Summer Heat, Morning Thoughts

I’ve just been abruptly rolled out of sleep like a bowling ball that's landed in some predawn gutter. The air is barely moving and the sky is beginning to get light and it feels futile to just lie there waiting for sleep’s unlikely return, so I’ve relocated to the living room sofa.

My fate is sealed: I already know I will spend the rest of this day with my brain slurring and my face drooping and my energy at the lethargy level. Undoubtedly there are others like me everywhere using this special time to air out their anxiety. Having failed to find relief in half an Ambien or the pages of a book or various arrangements of pillows fluffed and pounded, we rise, not to shine, but to sigh.

It doesn’t help that it’s been hot. Eerily hot. Yesterday you could feel the scorching heat radiating from dry straw hills and stucco walls, and the brass knob on the entry door felt scalding to the touch, and the thermometer registered 109 as the plants on the deck shriveled and drooped. It was ominous and unsettling.The world seems precarious now, and thirsty, waiting and still but potentially violent.

for mahin

But it sure does feel good to be home after several days in Orange County, the high point of which was visiting our old friend Mahin, who used to babysit for my daughter many years ago. Mahin recently returned after three months in Iran, her first visit back since she emigrated to the United States about twenty-five years ago.

Mahin's life here has never been easy, and I think she had long harbored a fantasy about one day returning to the embrace of her native land. She discovered, of course, it is not the place she remembered.

“For me, it was a strange country,” she said, “It wasn’t the Iran I left. It wasn’t the Iran I could call ‘back home.’ I found some things were better than I was expecting and some things were worse than I was expecting, and I am happy I could go and come back, but now for the first time, I look at California and I know that this is home.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear this. Mahin has made her own way for a long time. She is one of the most spirited women I have ever known, and it is impossible to imagine her easily adjusting to a restrictive society. 

She described sitting down in the male section of a bus, for example.

“Are you looking for trouble?” she was asked.

“No,” she replied, “I have been looking for a seat, and I found one. Right here.”

Sounds like a Persian Rosa Parks, but that’s vintage Mahin. Over the years I have seen her step into many battles, weathering ordeals she might have avoided if she could have ignored unfairness and stupidity, but Mahin simply cannot put her head down and keep silent if something is wrong. And she does not know how to lie.Someone once tried to explain to her that some lies are smart and smooth and can spare you lots of trouble: Better a peaceful lie than a violent truth, the saying goes.

But Mahin is honesty personified. Even the peaceful lies are against her nature. She is kind, though, and generous, and she has built a good life here, a modest and dignified one.

After dinner – chicken in a sauce of crushed walnuts and pomegranates, marinated beef kabobs, crispy rice called tahdig with three sauces – we had tea and pistachio nuts in Mahin’s apartment and she showed us family pictures and beautiful books about Iran and I thought about the epic histories and journeys that had brought us where we were and how unlikely it was that our lives would be connected and how grateful I am that they are. Someday I’d like to write the story of Mahin.

We said good-bye and drove back to our motel beneath the strawberry moon.

_____ 

Here, now, back at home, the room is filling up with daylight and birds are beginning  their chatter and chirp, and maybe I’ll try for a little more sleep before the sun is too hot to ignore.