valley then.
My generous surgeon father’s patients from near and far bear gifts of gratitude. Live turkeys we kept in our winter-emptied pool in the white house from the peasant patients, and Beluga caviar by the tin cans from the affluent.
A train ride to vacation at the Caspian Sea in the northern, subtropical region of Iran with the same families, physician colleagues of my father. It seemed as if we had taken over all the cars, a feast of parents standing, holding on to poles and children underfoot, weaving between pants and skirts, the anticipation of sun, sand, and beach in every cell of our bodies. Pickled garlic, mooseer, served with fresh fish only makes sense in that climate.
Lying on my stomach on the car’s backseat from a first-degree sunburn during the drive home through windy, mountainous roads connecting the Caspian Sea to Tehran.
Back home after the walks in the moist woods of the north, an itch at the base of my neck just inside my hairline. A tick fattens there—not of the Lyme variety. A doctor at my father’s clinic pops it off with pincers.
Hiking the mountains surrounding Tehran. My father so comfortable on those slopes. Stopping to breakfast on wooden structures built atop brawling streams flowing down the slopes. We sit at the wooden banquettes to have fried eggs, nimroo, tea, fresh-baked bread and farmer’s or feta cheese, and little bags of cheese puffs for the kids, inhaling that early morning mountain air. The breakfast everyone still tastes. There’s a feeling of freedom, endless possibility. We are in a film of entirely different people captured in silent and scratchy black-and-white celluloid. I was born with my father’s long legs. We are mountain goats, he and I, hiking the steep foothills of the Alborz mountain range north of Tehran, capped by the mighty Damavand peak.
Ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution was declared “victorious,” and one year of chaos had ensued as the Ayatollah Khomeini was digging his claws into government, schools had been gender-segregated, and hejab, women covering their heads and bodies, made mandatory. It was easy to hide one’s mouth discreetly holding the tail end of a scarf over it. I had just returned from the United States, where my father had sent my mother, brother, and me to take refuge while the bloody uprising was taking its course. I re-enrolled in the same school where I had spent my beloved elementary years, Ettefagh, the Jewish school across the street from Tehran University.
There, while in junior high, when a teacher was absent, as class monitor I corralled a classroom of sixty girls sitting by the threes in rows and columns of wooden benches like lines in an I Ching hexagram. We carved so many names into them. I took my stage at the blackboard and entertained with ad hoc performances of making faces, putting on voices, and any other shenanigan or skit that came to body. I could keep the class in stitches for the hour-long period. Which vice principal could object? No unruliness, no strays running down the hall.
Later, at another school, from my back-row bench I orchestrated a class of fifty high school girls. Their periodic mooing out of unmoving mouths drove the teacher to tears. Incapable of taking control of her classroom, she pulled me out of class, being that I was the straight-A class monitor, and implored that I find the ringleader.
I also mobilized the spitting of orange-peel pellets onto the blackboard. The tip of Bic pens that had been hollowed of their ink cartridges were punched into orange peel, pellets were lodged in and fired at the blackboard with a swift blow into the other end of the casing when the teacher was chalking the board.
On summer afternoons that stretched for eons, I retreated into Hemingway and Farrokhzad and de Chateaubriand and Gertrude Stein and Behrangi and Dickens and Emma Goldman and Al-Ahmad and Neruda and Fuentes and García Márquez and Daneshvar and Twain in my cool bedroom sanctuary. My father would, upon leaving home for the clinic in the morning, hand me a book—not picture books, we are talking Kafka—and tell me we were discussing it in the evening when he returned. And such went my literary education, and all the personas that I got to take on when immersed in those other worlds, intimate with so many characters and their dramas.
Nothing was missed from the absence of religious faith in my home. We had literature. My parents found spiritual solace in art. I would come to understand that the making of art promised that all my travails would be in the service of something better, building toward a redemption, giving my life an arc bent toward meaning.
During all the years I lived in Iran both before and after the revolution, I exchanged heaps of hand-written letters in English with pen pals all over the world. There were readily available forms I cannot remember how or through whom to be filled out and sent away that resulted magically in pen pal matches. I wonder whether children still practice this mysterious exchange, or whether internet connectivity hijacked this pleasure. Letters would arrive from faraway places in exotic or thin blue Par Avion envelopes bearing unfamiliar stamps and ink charting journeys through ports. I carefully lifted the stamps to add to my heavy stamp-collector’s book that was filled with picturesque stamps from my father’s correspondences from abroad and others he bought my brother and me at stamp stores, another favorite childhood token lost in emigration. I don’t have copies of the letters I wrote, nor any trace of where, to whom, and how many were sent. So many lost Creation Stories. Perhaps somewhere in my musty storage bags filled with letters received from my Iranian schoolmates after I left might be lodged an odd copy.
Packets of Pop Rocks arrived from America. The most memorable flavor: purple grape. I had never put anything like them in my mouth. Purely chemical tiny rocks unexpectedly thudding into the upper palate of my mouth. Almost violent.
What is time?
— A way of keeping track of how things evolve. The order of one thing coming after another.
— Causality. What causes what.
— A human construct, time may or may not exist.
— Everything may have already happened, and we are just aware of little pieces at a time.
— A way to ensure everything does not happen at once.
— Space is a way to ensure that not everything happens to us.
— A standard argument for time running forward:
We remember the past and not the future.
And what if we were going backwards in time?
We would progressively forget the past, undoing memories we have formed.
— We can time-travel into the past and the future:
We remember the first kiss and imagine next month’s vacation.
— People with dementia cannot imagine themselves fully or make new memories or predict the future. Our memories are crucial to our identities.
— Time feels longer if we are present. Time flies if we are busy.
I felt this during my car accident when all my attention went to that one thing, the swerving of my car across many lanes of the 405 freeway traffic toward the median at high speed while singing at the top of my lungs to Yma Sumac playing loudly on the stereo. My whole life did not flash before my eyes, but I did make a curious decision, or rather, the decision presented itself to me: I was moving to San Francisco—which I did on a Monday in December 1994, the day my physical therapy for broken bones ended. I had $60 in my pocket and no job, only a carry-on with a portable laptop and printer. When I was put onto a stretcher at the scene of the accident, I directed the paramedics to retrieve the master copy of a documentary I had made and was delivering to its producer from the glove box
