Grandpapa's Welcome

Tadjrish, Iran
January, 1971


My father arrived in Tehran on a cold winter night in January. Lygeia and I sat huddled in the dark car with aunty for what seemed like hours as we waited for him to emerge from the glass doors of the airport. My mother had disappeared through those doors leaving us the promise that she would return with him, and after months without him in Iran it seemed an impossible miracle that it could be true. When he finally appeared, weighed down with handbags and dragging two heavy suitcases, my mother at his side, the exhaustion of the late hour ran off me as if a light switch had been turned on in my mind. I squealed and I squirmed, bolting upright to reach for him in the front seat to wrap my arms around his neck. Before long, I nestled my head in to my mother’s lap in the back seat and listened to his voice tangle topsy turvy with the rumble of the car as we made our way back to my grandfather’s house.

At breakfast the next morning, my grandpapa had gained a formality that seemed odd and awkward. Instead of the cotton pajamas which he had always wore all day around the house, I found him eating his breakfast in a suit, with a crisp white shirt and shiny black shoes instead of his leather slippers. When my father emerged from the house, beaming and excited, Grandpapa rose and I watched him shake my father’s hand stiffly.

“Baba,” my father called him. “I am so pleased to finally meet you.” He pumped my Grandpapa’s arm vigorously and smiled. Grandpapa tipped his head forward, his eyes down, bowing slightly towards my father. “Ekhdiarderee,” was all he said, a slight smile on his lips. He laid his cane down on the ground and settled in to his chair, gesturing for my father to sit in the chair next to him.

I jumped in to my father’s arms as soon as he was free to catch me, and I remained planted in his familiar lap as he sat quietly at my grandfather’s side.

“Put your cheese in your bread, Daddy,” I explained. “and don’t forget the jam!” I erupted into giggles at the thought of him eating the dry bread with the cheese. “That’s sugar for tea, Daddy. Grandpapa puts sugar in his mouth. See?” We both watched as my grandfather drank down his warm tea and let the sugar dissolve in his mouth.


“Like this?” my father asked, and my Grandpapa smiled and nodded in agreement as my father placed the sugar cube from his saucer in his own mouth and reached for his glass of steaming tea.

The next week flew by quickly, pulling my father’s hand through the narrow streets, through the bustling bazaar and up the steep hill behind Grandpapa’s house to buy a snack, warm Pofak-namakee, like American cheese puffs. I suddenly had someone I could show around, someone who knew less about this place than me, and Lygeia and I enjoyed laughing at the way he pronounced all the new words we had learned, “sheer,” “ob,” and “madreseh.” Grandpapa seemed stiff in his suit, but he could not be convinced to change back in to his cotton pajamas, which he normally had only changed out of when he was planning to leave the heavy courtyard gate.

“Baba, really,” my mother would implore. “Do you think my husband cares whether you’re wearing a suit?”

“Hhmmf,” he would grunt and glare at her. He did not want it discussed.

It was about four weeks after my father arrived that Grandpapa’s suit began disappearing like a subtle strip tease in slow motion. First, the carefully shined shoes were replaced by the worn leather slippers that had been waiting patiently by the door and he returned to his shuffling walk and lost the clop of hard soles on the concrete patio.

Another week went by and my grandfather shed his suit coat and then after a few more days his tie, leaving them hanging over a chair, or laid out on his bed. After another week, his button-up shirt was replaced by his crème-colored cotton pajama top with the brown trim. Piece by piece my grandfather was restored to his normal self until two months after my father’s arrival he finally arrived at lunch, a springtime lunch under the blooming plum tree, without any sign of the formalities of the previous weeks. He settled himself at the head of the table, as if he had just rolled out of bed, resting his cane at his feet, and let out a tremendous fart which held a tone like a lengthy blow on a paper party favor. My grandfather was looking down at his food and his expression didn’t change.

“I’ve finally arrived!” my father exclaimed happily looking around the table and he, my mother and my uncle burst into hearty laughter. A sly smile crept on to my grandfather’s face and he peeked up through the long white hairs of his bushy eyebrows.

“That sound must be from a little mouse under the table,” said my uncle jokingly and I peeked down between my legs to try to catch a glimpse of it before it could scuttle away.

“Yes, a mouse,” my mother replied, smiling, and we all dug in to our rice and stew as if it was our first meal as a family reunited.

Recipe

This recipe is dedicated to Leila at http://persiankitchen.wordpress.com - Leila is tops in how she teaches us how to cook Persian food, so I know I'm not even trying to replicate her blog postings. But, this is a callout to her about my favorite persian stew Ghormeh Sabzi. If you read my posting "Watching over me" this stew was what I ate on that first day of school. The smell is of dried lime and is exquisite.

Cooking a traditional Persian stew:

Koresh-e Ghormeh-Sabzi

The unique ingredient is dried lime, which can be found at any local Middle Eastern grocery store like those found around San Pablo Avenue and University in my town of Berkeley.

1. Saute onion, add garlic and meat of your choice (normally this is lamb, beef or chicken cut in very small stewing pieces). Saute until golden brown. Add salt, pepper, 1 tsp Tumeric, 4 whole dried limes pierced with a fork, and 1/2 tsp saffron dissolved in a tablespoon of hot water.

2. Pour in 4 1/2 cups of water and and 3/4 cup cooked or canned kidney beans. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cover, simmering for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Meanwhile (this is the hard part) fry in 3 tablespoons of oil the following, all finely chopped:

4 cups parsley

1 cup leeks, scallions or chives

1 cup fresh coriander

1 cup fresh fenugreek

If you work and don't have the time to find, buy and chop all these hard-to-find vegetables, visit that same Middle Eastern market and check their freezer section for pre-chopped, even pre-fried vegetables for Ghormeh-Sabzi. Yes, Iranians are too busy to always do this fresh, so don't let step 3 stop you from making this really great stew.

4. Add the sauteed vegetables to the pot of sauteed meat, and add 4 tablespoons of fresh squeezed lime juice. Cover and simmer the stew for 30-40 minutes, stirring occasionally. When the aroma of the vegetables begins to rise from the pot, you know it's done.

Serve with long-grained or basmati rice. Yum!!

My crockpot adaptation:
Do step one the night before - and refridgerate overnight.
In the morning, add in the pre-fried (now thawed) vegetables, water, and kidney beans. Put crock pot on low for 8 hours.
When you get home from work you've got a wonderful persian stew!!

The Early Morning Gift

Tadjrish, Iran
Fall 1970

When I woke, the house was silent and still shedding its darkness with milky early morning shadows. I watched them through the slats of my crib with half-opened eyes. The noises from the night before, the rhythmic bark of the kitchen door as it swung like a heavy wooden pendulum when anyone pushed their way through, and my mother’s voice, piercing, all had fallen away in the night and in a moment’s time it seemed had turned in to this silent morning. I rolled over, tucking my knees underneath me, and sat up, rubbing my eyes with balled fists to clear them, smelling the moistness of my thumb which I had been sucking most of the night. The small rolling hillside of my sister’s back did not move in the next bed.

Since arriving in Iran we had been spending most of our days in Tadjrish in this big stone house and courtyard within the safety of the tall stone walls that embraced all that had now become familiar. The pond where my grandmother rinsed her pots, the folding table where Grandpapa played backgammon with my mother, the small garden plot that Grandmama tended, the slender trunks of fruit trees, these were the resting places, and the passages between them were my playground, my race track and my dance floor. No one seemed to know how to traverse the space like I could and I found joy in discovering its hiding places, its subtle changes with each passing day.

I heard the sound of steam escaping from the kitchen teapot and knew that meant Grandpapa would be waiting for his breakfast in his usual place. The springs under my mattress creaked under my weight as I stood and lifted my leg and rolled over the crib wall, dropping to the floor. At the window I could peer over the sill to spy him sitting patiently with his hands resting on his cane, his hair a bushel of whiteness, his eyes fixed on some far away spot on the garden wall. There was an empty chair next to him. The breakfast had not yet arrived.

When I arrived at his side with a polyester robe over my shoulders and a pair of plastic slippers on my feet, he turned to me and smiled with his eyes, patting the empty chair next to him. I settled into the chair and searched for the spot on the garden wall that had caught his attention and joined him in staring at it. I glanced up to take in the colorful umbrella of branches and brittle leaves that autumn had brought and watched them vibrate in the breeze. I wondered what he would have said to me if I could have understood him. I wondered how long we would sit before Grandpapa’s breakfast would arrive. He sat quietly, patiently and the deep lines on his face were a maze of cracks that made him seem like a statue, but one made of soft warmth and not the coldness of stone.

It took two trips to the kitchen to bring the spread of food out to him – a small shapely glass of steaming auburn tea with two white cubes of sugar balanced on a glass saucer, a basket of warm flatbread dusty with flour and tiny jars of dark jams in reds and purples. Some phrases were exchanged between my grandparents, and the second tray brought small cubes of white cheese in a bowl. I wanted to reach out for a square of cheese, to feel its wetness between my fingers, and the saltiness on my tongue, but instead I waited. I’d joined him already enough times to understand that he would share with me.

Grandpapa placed a square of flat bread in his palm and a square of the white salty cheese in its center. A spoonful of cherry preserve was dripped on top from a silver spoon coated with its sticky sauce. He rolled the bread closed and handed it to me with a napkin under it. I gladly took it from him, quickly letting the napkin fall to the ground as I sank my teeth into the sticky mixture of sweet and salty wetness and dry bread. When I was through I licked my fingers clean.

In the tea was a miniature metal spoon and I watched next as Grandpapa placed a white cube of sugar in his cheek and removed the spoon before he brought the glass to his lips to drink. Threads of dark tea leaves floated in the tea which shone red as I watched him drink it down in one smooth gesture, and place the glass back on its saucer. When he reached out for another slice of bread my brows went up in earnest.

Did you forget? My eyes asked, eyeing the last cube of sugar that remained on his saucer. Will today be the day that you forget? But he did not forget, and before long I had the cube on my tongue, dissolving it slowly to fill my mouth with sugar juice. The last taste of sugar to leave my mouth marked the end of breakfast, and the tray was returned and the jars and basket were cleared before the sun could peak over the courtyard walls. The city woke around us with the sounds of cars and peddlers unseen, and our courtyard filled with the busyness of the day. My grandfather and I would begin again the next morning, and once again I would leave the warmth of my bed to be the recipient of his early morning gift.

Poetry

At times it returns,

in the motionless calm of the day, that memory

of living immersed, absorbed, in the stunned light.

Excerpt from "The Night" by Cesare Pavese

The leaving

Oakland, California

1970

Roshan had not been back to Iran for 8 years when my father’s teaching job offered him a sabbatical year, and it was decided we all would go to live with my grandparents in Tadjrish, just outside of Tehran, Iran. My mother would be returning to her family home in Iran a married woman again, married to an American no less. Our big white house on the hill in Montclair, with the addition my father had built for my nursery, it would have to be sold. We would be gone a year, so there was no sense leaving it to stand empty and waiting. We would have to start over when we returned.

Roshan was an alluring symbol of a wider world that none of us had ever known. Even my father, already 47 years old, had never traveled as a tourist before. His only time out of the country had been as a soldier in Iwo Jima during World War II, and he coveted old photos of himself, youthful, and bare-chested with a rifle in his hand, as if he’d been in swim trunks on a beach in Bali. He wanted nothing more than to follow this dark-haired Persian girl around the world, this sad-faced mother and wife that longed to be a daughter and sister again if even for a short time.

My half-sister Lygeia was seven years old that year, a tall child that had weathered too many emotional storms already for one so young. She’d been the motherless small child in my father’s life when he met Roshan, and became a pawn in the emotional powerplay that resulted in their marriage and my birth. By the time I emerged as the fourth member of this new family, Sissy, as I called her, had already become guarded, for the adults in her life had proven to be unpredictable, careless. The world shifted constantly under her feet. The trust and security that I took for granted were not hers to hold. But at three I recognized none of this. I adored her. For me, the sun rose and set on her face, and as long as I could be near her all would be well.

A whirlwind of preparations swept us all up in haste, matching dresses for my sister and I to be sewn, suitcases to fill, gifts to be bought. As a tiny, moon-faced three-year-old, my concept of travel was long, boring bouts in the back seat of my father’s Mustang. Life was simple, predictable: long climbs up the winding stone staircase to our house, trips to the supermarket, and barefoot mornings at nursery school. My world was small and I moved confidently in it. I thought it could never change.

My mother, my sister and I left for Iran first, in the fall of 1970, with the understanding that my father would follow after the house and car were sold and he had completed the fall semester’s classes. That we left behind the only home I had ever known, our metal swingset surrounded by towering pine trees, that we left behind our dog, my sister’s school, my father’s students, none of this mattered – we were all swept up by mother’s sheer enthusiasm: the wild fire in her eyes. But while the leaving seemed to be about her, what we would find once we were in Iran was unique to each of us, and wholly personal. My father and my sister longed for context, the smells and tastes of this culture that set my mother apart from others around us. I was only along for the ride. But it was in Iran that my senses were awakened and my memory was born. I was too young to understand that a chapter of my life was ending and that I would forever categorize events in my life as “before” or “after” our year in Iran.

Roshan means "light"

Oakland, California

1964

This story has been told to me many times, and as I tell it I know that the facts have faded into fable. This is my version as I’ve come to know it.

This (right) is a picture of my mother, Roshan, very soon after she immigrated from Iran. It was 1964 and she was 26 years old. She is standing near Lake Merritt in Oakland and it is around the time that she met my father.

She’d been married already once before, in an arranged marriage in Iran that ended violently. She’d been forced to flee “all black and blue” and abandoned her 3 year old son with his father in Iran. My grandmother, the progressive woman that she was, made sure that Roshan had the option of divorce included in her marriage contract. My mother took that option and escaped.

She arrived in the U.S. without speaking a word of English, to live with her eldest brother who had immigrated a few years before. She was despairing over the loss of her child, vulnerable, and in need of an anchor. My father, 20 years her senior, was breathtaken by her exotic beauty and became that anchor as he wooed her with poetry written on tiny scrolls tied with dried flowers. A single father, he offered her his daughter to raise, he promised her stability, a home, a family. She had few options and sought the refuge of marriage.

They married in 1966.

Poetry

I will plant my hands in the garden
I will grow
I know I know I know
and in the hollow of my ink-stained fingers
swallows will lay their eggs

Excerpt from "Another Birth" by Farough Farrokhzad (1964)

The Trunk - parts one and two

Oakland, California
Fall 1974

My memories of Iran had already faded by the time I was seven years old so when the trunk arrived one fall day in October I was awestruck. It arrived on our doorstep like a long forgotten relative, encased in metal and lacquered wood, shredded rope wrapped around its belly and our address plastered to its top in my father’s careful script. The heavy iron handles lay flat along its sides like tiny round arms, worn and smooth in my hand. This was the lost trunk that my parents had sent ahead before our return. They had considered it lost, gone forever, and yet here it stood after having had travels of its own.

It must have taken both my parents to lift that trunk. I imagined them holding those heavy handles, surprised by the weight of them, and then a noisy heave as they brought the trunk over the threshold. They would have carried it slowly through the dark hallway and down the carpeted stairs to our rumpus room, calling out to each other when they turned the corners. But I wasn’t there to see any of that. It was already enthroned in the deep shag of our rumpus room floor by the time I got home from school, and it lay in waiting to be opened, mysterious and silent. It’s silence and weight did not whisper, but ached with a tired groan, finally still and finally home.

My father’s massive canvases stood leaning against one wall, their colorful geometric faces hidden and only the blond wood frames and frayed canvas edges exposed. The black upright piano with its bench settled underneath it stood ignored challenging the old zenith TV on its rolling cart as if it stood a chance to claim my attention. Instead, both sat waiting for me to awaken them from sleep. But that trunk, surrounded by our big corduroy pillows, that was new – unexpected, uninvited even.

Iran had become an “other”, foreign, strange, the half of me that was oddly-colored and smelled of celery stew and rose water; the half of me that I tried to ignore. My year there when I was three and four was like a closed chapter of one of my father’s library books – black and white pictures of artifacts and statues, flashes of memory, paper schoolbooks and pots of steaming rice; the bright orange of a glass of fresh carrot juice. Iran was the sound of my mother’s shouts in to our kitchen princess phone on New Years Day; her voice desperately reaching, searching, through the phone, her loud voice, shouting through smiles and tears, in the language that was familiar yet incomprehensible to me now. Iran was the phone inevitably handed to me to hear a tinny distant voice calling my name in answer to my small hello. The awkward silence when I didn’t know what else to say.

And when this trunk was finally opened it brought forth all these things in a flood that made me breathless, even without words. Its heavy rope was cut with our kitchen knife and fell away to expose the heavy padlock that had been hidden underneath. Within minutes my father produced the small key and the top was lifted. Stale air mixed with the smell of sweet moth balls lingered in my nose as I stretched my neck to peer inside. Its dark gut was still and full. My mother, chatty, exuberant, welcomed each item from its depth as she gingerly removed them– small folded rugs with bright patterns, tiny sheep skin hats that I could hardly believe I had ever worn, a tin samovar with small matching tea cups, clothes, wraps, shawls and stiff beaded shoes of gaudy colors. I stood away and poked at these things with outstretched fingers. Everything was scratchy against my skin and the old, weighted smell was so strong it assaulted me and filled the room, seeping around corners and in to the next rooms. I gladly disappeared into the kitchen to make her a cup of strong black tea and leave her with these smelly and unexpected relatives.

When my mother was satisfied that she had unfolded each item, caressed each with nostalgia and longing and then refolded them with the same creases, she began returning them back to their waiting vault. The trunk which witnessed this whole scene was eventually closed with a slam and my mother sprang up from her squat with a light step, chatty– both of my parents seemed to welcome this trunk home. As for me, I was wash with relief when it was all over: the foreigness of these things only served to remind me of my own unexplainable foreigness. The trunk finally took its rightful place amongst the old boxes in our garage and I felt more at ease with its place there, hidden and unseen.