Last month my wife and I visited Wadi Rum in southern Jordan. It’s a famous desert, with majestic scenery, including a mountain feature called T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (below). The arrangement is that you come to a small settlement at the edge of the desert and hire an outfitters to take you into the desert in 4X4s and bring you round to all the sights, then put you up in tents. 
One of the sights is a siq, or channel, between two mountains, with ancient petroglyphs on the walls (including the one at the top of this post).
The Toyota deposited us, our lazy driver didn’t stir from the wheel, and a boy of about 11 came out of the shadows and ran barefoot ahead of us across the hot sand toward the siq.
I don’t like aggressive guides so I ignored his pitch, but my wife fell in with him. I went ahead, up and down the tortuous siq, the rock polished by thousands of visitors, but I could hear the kid and my wife chattering. My wife falls for some people; and she can be charming. Later, when it became an issue, she said that she loved the kid because he loved the place he lived in, he was energetic and enterprising, and he was knowledgeable.
He even got out a flashlight to point out some of the more obscure pictographs. “This is snake,” I heard him saying, to her oohs and ahs. “Be careful!” I heard her call out as he showed off, scaling a steep chute of stone. He grinned as he jumped down into the sand.
Another Toyota had come and I befriended a Canadian couple on vacation from Dubai, and then we were leaving, and my wife called out to me from a bush. “Phil do you have 3 dinars [$4.50]?”
The kid crouched over an array of cheap souvenirs. My wife was buying a couple of bags of tea.
I brought the money over, and my wife said, “This is my husband.”
The kid said, “He is a lucky duck of a man.”
My wife laughed.
The phrase has echoed for weeks. When I complain about the shopping– lucky duck. When I complain about having to email her files from her computer that she forgot to take with her, lucky duck. The clay pots must come inside now… lucky duck. When I complain about anything at all, the Bedouin boy sides with my wife. I know that the unexamined life is not worth living; so is this who I am– a lucky duck of a man, now and forever?
