Tales From My Past - The Iranian Kid

When I was in eighth grade a new kid showed up. Being in a military town we got new kids all the time, but this one was different. He was thick and dark and was already working on a pretty decent mustache, and he looked at us with wide, suspicious eyes, like he was waiting for the worst but hoping for the best. He liked to play basketball - 'hoop' as he called it - even though he was a worse player than I was, which was saying something. He looked vaguely Mexican, at least in coloration, but his features were wrong for it. When we asked him, he said he was Persian.
   He was from Iran. It was August 1979.
   His name was Sayeed, and he understood math better than the math teacher. He spoke English with barely an accent, which was way more Farsi than I knew, and he wrote Arabic as kind of a parlor trick, because it went backwards on the page. He didn't care for football and its pads and solid hits, but he really wanted to try out for the basketball team, and maybe baseball if he learned how to play. He slowly stopped being the new kid and stopped being the zoo exhibit because of his foreign-ness and started just being one of us.
   Fast forward to November. Revolution in Iran. Students storm the US Embassy and take over fifty people hostage. It's the only thing on the news, video of young men who look remarkably like Sayeed chanting 'death to America.'
   In an instant Sayeed went from just another kid to representative for his entire country and spokesperson for the revolution. He endured abuse like I could never imagine, but he also enjoyed more sympathy and defense than thought twelve-year-olds capable of. I could imagine him bracing for a day at school, for the names, for the demands for an explanation, for the humiliating yet necessary teacher interventions, for the agonizing yet well-meant friendly gestures. No matter how bad I had it, I knew I didn't have it anything like Sayeed did.
   He finished out the school year and then his family moved back to Iran. I remember talking to him about it, and he was politicized to an extent that was foreign to me. He loved his country, and he and his family wanted to help make it better. So they went. That would have been May 1980.
   The Iran-Iraq War started in September 1980.
   I remember watching TV and seeing bodies, men killed in some nameless part of the desert between the two countries. They looked like Sayeed. Just as young, with the beginnings of proud Persian mustaches that were never going to get bushy. The news said both sides, Iran and Iraq, conscripted boys as young as twelve. If you were big enough to hold a rifle, you got one.
   And it hit me. The kid who just wanted to 'shoot hoop,' and who could out-Algebra the Algebra teacher, might be dead. He was my age, fourteen, and he could be a corpse at that very moment. Or he could be sitting behind a stack of sand bags waiting for the enemy to come over the wall. And here I was worried about having the proper brand of shoes and whether I should buy a mum for one of the girls I liked. We were the same, he and I, and yet his path took him into a true life-or-death situation, while mine let me worry about zits and trying to get to first base.
   That was the first time I realized that life isn't fair. The truth hit me in the gut when I saw the lifeless eyes of boys my age, killed in some conflict they certainly didn't understand. The injustice of it made me cry, and the shame I felt made me turn off the TV.
   I don't know what happened to Sayeed. I hope he's alive and well and teaching his kids how to shoot hoop. But he was exactly the wrong age, and in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time for his survival to be anything but a lingering question.
   Ma salama, Sayeed.

I Resolve

It's the last day of 2010, and I was going to resolve not to make New Year's Resolutions, but that would have resulted in a space-time continuum paradox that might have created an alternate timeline where William Shatner was never Captain Kirk.* So I didn't do that.
But I did come up with some resolutions that might work for me.

   Learn to speak dolphin. This might be more difficult that it might at first seem, seeing as how there aren't a lot of dolphins off the LA coast, and I live in Pasadena anyway, about 25 miles inland. It might be better to learn parrot.

   Take the stairs less. The elevator in my building should be fixed by the time I get back. Let's hope.

   Either go to an all-soda diet or eliminate soda entirely. My long-time friends know that I've been 'giving up soda' for years now, just like one of my friends has been quitting smoking every time he lights up. So I'm either gonna quit the junk entirely or abandon the pretense of drinking anything else. No middle ground.

   Get a monkey butler. Not a chimp that will tear my face off when he gets old, a monkey. With a prehensile tail. And without any tendencies towards evil. It wouldn't hurt if he could mix a good milkshake.

   Earn my flying carpet license. It would be much easier to get around the city on a flying carpet rather than in a car.

   Go to a psychic. I've always wanted to do this but just can't part with the cash for such an obvious charade. I need to look on it as an entertainment expense.

   Climb a tree. Adults don't do enough of that.

   Solve a Rubik's cube. Back in high school a friend of mine could do it in less than a minute, and my younger niece can do it in less than two minutes.

   Go to Ireland and capture a leprechaun. I used to just want to visit the land of my forefathers, but how hard is it to get to Ireland these days? With their depressed economy they're practically paying you to come over. But to capture a leprechaun... there's the challenge.

   Get a job as one of those flippy-sign guys. You know, the ones trying to get you to rent an apartment or come into the tax preparer's office? There's a training class for them in Studio City, and I want to learn.



* if you've seen the latest Star Trek movie you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, just go with the flow.

Delayed Compassion

My grandmother wasn't a very nice person.
   I'm talking about my father's mother, who lived a block away from us when I was growing up. I spent my childhood enslaved to her and my grandfather, doing all sorts of manual labor for 25 cents an hour. She was a child of the Depression, one of the 'Feminine Mystique' generation, and generally sullen, resentful, and spiteful. Not to mention openly racist, but that wasn't her so much as the times she grew up in.
   After my grandfather died it fell to me to take care of her, which meant I just did the same thing I always did, mowed her lawn and cut limbs and weeded and all sorts of other things. She didn't drive, so she stayed by herself in her big house, waiting for visitors and emerging for graduations and holidays. It was kind of sad, actually, she'd been so mean and objectionable that she spent the last few years of her life mostly alone.
   It wasn't until just today that I realized how awful that time of her life must truly have been. Sure, she had the telephone, and she loved her San Antonio Spurs on TV, but she spent 99 percent of her time all by herself. No visitors, family only on special occasions, a visit from a Lutheran minister once every few months to take communion. I knew all this at the time - how could I not - but I was still so close to my decades-long servitude that it didn't matter to me.
   Now it makes me want to weep. No one should have to live like that, not even a bitter, hateful old woman who never did anything for anyone else. Time and distance have given me perspective and softened my own hard feelings.
   I feel sorry for her now, trapped that way, in a suburban prison largely of her own making. And it makes me realize the prison I'm building around myself, isolated, alone, becoming increasingly disconnected from people. I don't want to go out like that. I want a house filled with friends and family, I want people to drop by at all hours, I want to live my last days with noise and clamor and company, not bitter and alone, waiting for the end to come.
   Cross your fingers I'll get my wish.

Cop Ettiquette

I have a travel day today, so I'll be busy watching someone who's never flown before get a cavity search from the TSA because they set off the metal detector one too many times. It is a spectator sport, you know. But I leave you with this puzzler:
   If you're sitting behind a cop at a stop sign and he's obviously busy with folders and paperwork in his car and not paying attention, should you honk at him? It's not illegal - as far as I know - but it seems like an ill-advised move. You don't want to give a cop an excuse to notice you, after all. But then again, if he's in your way and oblivious to the flow of traffic... I don't know.

Enjoy your day, I'll be on a plane.

Dream A Little Dream

You ever have a dream where you're speaking another language? Except you don't really speak another language, you just read several ancient ones really well? And so when you're having the dream and everybody is speaking another language, including you, when you try to make sense of what people are saying, within the dream you realize that none of the words are from any language you've ever heard or studied? So you know you're dreaming, and you know that everybody in the dream is speaking a non-existent language, except that there does seem to be some internal consistency and grammar to the nonsense, and people use the same word to refer to the same thing, so it's not like everybody's doing their own thing? And even while you know you're dreaming you try to make sense of the fake language that really only exists inside your own head while at the same time in the dream you continue to speak that same made-up language? And while you're speaking it in the dream, in your own head you're really wondering if this is some kind of real language you've tapped into, or if all the internally-consistent linguistics that seem to be around this made-up language come entirely from your own imagination? And if it is all from your own imagination, then you're either seriously f**ked up or a certifiable genius? Or both?
   You have? Really? What a weirdo.

Flying Carpets

It wasn't so long ago that I was grousing about the complete lack of flying cars in today's society. And robots, death rays, and airships, etc.. Eggheads promised us flying cars by now, and so far I'm stuck on the ground like a chump.
   But then I got to thinking. Flying cars probably aren't the most practical thing, since they're still as big as a car, and they would probably need a runway to take off. And as much as I don't trust the functional illiterates on the roads now, I'd trust them even less in the sky. So no flying cars.
   Ah... but flying carpets, that's a different matter.
   With a flying carpet you could just float up to cruising altitude, you wouldn't need a runway. You probably wouldn't need a license, either. No complicated dials or controls, you just point your carpet in the direction you want to go, and - bam! - you're there. It's magic. It would be refreshing, like a run in the mountains, wind in your face, hair flying back. And since you're not enclosed in a metal cage, you'd probably be much more courteous to your fellow carpet-flyers; kind of awkward to use your driving finger when there's nothing between you and them. The fashion-conscious could even wear Arab silks and curly-toed shoes, if that's what they really wanted. Secretly. Because it made them feel pretty.
   Of course, with a flying carpet you'd be like a motorcycle rider, getting bugs in your teeth. And if it rained you'd get wet. Unless you had a magic umbrella. The FAA would probably want in on the act, and 'approve' the carpets for US airspace. And the State would probably charge you an arm and a leg for registration. And there'd be some sort of tax on magic to make up for the fact that flying carpets don't use gasoline. They'd probably make you put a license plate on your carpet too, which would completely ruin the aesthetics of the whole thing.
   Why does everything always get bogged down in bureaucracy?