The theme of my 7th birthday party was Superman. The icing on my cake was red, white, blue and yellow. A dozen kids played games, ate spaghetti and wore cone hats with those elastic straps that fit under your chin. The party started at 1pm.
About an hour into the festivities two men came to the house and asked to speak with my father. My mother showed them inside. Ten minutes later, as I was trying to pin a plastic tail on a cardboard donkey, the men escorted my father out of the house, into a car and drove away.
When Libyan security services arrested your husband they didn't tell you the reason. They didn't need a reason. To her credit my mother continued hosting the party and I never knew about what really went on that afternoon until many years later.
People didn't always return from their weekend sojourns with the police. This had lately become a problem. Rumors were beginning to spread that the government was tightening its grip on those who they deemed too high profile. Businessmen mostly, like my father. Other people we knew had been arrested but no one we knew personally had failed to come home. But again, there were rumors...
And then two days later without notice he walked through the front door. He carried his jacket over his arm as if he'd just walked off a plane. They'd asked him a few questions. Fifteen or twenty minutes worth of actual interrogation over the course of 48 hours. My parents decided that it was time to leave for good. Three months later we boarded a plane for London and never came back.
"Does your dad know Ghaddafi?" That question. Always the same question from kids who didn't know better. They never asked about the country or the people or its history. They just wanted to know if my father knew the Colonel. This was the 1980's when Libya was terra firma non grata.
"No," I'd reply. "Does your dad know President Reagan?"
In the 1980's, Libya became a joke and a curse. The Libyan passport was about as sought after as traveling papers from Narnia.
After being away for 23 years I returned in July 2003. It was like walking around inside of a memory. Everything was smaller and shorter than I'd remembered. But little else had changed. Even the poster of the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders still hung on the wall of the den. The pool where I'd learned to swim, and my brother nearly drowned, was empty. Small piles of sand filled the corners.
Were it not for the invasion of Iraq I might still be wondering what Libya was like. Ghaddafi watched the tanks roll into Baghdad on CNN like the rest of us and figured that it was time to come in from the cold.
The lives of most Libyans have not changed much since the country was welcomed back to the world stage. Things will change there slowly. Slowly in this case refers directly to the moods, whims and decisions of one man.
Who thought it would ever change? Colonel Ghaddafi walking beside Sarkozy is a sight I doubt my father ever thought he'd live to see. But there they were last week, all smiles and handshakes like the old friends they aren't.
The future leaders of the country are sitting around a table tonight drinking Scotch, eating Pringles and listening to Lionel Ritchie, Madonna and George Michael. They are cocky and heavily cologned. They drive Mercedes and BMWs. All of them are in their late - thirties but seem half that. The future of Libya, or at least as much as Ghaddafi will allow them, is theirs.
They are the future of a country that just discovered it has one.