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.