggered by a strange encounter I had in the bookstore. Anyway, you can read about it HERE.


What I didn't anticipate was the surprising number of blog commenters who had in some way come in contact with the place in that era or shortly afterwards. Most of them were people who had been kids on the base, but it's actually a kind of varied crowd. And almost every one of them took the time to share their experience of being there. I have tried to steer them to a larger website called Bahrain DC, which has much more material and photos and where they might be more likely to find long lost friends, but leaving that aside, I am incredibly grateful that they have left their memories on this blog.


Recently, I had an interesting comment from Terence Sharkey, who had been in Libya in 1955 as a young actor and ended up on the base during that time. If you have access to Amazon Prime, you can watch the movie he was in HERE. Mr. Sharkey plays Daoud Holland.

I'd been meaning to post about all this for awhile now, but today one of the commenters who has popped in their from time to time posted this upbeat music video from Pharrell Williams, called We Are Happy in Tripoli. As "circuitmouse" points out on his blog, all we ever hear about Libya is the bad news these days, and yet, of course, people go on and live their normal lives there as always.