Maybe this picture explains something

This photograph was probably taken Christmas 1985, a couple of months after I had returned from Yemen.  I remember the caftan because I had made it myself.  I was staying at my parents' house in Orchard Mesa, Colorado, and working part time at an abortion clinic in Grand Junction.  I was just treading water, waiting for Halis to get a visa to come to the U.S.

I am holding the dog, Toni.  The dog is looking at my mother, and my father is looking at the dog.  I don't know who my sister, mother and I are smiling at.  I don't remember who took the picture.

I'm not sure why I'm wearing so much make up that morning.  It was the eighties and my eyes were always glammed up.  No bra, but big earrings and plenty of Revlon. 

As in most family photographs, we're not as happy as we look -- at least, I'm not.  It was a rather miserable period in my relationship with my father.  The very sight of me seemed to raise his blood pressure.  I, on the other hand, was 30 years old and gradually becoming my own person and less inclined to kowtow.  This resulted in a few nasty skirmishes.  I knew I should move out of the duplex attached to my parents', where I was living gratis, but I didn't want to commit to a real job or a real apartment because I knew that any week Halis would be coming, and he was going to determine the course of my immediate future.

My father hinted darkly that I was making a mistake, that Halis (and probably no man) would ever marry me.  He even suggested I might reconsider my decision to quit the Middle East.  As it turned out, he was right on the former point.

A couple of months later Halis did receive admittance to the Ph.D. program at Lousiana State, and I flew down to Baton Rouge to join him.  I never saw my father again, as he died of a heart attack the following year.  We had spoken once in the interim year on the phone, when he chastised me for spending too much money on a used Toyota.  He was right about that, too.