THWACK!

Last night Violet helped me pick out new frames / glasses. She and the technician made me try on pair after pair after pair. When I’m with Violet, it’s like someone has opened the door to the room where I keep my silly side safely locked away. You’d think we were playing dress-up in mommy’s closet. The technician–a woman for whom composure and dignity are apparently quite important–couldn’t decide if it was okay to laugh at us or if she should maintain her professionally straight face through it all.

I paid the extra $32 for a photo of the insides of my eyes. Aw shoot. I should have asked for a printout of my gorgeous optic nerve, healthy web of blood vessels and nice round macula.

Violet and I were talking away at the kitchen table after when two other girlfriends showed up at my kitchen door. It was Katryn and Wendy and little Sasha. Violet had to head home to crate dogs, and so I accepted an invitation to walk up to Whole Lotta Gelatto, which is where Katryn and Sasha and I met for the first time back in July. Don’t worry; I had peppermint tea with no sugar.

Oh! Now I remember why I started this post.

So Wendy was telling us about the time she had to decide between staying in the IT Dept. at Ithaca College or accepting a position at Princeton. Before you go thinking that’s a no-brainer, you have to understand the kind of place Ithaca is. She lives in the EcoVillage, for goodness sake.

She told us about the two stones method of finding out what your heart really wants. You take two stones. One of them represents one path. The other stone represents the other path. She took her stones to the edge of Cayuga Lake. In one had was living in the intentional community nestled at the foot of the Catskill Mountains with waterfalls and Fingerlakes all around. In the other had was the new job, new life, new place to live… and Princeton.

Which stone could she throw away? Which stone could she throw into the water, never see again? Which could she live with having tossed away forever and ever and ever?

I had been talking to Violet earlier about my method for accessing what my heart knows is the right path for me. (Violet is trying to figure out which grad program to pursue. Everyone and her aunt Vivian has an opinion on her tentative choice.)

What I do is sit in the yes chair then sit in the no chair. I close my eyes and imagine myself sitting down in a chair in a world where I’ve already said YES. How does it feel? Am I happy or disappointed? Joyful or afraid? Calm or nervous? I sit in the energy of that decision.

Now I sit in the NO chair (or vice versa). How does THAT ONE feel?

Violet has a very intriguing way of figuring out what she really wants. Her husband helps her. She might be trying to decide between going out for dinner or staying in, getting a certain tattoo or using the money for the rhinestone cat-eye glasses. Whatever.

Coffee takes something representing each choice, one in each hand, and puts them behind his back. He mixed them around so she no longer knows which hand holds which prize.

“Pick one,” he says.

She picks the left or right hand and he shows her which one she chose.

Her immediate gut reaction will either be “Oh, goodie!” or “Meh.” That’s how she finds out which one she really wanted more.

==========

I’ve been thinking about blind spots. Psychological blind spots, I mean. We each have one. Most of us are capable of at least some introspection. Others of us are pretty darned self aware.

But you know what? We all have an area where we just can’t see something clearly and objectively about ourselves and our behaviour. I find this fascinating and frustrating, too. I guess our psyche protects us from the really hard to face stuff…or the defense mechanisms we still need, or think we need. They fit us like an old glove. We don’t even know they’re there.

Don’t you know someone who just doesn’t realize how others see her? Maybe she is a compulsive talker and totally does not realize she bores everyone to tears. I have an acquaintance who sabotages every good thing that tries to happen to him. On some level he is aware of this some of the time, but he is in absolute denial about many incidents that fall smack dab into that pattern. Everyone around him can see it. He can’t. Blind spot.

You may THINK you know what your friends would all tell you if you could pump them full of truth syrum and ask them what yours is. But if you even have an inkling…that probably isn’t it.

As I’ve been working my way through this individuation process with a Jungian analyst, I’ve uncovered some things that used to hide from me behind a veil of denial. But I know there’s a biggie still playing peek-a-boo with me. If I ever manage to come face to face with that one, well… It’s probably like that carnival game where as soon as you shoot one duckie, another one comes along.

Karen’s comment of the other day lingers with me still. She said she wanted to comment on the post, but would be negative where I was positive and positive where I was negative. So she decided not to say more.

Wow. At first I wanted to say, “no, no…speak freely here.” Then I wanted to say, “suit yourself, but do know that I welcome all input and opinions.”

Hearing others’ views and opinions is the only way to grow! God save me if I am surrounded only by people who agree with me.

But I’m glad I didn’t say either of those things and I’m glad Karen didn’t continue. Because trying to figure out what she MIGHT have been thinking has been very interesting for me. I’ve taken each subject in that post and have turned it over and over in the light, looking for the negative side of the positives and the positive side of the negatives.

I do believe I’ve probed myself much harder than I would have had she finished her thought.

Nevertheless… Karen, please always feel free to open up here. You may rant, vent, poke, prod, criticize or laugh. While I appreciate people who can remain respectful while doing so, it takes a real friend to be brutally honest with us.

I’m thinking of 1984/5. My boyfriend Xavier’s brother Jose Luis came to visit us in Japan, where we had a modest little flat on the industrial side of Sapporo, island of Hokkaido. While I was practicing Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism, Jose Luis was very drawn to Zazen. And so he found a nearby temple where he could participate in the meditation sessions.

He came back from his first one and told me all about it. Everyone sat erect on the tatami. They closed their eyes and meditated. The Zen master came around with a long bamboo pole that is actually two halves of a pole lashed together at the handle but not at the top. When you least expect it, the pole may come down and whack you on the shoulder.

THWACK!

The two halves of the pole slap together, resounding through the room.

This is to bring you back when your mind has wandered.

We need that. We can’t sneak up on ourselves. Sometimes it takes an outsider to give us a good THWACK.

The Sun’s Birthday

I was swept into the world of my new Iranian friends. Kiarash introduced me to his colleagues, his girlfriend. I started coming to Iranian movie night at the Student Life Centre on campus. I LOVE Iranian cinema. My favourite director is Abbas Kiarostami. I was just amazed month after month at how radical some of these films managed to be. They had to pass the board of censors, making sure the women were all wearing their rusari and that unrelated men and women were not touching. But other than that–particularly since the new president had come into office–things were loosening up!

Mr. Raad had me over for dinner. I became friends with him and his wife, Zarrin, and their delightful and very smart daughter, Khorseed. I attended Khorsheed’s violin recital, turning to her parents at the end to say, “Kheili ghashang bud, mage nah!“

I even managed to do what months before would have been unthinkable. I picked up the phone and invited Negar and her family over for dinner. Beyond the phone phobia, I’d always had this panic-level anxiety that I just couldn’t handle having people in my home. I’d never be able to get things clean enough, tidy enough. I’d surely burn something. A million potential catastrophe’s paraded across the screen of my neurotic mind.

I got knots in my stomach just thinking about it.

Anna and I were working on the perfectionism thing. I was trying…at work and with friends and in all aspects of my life…to allow myself to be less than perfect. Hey, sometimes maybe even mediocre! What a thought!

Be human. Make mistakes. It’s O-K-A-Y. Anyone who really likes you or loves you will still like or love you after you burn the meal. It’s OKAY, Kel. Remember to breathe.

I had Najmeh and Javaad, Naimeh and Negar to dinner. I made salad and aash and a rice dish. They were so very sweet in the way they broke the news to me that Iranians don’t serve aash with rice. That would be like inviting an American over and serving steak with a hotdog on top. So I made a faux pas. But you know what? The sky didn’t fall. Javaad, who only drinks Shiraz because he is from Shiraz, was as funny as ever. We talked long into the night.

They told me of a big celebration coming up. The solstice was approaching, and that’s a big deal in Iranian culture. The rituals of that night are as old as Iran itself, pre-dating Islam. It is a celebration of the longest night of the year. Negar’s parents invited me to join in the festivities that would be held in the party room at our apartment complex.

I might write about that another day…or get myself invited this year so I can show you what it’s like!

=======

One day at Farsi school an announcement came over the intercom. I can’t remember now why, but we were to divide ourselves by grades, the kindergarten through 3rd graders should report to room 105. The fourth grade and above should report to the gymnasium.

I looked over at Khorsheed and Kimia. I looked to the row in front of me where Shaadi, a shy and quiet 13-year-old was sitting. It struck me out of the blue. For some reason I wanted to go to the gym with Shaadi. So I did.

That was the week the feelings came.

I don’t remember where it was exactly. Maybe I was in the cinema watching a love scene. Maybe I was in bed reading a novel for a short while before turning off the lights. I just remember hints of an awakening.

I was eager to tell Anna all about it that Thursday. Now I understood the dream about the 8-year-old. Now I understood losing interest in being one of the 8-year-olds, wanting to hang out with Shaadi instead. I was passing through puberty all over again. Naturally this time.

And so here I am. I no longer have the paraphilia, but that’s not to say I would never again love someone with a physical disability. I might. The nice thing is, it would be for the right reasons. It would depend on spirit and soul and having things in common…seeing the world in a similar way and having shared values. Love would come first instead of being an afterthought.

Life is good.

The Other Kind of Dream

I woke up this morning in the middle of a dream about my cousin Mark. In the dream, he died. Other things happened between him and me in the dream, too. But he was leaving, going away forever. He slipped away piece at a time until there was just a small part left. Then he was gone.

During my life, I have often dreamed of people the very night they passed from this world. These dreams differ from others. They feel different. Sometimes they are clearer.

I normally would not have blogged about that at all this morning, but it felt important, and I wanted a record of it. I was pretty sure it wasn’t the Jungian type of dream but the other kind. You know what I mean.

After a very full day with time spent with Violet, time spent with Wendy and Katryn, then time spent with two Freecyclers gathered around the rat cages, I finally got time to myself at 10:30. My brother’s email was at the bottom of a dozen or more:

Sad news: Cousin Mark died last night at about 10pm. Mom said he went peacefully.

 

Love you

 

Mike

Each time I’ve had one of these dreams, I feel so blessed. I am not claiming to know if there is such thing as a soul or spirit. I am not professing to understand how it works. I just know I got the opportunity to say goodbye to my cousin last night, and for that I’ll be forever so grateful.

Skipping Christmas

My life is getting simpler by the year.

Giving up a car wasn’t really my idea, …well, I had some help making the decision. It’s working out pretty well.

Giving away the television was the best decision ever. My house is so peaceful all the time. I spend more time reading and writing, playing with the rats and socializing with humans.

No cell phone. No Blackberry.

No makeup.

No holidays. NO HOLIDAYS???

I love Christmas as much as the next kid. Oh, I don’t care so much about getting gifts. I love giving them. But I never got my act together in time. I always had ideas for what I was going to do THIS year, like start my shopping early to avoid the madness. I came up with excellent ideas for homemade gifts that I never homemade. Baking I never baked.

I spent a lot of time feeling like a bad person, subhuman. A procrastinating failure. I hate…more than anything I hate rushing out at the last minute trying to find something for someone. All the good stuff is picked over. All the other procrastinators are in the stores with you, and we’re all in a bad mood. Talk about STRESS.

No more. I’m skipping Christmas. This will be my third year to abstain.

I was in Pet Valu with Violet on the weekend. The young clerk made the mistake of asking me something that got me started.

“I’m skipping Christmas.”

He didn’t understand. “Where are you going?” he asked.

“No place. I’ll be right here in town. I’m just not doing Christmas.”

“How to you skip Christmas?” he asked. He seemed amused, or was still not sure if I was pulling his leg.

“You just don’t do it. You don’t buy anything, you don’t send out cards. You just ignore it all.”

He still wasn’t convinced. I could tell he’s of the same ilk as my ex husband. He loves getting presents.

“You can give and get presents and nice gestures throughout the year,” I told him. “You don’t have to make a special day for that. I like giving a friend a little gift for no reason. HAPPY WEDNESDAY!” I said.

“Happy Wednesday!” he echoed, cracking up. You’d think it was the funniest thing he’d heard all day.

I do miss Christmas…the real Christmas… the one we as a society ruined a few decades ago. So I know that at some point, after getting the skipping out of my system, I’ll start to rebuild a winter ritual for myself. One of my own design.

I think it should take place at the solstice and should involve wassail. I like Violet’s idea of picking a wish off the Adopt a Senior tree. Buy colourful flannel jammies for Bernice or many decadent chocolates for Gladys.

What about Oxfam? You can buy five hens and a cockerel for a family in Bolivia. Do that in your friend’s name instead of buying that shiny new gadget nobody really needs.

Well, whatever. I’m rambling and I need to get ready for work.

Happy Tuesday, everyone.

Which Kind of Dream?

I awoke just now from a very clear and interesting dream about my cousin Mark.

I wonder which kind of dream this was…the kind that is really about that person or the kind that has something to tell me about a part of myself represented by that person.

In real life, not in my dreams, my cousin has been fighting a long and valiant battle with cancer. The last news I got was that he is very weak now and has to sleep in a hospital bed in the living room.

They’ve tried so many things. He’s been through chemo and everything the allopathic doctors have suggested. He’s also tried alternative approaches when the chemo wasn’t doing it.

At what point is it okay to say goodbye? Does it seem like a betrayal to those who are still praying for a miracle? After all, think positive think positive think positive. Pray.

At some point is it okay to start talking about a good death instead of no death?

Zereshk Polo

Since my fortieth birthday and beginning analysis, I’d decided to teach myself to cook. Not only did I want to leave behind my past life as a junkfood junkie, but I wanted finally to realize my dream of having friends over for dinner. Anna and I were working on the phone phobia, so I wanted to have some recipes under my belt when I finally found the courage to invite people into my home.

I ordered this gorgeous cookbook from Amazon. Oh, my. That was thirty dollars well spent. This book has rich glossy photos, poetry, lore, explanations of celebrations and holidays, a wedding meal, recipes for salads, drinks, cookies and pastries…you name it.

I decided to learn to make zereshk polo baa morgh or barberry rice with chicken, the recipe featured on the cover of the hefty cookbook.

To this day, the preparation of this dish is one of the most meditative and sensual exercises I know.

INGREDIENTS (from New Food of Life)

• 3 cups long-grain basmati rice
• 1 frying chicken, about 3 lb, or 2 Cornish game hens
• 2 peeled onions, 1 whole and 1 thinly sliced
• 2 cloves of garlic, peeled
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 teaspoon ground saffron dissolved in 4 tablespoons hot water
• 2 cups dried barberries (zereshk), cleane, washed and drained
• 2/3 cup clarified butter (ghee), or oil
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons plain yogurt
• 1 teaspoon Persian spice mix (advieh) or 1 tablespoon ground cumin seeds
• 2 tablespoons slivered almonds
• 2 tablespoons slivered pistachios

First of all, if you want to go completely traditional, which I do, you need ghee. So I start by making a batch of my own ghee the day before.Also done the day before is the rinsing of the basmati rice–five times or until the water runs clear. Then you leave the rice to soak overnight in very salty water (2 tablespoons salt in 8 cups of water). This helps the long grains hold up better when cooked. It ensures a fluffy rice. I usually leave the rice and salt water resting atop my refrigerator and put a large round glass serving dish on top to keep dust and things out.

The chicken, by the way, practically cooks itself in a covered baking dish. Najmieh says:

Place the whole chicken in a baking dish. Stuff the bird with one of the whole onions, the garlic, and sprinkle with salt, pepper and 1 teaspoon saffron water. Cover and bake in a 350 F oven for 1.5 to 2 hours.

Oh, how I love that moment on day 2 when it’s time to take the lid off the soaking rice and put my face down near the fragrant basmati water. Breathe in deeply. Aahh, there’s nothing like it.

You rinse out all the salt using a colander and/or two bowls. This takes a lot of swishing and pouring from one bowl to another. I use my bare hands. It’s relaxing.

The barberries–which should be red when you buy them and which can be stored in your freezer until time to use–also must be rinsed and rinsed and rinsed. They are full of sand and grit and stems that must be plucked out, as well as a few tiny teardrop-shaped leaves. As I’m picking and sorting, tossing aside the uckie looking berries, I think loving thoughts about the friend or friends who will share this meal with me.  Najmieh says, “Clean the barberries by removing their stems and placing the berries in a colander. Place colander in a large container full of cold water and allow barberries to soak for 20 minutes. The sand will settle to the bottom. Take the colander out of the container and run cold water over the barberries; drain and set aside.”

Saute 1 sliced onion in 2 tablespoons butter, add barberries and saute for just 1 minute over LOW heat because barberries burn very easily! Add 4 Tablespoons sugar, mix well, and set aside.

The cooking process itself has many steps–if you want a proper tadig or golden crust to form on the bottom of your rice. First you parboil the rice on high heat in salt water for just a little while. As Najmieh explains:

Bring 8 cups water and 2 tablespoons salt to a boil in a large, non-stick pot. Pour the washed and drained rice into the pot. Boil briskly for 6 to 10 minutes, gently stirring twice to loosen any grains that may have stuck to the bottom. Bite a few grains; if the rice feels soft, it is ready to be drained. Drain rice in a large, fine-mesh colander and rince in 2 or 3 cups lukewarm water.

While the rice is parboiling, you can put your saffron strings into the mortar with a bit of sugar and grind it to a fine orange powder. A few tablespoons of hot water added to this makes the key ingredient that will go on the chicken and also into the rice. Be careful! This mixture stains fingers and countertops and, well, everything it touches.

When the parboiled rice is rinsed and set aside, you get the big pot ready to accept the rice again.  Najmieh says, “in the same pot heat 4 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons water.”

In a bowl, mix 2 spatulas of rice, the yogurt, and a few drops of saffron water and spread the mixture over the bottom of the pot to form a tender crust (tag-dig).
Next you mound 2 spatulas full of rice into the middle of the pot atop the yogurt mixture. Sprinkle some spice mix on top of the mound and then top that with a layer of the barberries. Repeat: rice layer, spices, barberries; rice, spices, barberries. Soon you have a huge pyramid of rice and your ingredients are all used up. Way to go! (The pyramid shape give the rice room to expand.)

Cover and cook for 10 minutes over medium heat.

Mix the remaining melted butter and saffron water with 1/4 cup of water and pour over the pyramid. Place a clean tea towel over the pot; cover firmly with the lid to prevent steam from escaping. Cook for 50 minutes or longer over low heat.

Those were Najmieh’s words.   I personally do the above 2 steps a bit differently.  I start the fire on the high end of medium and keep it there until a wet finger struck against the outside of the pot toward the bottom gives a ssssssss. That means you will have a good tadig and you can now turn the fire very low and keep it there until your guests arrive. (The wet finger hissing trick isn’t in the book. I learned it from my friends Najmeh and Zarrin. They learned it from their mothers, who learned it from their mothers.)

Before the rice is done cooking, wet down a tea towel with cold water. When the rice is done cooking,  set the hot pot of rice down on the cold towel. This helps release the tadig from the bottom of the pot.

Decorate the top of the mound with almonds and pistachios.

THE SPICE MIX (advieh-ye polow)

• 2 tablespoons ground dried rose petals (gol-eh sorkh)
• 2 tablespoons ground cinnamon (darchin)
• 2 tablespoons ground cardamom (hel)
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin (zireh)

Mix all the ground spices together in a bowl. Store in an airtight container to preserve freshness.

If I ever make this dish for you, it means I love you.

Cafe Fardeen

I could now fulfill the promise I’d made to myself back in the summer: that the next time I shopped in Mediterranean Market, I would speak to the proprietor in his language.

The store was narrow and deep. Mr. M and his wife, with the help of brother Benny and other relatives, had converted the very back of the store into a small sandwich shop called Café Fardeen, named for the 9-year-old lad who often interpreted for his parents.

At the front of the store the sun shone through the glass onto large, open burlap sacks of nuts and dried fruits. There were dried white mulberries or toot, mentioned in my reader. There were pistachios, almonds, sunflower seeds, and mountains of seeds, nuts and fruit I did not recognize. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. M. nor even their high school aged daughter could tell me the names of them in English.

On the left side of the store, just past the cash register, was a deli case with white plastic pails of sheep’s feta and goat’s feta resting in milky brine. There was a bucket of barberries or zereshk, a small, tart red berry that grows on a shrub and is used in one of the most delicious of all the traditional Persian meals.

Beyond the cheeses you came to the pastry case with its trays and trays of honey fritters, baklava, pistachio cookies and little round cookies made with chickpea flour (don’t tell Nokhodi). Often Mr. M. gave me a sample to try.

One aisle offered seven or eight or more kinds of leaf tea, including many brands of Ceylon, Orange Pekoe and other good black teas used to brew a proper pot of Iranian tea.

I was excited to be able to show off my budding Farsi to Mr. M. and his family. I teased the father, saying I would learn Farsi before he learned English. He didn’t take the bet.

Soon I had a routine established. I would buy my sheep’s feta and barbari that came to the Mediterranean Market on a truck each Friday, fresh from the bakery in Toronto. I sat in the back with my primer and composition book copying out that week’s lesson. Mrs. M. watched Iranian soap operas, dramas and talk shows on the television mounted overhead in the corner. Sometimes she talked to me a bit in broken English, or asked me a simple question in Farsi.

I made a point of trying every Persian dish the small cafe had to offer (this was before I stopped eating meat). Mrs. M. approached me one day to ask, hurt and perplexed, “why Canadian people no like?” She was referring to sheep brains, considered a delicacy in Iran. I’d ordered them more than once; they had a bit of an organ meat taste to them, with a texture somewhere between silk tofu and scrambled eggs.

Often I’d be there with my book or trying to understand the talk show blaring from the TV overhead when friends or relatives of the proprietors would stop in for a complimentary glass of tea hot off the samovar.

Then Mr. M. would find an excuse to turn to me and ask me in his language how things were coming along. I’d sputter out a short but well-pronounced response, which always triggered excitement and curiosity from his friends. At that point Mr. M. would tell them the whole story, as I went back to my lesson, trying to keep a big silly grin off my face.

Sometimes Fardeen’s grandparents came to sit for a while. They were Azeris and didn’t speak Farsi, so I couldn’t exchange greetings with them past the initial Salaam without someone else interpreting for us. Both Grandmother and Grandfather wore the traditional garb of their region, which is in the north of Iran.

Mediterranean Market closed not too long ago, moving its wares to a stall at the St. Jacobs Farmers’ Market. I miss being able to pop in there to exchange greetings with the family and shop for my Persian meal ingredients. However, we do have a modest Persian diner in town. I’ll review that for you soon.

Little Chickpea Boy (Nokhodi)

The girls in my Farsi class let Mr. Sadr know that it wasn’t fair for the same girl always to get to sit next to me to help me with my lesson. Mr. Sadr was in agreement, and so the girls started taking turns. There were boys in the class, too, in case you should wonder. But everyone knows girls don’t want to catch boy cooties and vice versa. I steered clear of them.

I now understood much of what Mr. Sadr was saying to the class so long as I concentrated with every molecule of my being on what he was saying. If I got distracted for a second, I lost the thread. I understood only about 20% of the words, but I could piece together the rest from context. Sometimes I could understand whole sentences, even a few consecutive sentences. Those moments thrilled me.

I could understand a question being posed to the class and would raise my hand to answer. But I could only answer in English. Mr. Sadr wanted me to answer in Farsi. Oh, gosh that was difficult. But I did try. Because he wanted me to answer in Farsi, I often waited, only putting my hand up when the answer was one I could express in Farsi. For example:

Mr. S: What are the colours of the Iranian flag?

Answer: The colours of the Iranian flag are white, green and red.

But though I knew the answer to “Why did the miner take off his shirt and set it afire and wave it at the oncoming train?” I didn’t know how to say, “he wanted to warn the conductor of the boulders that had fallen onto the tracks.” I waited that one out.

The little reader with its dull black and white line drawings included cultural and geography lessons. I learned about the different regions of Iran, learned a bit about our neighbours, such as Turkey and Afghanistan and Iraq. I learned about the various peoples who make up Iran…the mountain people who herd goats, the fishing people who live on the riverbanks and go out every day on boats, the nomads of the desert who bring teachers along with them so their children can go to school during the migrations.

============

I attempted to let my neighbour Farhad off the hook. I wasn’t getting much out of our time together, so I tried telling Farhad, “It’s okay. You don’t have to come over.”

Farhad said no, it’s okay. It’s no trouble. He wanted to.

Before starting our next lesson that Wednesday, Farhad confessed something to me, something he didn’t want his friends to know. He’d been spending two, three days at a time without dressing or shaving. The job search wasn’t going well. The accounting exams weren’t going well. His roommate was on his case, worried about him. Farhad said he so looked forward to our tutoring sessions as an excuse to bathe and shave and dress and get out of his apartment…even if it was just to walk a few paces down and across the hall from 1409 to 1408.

I noticed Farhad was putting on weight.

I tried gently telling Farhad about depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder. I told him I took medicine for it daily and it helped quite a bit. There was no shame in that. I told him about the nature of psychotherapy, how it worked, what it cost, how to get a referral.

Though he listened, I could tell Farhad was not going to follow up on any of these ideas. And so I gave him a phone number he could call day or night if he ever found himself feeling desperate. I told him he could call me as well. He apologized about seventeen times for telling me his troubles, but I assured him it was very important to have at least one person he could talk to, and I was honoured to be that someone for him.

When Farhad left that day, I couldn’t quite bring myself to give this skittish young Muslim a hug, but I did put my hand on his back briefly as we walked to the door, looked him in the eye and told him to take care of himself.

I knew now why Farhad had to come back to my apartment every Wednesday. He was a miserable tutor, but I couldn’t cancel our dates. I understood now what the Universe wanted from me. I would continue to be there for Farhad through the difficult Ontario winter.

One day Farhad called me on the phone. “A package has come for you,” he said.

“For ME?” I wondered if the mail carrier had gotten our numbers mixed up. I sometimes got other tenants’ mail. But I wasn’t expecting any package.

“Yes,” he said, trying not to sound as excited as he was. “My parents sent you something from Iran. Shall I bring it now?”

“Yes! Yes, of course. Come right over.”

Farhad came to the door with a flat package wrapped in brown paper. We sat down at the round oak table in my dining nook off the kitchen. He watched with anticipation as I peeled open the package. Inside were a children’s book and accompanying workbook. The cover of the large, thin, hardback book was all primary colours: red with yellow and blue. On the cover was a cartoon figure. This was the hero of the book, a little garbanzo bean boy named Nokhodi. Nokhod means chickpea in Farsi. In the back of the book there was a poster of the entire alphabet, which I stapled up on my wall immediately. I could not have been more thrilled with this gift than if Farhad’s parents had sent me all the treasures of Persepolis. I was beside myself with glee.

Farhad smiled when he saw how pleased I was. I clutched the beginning reader to my chest and sputtered thank yous over and over, almost forgetting to put the kettle on so we could have some of my terrible tea.

I couldn’t wait to show Kiarash my new book with one story per letter of the alphabet. That night I began memorizing story one where Nokhodi meets a ladybug beside the waterfall. These stories were not at all like the ones in our school primer. They were contemporary and silly. Nokhodi was always getting into trouble, but the stories ended on a happy note. My favourite story is the one about Naneh Kalaagheh (Mamma Crow) who steals the bread right out of Nokhodi’s hand because she and her babies are hungry. But don’t worry; the baker hears Nokhodi crying and bakes him another piece of bread.That book went everywhere I went that winter. At Farsi school, the kids crowded around my desk to peek at it. The teachers passed it among themselves, writing down the ISBN. I had it clutched to my breast as I boarded the bus each morning and each evening, cover facing out so the many Iranian U of W students (almost all male engineers) could read the cover. I got a kick out of watching them whisper to each other and sneak glances at me as I proceeded to open the little reader and move my lips as I practiced that week’s story.

Kiarash was very impressed with the little book. “That’s how people REALLY talk,” he said, flipping page after page. “This is great,…oh this is GREAT.” So he and I formed our next several lessons around the Nokhodi stories.“How is Nokhodi this week?” Kiarash asked me in Farsi.

I would stammer, wanting to tell him all about Nokhodi’s adventures in English. I just couldn’t express them all in Farsi. But Kiarash would have none of it. “Baa Faarsi!” he insisted over and over.

“But I don’t know the word for….”

“BAA FAARSI! He said, glaring at me.

Have I told you that Kiarash was the best Farsi tutor EVER?

Equal Time

A commenter from Iran wishes to point out that it’s been eight years now since the Komite has stopped their scare tactic of hauling kids down to the police station for hanging out as boyfriend and girlfriend. Nice to hear. She also wants to point out that God can be found anywhere.

Good point. Thank you for sharing from Iran, Anonymous.

Puzzle Pieces

photo: Jay Simons

I told Anna I feel things moving in my psyche again. I think a new growth spurt is upon me. I don’t know yet what it’s all about. I just feel pieces shifting, not yet settling.

I remember snippets of my dreams last night. My step-father was there, though just briefly and in the background. He represents a part of me I most certainly don’t want in the driver’s seat. My mother was there (mother complex). Someone, maybe my first cousin Leslie, pointed out that there were worms on my birding vest. I looked down and brushed a few maggots from my vest.

No, there are more, WAY MORE, she told me. I brushed higher, from my shoulder where my eyes couldn’t see them. A lot of maggots fell to the ground as I brushed. Finally I took the whole vest off and discovered the source of the nasty, white worm-like things. There was half a baby alligator carcass stuck to my vest.

I wish I were in Anna’s office right now. We could pull that book down off the shelf and amplify alligator. BABY alligator. Half-eaten baby alligator. What part of me is this? What message is this? I know it’s powerful. I know this message can give me some important guidance just now if I can figure out the symbolism.

Decay. Something has died. I wonder if this is the mother complex. Certainly these days I am struggling with that voice inside me that is so full of shoulds. A good girl should not do this, a good girl should do that (good daughter, good citizen, good girlfriend).

There was also a scene where a man was leading me down a river, only the river wasn’t made of water. It was a blue water-like gel substance. We didn’t sink into it but rode atop it to our destination. I don’t remember now where we were going… to an empty new house under construction on the bank?

Today my girlfriend Princess Violet of Hillview and her husband Coffee are going to help me bleach out my newly shorn hair. Then…maybe not today, but soon…we are going to Out of the Past in downtown Kitchener to buy some hair dye in a shade of pink I like. I’m leaning toward Carnation Pink.

Yeah, I’m giving myself permission to have a mid-life crisis.

Last night I worked late. My manager was in her office as well. I took some brown rice crackers into her, knowing there’s nothing good in the vending machines to tide you over on late nights catching up work.

When she left, she asked, “Are you going to work much longer?” I said not too long.

“Do you want a ride?” She offered.

“No, I have my bike. Thanks, though.” Then we compared weekend plans.

“I’m just going to hang out with my girlfriend,” I said.

“Oh, so am I!” She told me more about her plans to blow off some steam a la a ‘girls only’ night. I told her my plans were going to involve hair bleach and maybe a dash of pink dye.

It feels less scary now that my manager knows. Less rebellious, less self-destructive. This is a good thing, a creative thing, an act of self-expression.

Going to think more about the dead baby alligator.

Kindred Spirits

A sweet, quiet young woman new to Canada and new to Laurier University volunteered one day to help Mr. Sadr teach Farsi class; she came around and helped us each with the passage we were on in our little primers.

Before we adjourned at noon, Negar made a point of writing her name and phone number on a piece of paper. She gave it to me and told me to call her should I ever need help with my homework.

I’d been doing lots of work with Anna on my social phobias and was feeling brave enough to make a telephone call. The fact that Negar had asked me to call helped me screw up the courage to pick up the phone.

Softspoken young Negar said yes, she’d like to help me and where should we meet? “Where do you live?” She asked.

“Near Laurier University,” I answered. She said she lived near Laurier, too.

“I live in Richmond Square Apartments… you know…those two tall shell-coloured buildings that stick up on the horizon…you can’t miss them.” I told her.

“I live in Richmond Square Apartments too,” she said.

And so Negar crossed the courtyard from Building Two to Building One and visited me in my new home. She brought photo albums.

We sat on my loveseat and she showed me her photos of her home back in Iran. I saw a garden with bougainvillea that looked not so different from gardens I’d seen in California and Spain. I saw the boy she had a crush on. I saw her girlfriends, whom she missed terribly. Parties.

Negar told me a lot about life in Iran under the Islamic regime. She explained how you have to do everything carefully and behind closed doors so as not to be hauled down to the police station by the Komite. You can’t go out on dates with boys, so if you want to date, you have to do so inside someone’s home.

I’ve also read about this fractured society in Maclean’s weekly news magazine. Out on the street, everyone dutifully wears the head scarf. Inside private homes, however, there are wild parties where kids wear makeup, western clothes, girls wear tube tops and glitter on their faces. You might even find a rave complete with Ecstacy if you ask around. I also read that the vast majority of Iranians are Muslim in name only. Very few attend weekly services. That would explain why only two of the scores of Iranians I know are practicing Muslims. Once they get over here, many of the women wear more makeup than your average Canadian.

Negar told me that since coming to Canada two years before, she had begun wondering about God. Back in Iran, religion was shoved down their throats at every pass, so she wanted nothing to do with it. Only here, free from the dogma, was she developing a natural curiosity.

Negar and I got along really well that day. She confessed to me that she was lonely in Canada; she found it difficult to make new friends, and she was quite excited to have a new one in me. The feeling was mutual.
======

A week or two later, I got a call from Negar. Her mother and father, she said, would like me to come for dinner. I told her I’d be thrilled to meet her family.

And so that Friday I made my way across the courtyard with a potted chrysanthemum for Negar’s mother. I was nervous as I stood in the carpeted hallway of Richmond II and rang the doorbell.

A woman about my age answered the door and welcomed me inside. The fragrance of saffron and basmati rice enveloped me as I stepped inside.

I don’t know how to explain it, but from the first moment inside this warm little apartment with its homey decor cobbled together from second hand furniture and richly coloured rugs, I felt at home.

Najmeh, Negar’s mother, was an electrical engineer. She apologized for the furniture, saying they hoped to move out of the small apartment into a house before long. This was all just temporary.

Negar’s younger sister, Naimeh, sat in on our visit but didn’t say much.

Negar’s father, Javaad, was a ruddy, balding man with a sweet face. He didn’t say much. This was partly because his English wasn’t terribly good yet, but I think he was also accustomed to hanging back a bit in this female dominated household. When he did speak, he was always funny. Sometimes his English itself was the root of our laughter, and when that happened, he laughed good naturedly at himeself along with us. He mocked embarrassment and basked in the attention.

In front of me was a huge spread, the typical Persian before-dinner smorgasbord: a big pyramid of clemantines, apples, grapes. Bowls of almonds and pistachios. I was offered steaming hot tea in a glass and ghand or cube sugar.

Najmeh told me of her depressing year-long search for work in her field after their arrival. She told of showing up for an interview at the same manufacturing place with her resume not once, not twice, not three times but FOUR TIMES. Finally the senior engineer who interviewed her joked that hiring her was the only way he was going to get rid of her. He hired her.

Now she was able to tell stories of astounding them with her dedication, hard work, skill and knowledge. She was an excellent electrical engineer and they now saw how lucky they were to have hired her.

Javaad was hoping to start his own carpentry business with Najmeh’s brother, Mr. Raad from Farsi school. They were master cabinet makers. But in the meantime he cooked and did dishes, getting a hot meal on the table every evening for his hard working wife, something he had done through their whole marriage. She had warned him when he’d proposed, “I don’t cook.” That was fine with him, as he was a good cook.

Najmeh asked me if I wanted to look at a photo album. I did.

We sat side-by-side as I turned the pages slowly and Najmeh told me who all the people were. She and Javaad were so young in the pictures. Negar and Naimeh were not yet born.

“What is she doing now?” I asked about one close girlfriend.

Najmeh hesitated. “She died in prison.”

Oh.

We looked at more faces, I asked more questions. Again and again the answers came: He’s dead. She was tortured and is dead. He’s dead, too.

My mind wandered. I was back in Hamid’s living room the day I asked him about the dark, oppressive feel to his paintings and got stories of prison and torture and death.

I didn’t want to look up from the photo album, as tears were running down my face as I opened my heart for these strong young men and women who spoke truth to power and paid with their lives.

When I reached up to wipe my cheeks, Najmeh began apologizing for upsetting me.

“No, no! It’s okay. I want to know about it. I cry easily. Don’t worry. But, do you have a Kleenex?” I laughed through my tears, lightening the mood.

We sat down to a huge meal of basmati rice and aash, a special stew that takes all day to slow cook. Najmeh said nobody made an aash as good as Javaad. All their friends said it.

“So what made you want to study Farsi?” Najmeh asked.

“That’s a long story,” I responded, since it really all began with meeting the guys at UALR.

“We have all night,” she said.

“Well, okay. I used to hang out with some Iranians back in university. They were very kind to me, and I was trying to learn the language. There were not any good books back then, and I never succeeded. So…”

Javaad interrupted me. He wanted to know more about which circle of Iranians these were.

“What do you mean?” I knew full well what he meant, but I wanted to get away with vague answers. Admitting to having fraternized with communists in my youth usually led nowhere but to fruitless circular arguments, and stamped a cool awkwardness on the friendship from that day on.

He asked again and something in his tone…in the events of the evening…told me it was a risk worth taking.

“They were… well … they were Marxists.”

Javaad stopped chewing his rice.

He put down his fork.

He stood up, grinned, extended a hand across the table and said, “COMRADE!”

Communism

Communism. That word really packs a punch, doesn’t it? I never really got what all the fuss was about. I guess it helps that I wasn’t alive during the McCarthy era.

I have not read the Communist Manifesto. I just read Marx for Beginners by Mexican cartoonist Rius. I found that whole series of graphic novel style books to be very helpful to lazy me. I read Nietsche for Beginners, Freud for Beginners and a few others in the series.

China and the Soviet Union and Cuba aside, let’s just look at the principal behind the system…the ideal itself. It all boils down to “from each according to her ability, to each according to her need.”

For me that just means that if all a child can contribute is helping to set the table and weed the garden, then that is what she contributes. And we will give her all she needs to eat, the clothes she needs to wear. If granny is too old and frail to do anything for the group other than mend all our socks, so be it. We won’t kick her to the curb. We will still set a place for her at the table and fill her plate with food.

Those of us able to do more will do more.

Communism.

Commune.

Family unit.

Marriage.

Is there anything inherently evil in that? I find that there is not. I find it to be beautiful, in fact.

Ok, now let’s bring back all those arguments starting with, “But look at the USSR, China, etc.”

Ok, I concede the point. It’s a lovely ideal but doesn’t seem always to work on a large scale. Corruption can creep in. It can be carried out in a way that renders it no different from any other oligarchy. Sad.

Communism can work, though, and has. In cultural anthropology class at UALR, I remember learning about these little nomadic tribes who lived in some inner jungles of Uganda or somewhere like that. They had a communist system that worked perfectly. It was anarchistic communism, to be exact. They didn’t have one leader or chief, but rotated that duty! No chance for a leader to let absolute power corrupt.

I think the key to success for communism is that you keep the group small enough so that everyone knows one another. Loves one another. Then, just maybe, it works.

A Second Chance at Childhood

It was working. Farsi class was keeping me out of trouble. My classmate Andrew was struggling with the wind and the rain chapter as I was participating in grade one activities weekly. I tried comforting him by pointing out that: a) this was my seventh or eighth or ninth language to study; b) I had no family and no social life to tear me away from hours and hours of study and c) I was a keener. I hope I managed to convince him to stop comparing my rate of learning with his own.

But I wasn’t learning as quickly nor as well as I knew I could. Mr. Sadr and the kids in my class were very helpful, always ready to pronounce a difficult word for me or flesh out a definition. But I needed more.

I needed a tutor. I needed someone during the week to help me while I memorized chapters and composed essays that were due the following Saturday.

And so I took a two-pronged approach to finding my tutor. I knew there were two places full of Iranians. One was the University of Waterloo, where in the electrical and mechanical engineering departments you could hear more Farsi around you than English. The other was my apartment building.

I put up a sign in the lobby near the mailboxes. In Farsi I wrote: DO YOU SPEAK FARSI? And the rest I wrote out in English. I was offering English tutoring in exchange for Farsi help. I put my phone number at the bottom on a series of columns and cut between them so anyone interested could tear off my number and put it in her pocket.

Then I emailed the Iranian Students Association at U of W and asked the president to pass on the word that I was needing a tutor.

That week I got a phone call from a young man who was responding to my advertisement. He said he would be happy to help me and would welcome some English practice, too. And so we would meet.

“Which building are you in,” I asked, “One or Two?”

“One,” he said.

“Which floor are you on?” I asked.

“Fourteenth,” he said.

“Fourteenth? I’m on the fourteenth floor! What’s your apartment number?”

“1409,” he said.

“Fourteen o nine? I’m 1408! We’re neighbours!”

And so I met my neighbour Farhad, a meek and awkward young man trying to pass his exams so he could become a practicing accountant. His roommate was the tallest Iranian I’ve ever seen. Both of them were polite, sweet boys who always asked after my welfare when we met in the elevator.

Farhad and I established a schedule. He would come over on Wednesday evenings after we’d each finished dinner and help me with my homework. Then I would help him with his English. He brought his ESL book with him, or sometimes preferred help interpreting a letter from a government office, or wanted me to look over his resume and newest cover letter.

I had known and would come to know many Iranians, but Farhad was just about the only one I knew who was a practicing Muslim. He observed Ramadan. The first time he came to my apartment, he expressed some consternation over the matter of our being together–an unrelated male and female–in a room with the door closed. And so we didn’t pull my front door all the way to, but left it open a hair’s breadth.

Before sitting down to study, I always offered Farhad a traditional glass of hot tea, complete with sugar cubes. Twenty years before, Hamid’s brother–when I stopped to visit him in London–had showed me how to drink tea like an Iranian, placing the sugar cube between my teeth before raising the piping glass of tea to my lips.

I really sucked at preparing the tea, and had to remind poor Farhad that if I’d over steeped it, he need not drink it. I also invited him to show me what I was doing wrong. Together we managed to brew a not quite so disgusting pot of tea.

Farhad and I joked about the Iranian social phenomenon whereby one never accepts anything on the first offer. This is called taarof. Decorum dictates you must wait to see if your friend offers again. And a third time. If you get a third offer, you are free to accept knowing the offer was sincere.

Farhad told me funny stories from his days of learning that we don’t practice taarof in Canada. One day it was raining and he was setting out from campus toward home on foot. His chums passed by in a car and asked him if he wanted a ride. Obligated to decline the first and second invitations, he said, “No thank you.”

His friends said, “suit yourself” and drove off, leaving him standing in the rain.

I helped Farhad practice the Canadian way of doing things. If he politely turned down tea the first time, I’d say, “fine. I’m having some.” Then I’d grin and say, “Want to try that again?” I also assured him that if my tea was so nasty that he really didn’t want any, he could say no the first time and I’d take his word for it. Learning a new set of cultural mores isn’t so easy!

Not long after Farhad and I set up our first tutoring date, I got an email from the president of the Iranian Students Association saying she had found me a tutor. The candidate was working on his PhD in electrical engineering and was extremely excited about the prospect of meeting me.

Oh, dear. Had she not added the latter part, I could have said thanks but no, I’ve already found someone. I decided that since it wasn’t costing my anything but an hour of my own time in exchange for an hour of theirs, it might not hurt to have two tutors.

And so I met Kiarash at a small tea shop next to the campus. I have to tell you that Kiarash and I hit it off as student and teacher so well, and he was so smart and kind and fun…well…it was only with great difficulty and a lot of help from Anna that I managed not to fall head over heels in love with this much younger man (who, by the way, was already taken).

My two tutoring sessions were as different as night and day. Farhad didn’t know how to help me. I tried spelling out what I needed from him, such as, “Could you read the passage through once for me?” He would read it quickly through from start to finish without taking a breath. I’d ask him to slow down a bit, but he didn’t seem to get the concept. Teaching Farhad to teach was stressing me out. So I learned to save certain things for Farhad while relying on my meetings with Kiarash for everything else.

Kiarash, on the other hand, was a natural born teacher. Seeing my interest and giftedness, he challenged me to go further than even I dared imagine I could go from one week to the next. He wanted me to converse with him. I was too embarrassed. A perfectionist, after all, gets it all down and then utters perfect sentences. We do not make fools of ourselves by speaking baby talk in the interim. Yes, well. Kiarash was not one to take no for an answer.

Oh, okay. I suppose I can say Salaam. Haale shomaa chetoreh?

Khoobam, mersi. Haale shomaa chetoreh?

I appreciated the economy of “khoobam,” with am stuck to the end of good, like AmGood rolled into one word. And what could be easier than mersi for thank you instead of the longer, more traditional kheili mamnoon? With these two little words [khoobam, mersi] I could walk the halls of the school answering every inquiry in perfect Persian and sound ever so fluent. Fun!

During my next session with Anna, I reported on my new life as a first grader. I told her of playing with Khorsheed and Kimia at recess. I really felt like I’d died and gone to heaven. My work week dragged by; I couldn’t make Saturday come soon enough.

She asked how things were going on the other front.

“Still nothing. Tabula rasa.”

When I’d first told Anna that my paraphilia was gone and that in its place was nothing, she’d nodded and smiled broadly, saying, “That’s GOOD.” I trust her, so I took her word that it was a good thing, almost puffing up with pride as if I’d had anything to do with it.

With her sharp eye and ear for those coincidences no Jungian considers to be coincidence, she noted that I had dreamed of an eight year old. My playground mates were eight years old.

“What was going on when you were eight, Kelly?” she asked me.

“I guess we’d just moved to Arkansas. It was right before things started to fall apart. That was the year before Mom met Don, who made me touch him,” I reported, curious to know what she was thinking.

“So that was your last year of innocence,” she said softly, scribbling notes on her pad. She put her pen down. We looked at one another as that idea settled on the quiet room.

So Many Good Things

This morning as I greet the day I am thankful for so many things, for the people who have come into my life, for my job, for my boss, who nearly broke into tears when I popped my head into her office yesterday to say, “when is the last time I told you YOU ROCK?” She has a tendency to focus on all the things she thinks she is not doing perfectly, while losing sight of all the ways in which she is head and shoulders above most people who manage people.

Reading a friend’s blog has me feeling even more grateful than usual for my wonderful job.

This afternoon I have a massage booked, and my benefits will pay for it. I’m thankful for that.

Last night a lovely young woman named Holly spent way more than $35 worth of her time shearing and razoring and clipping and shaping my hair. Yippeeee! Short hair again! I feel as if I look 10 pounds thinnner and a good five years younger. Not to mention EMPOWERED. Thank you, Holly.

I’m having a lot of fun blogging about Farsi school.

And…(saving the best for last)… my friend Dave just emailed me to let me know that my favouritest musical group in the whole world just came out with their third album! I think I might float to work this morning.

Baabaa Naan Daad (Father Gives Bread)

All Farsi primers start the same way. You learn A, B, N and D and you are reading!

Note: There are two a sounds in Farsi. One is short like the a in cat. The other is soft a as in ought, but very long and drawn out and diphthongized. It’s hard to describe. I write the second one as “aa.” Okay?

So you learn aleph, be, nun and de and you can say father gives bread: baabaa naan daad. The verb comes at the end. So that really says Father bread gives. You knew naan meant bread, didn’t you? You’ve seen it on the menu at Indian restaurants. What? Hindu and Persian are related? Yes, they are both Indo-European languages, related to English!(Arabic is not.)

To give you an idea of the common roots of Farsi and English, check out these cognates or close cognates: girl – dokhtar; mother – madaar; brother – baraadar. Here is how you count to ten in Farsi. Think of these numbers in Latin or French or Spanish and see the resemblances:
1 – yek 2 – do 3 – seh 4 – chahar 5 – panj 6 – sheesh 7- haft 8 – hasht 9 – noh 10 – dah

I am thinking of dos in Spanish, pente in Greek, seis in Spanish, nonegenarian in English, ten in most of them. Cool, eh?

So if Baabaa naan daad is father bread gives, and aab is water, how do you say father water gives?

Righto!

===========

I don’t make any friends at recess that first Saturday. But I can tell the children are curious about Andrew and me. They peek at us when they think we aren’t looking. They whisper.

Mr. Sadr gives Andrew and me primers. With the exception of the drawings, this is the same reader every Iranian was given in school. Their parents learned these stories and so did their parents’ parents. During the reign of the Shah, the illustrations were of stylish men in suits and ties, women in pillbox hats like Jackie O. Since the revolution, the illustrations show women with the head covering and never show an unrelated man and woman touching.

I start with lesson one: father gives bread. I have to write it out in my notebook before I can move on to story two. I read the first story over and over until I am certain that if Mr. Sadr calls on me to read it, I’ll be able to do so without stumbling.

Class runs from 9:00 to noon with a 20-minute recess, when we are allowed to roam the halls of the school, eat our snacks, or stay at our desks doing our lessons. I usually stretch, use the washroom if I need to, then go back to my desk to move farther along in the reader.

By the time recess is over, I have all but memorized the story of the horse in the rain and the story of the rain and the wind, and am on story number six, which is about two girls, Saraa and her friend. One has a basket of pomegranates and the other girl has a basket with no pomegranates. I am starting to learn how to say “has” and “has not.”

As the children slowly drift back to their seats chattering in English to one another, Mr. Sadr walks past and looks over my shoulder. In an almost admonishing tone he asks, “you’re on page 12?”

“Yes,” I say.

“So you can read all the stories up to page 12?”

“Yes,” I say. “Would you like me to read this one to you?” Say yes, say yes, say yes.

“Sure,” he says with a remnant of doubt in his voice.

I read the little story that covers two facing pages, pausing in the right places to show I understand the meaning.

When I’m done, I look up at Mr. Sadr.

“Do you understand what you just read?” he asks.

“Yes,” I answer with a straight face, trying to conceal my wish to jump up and hug him around the neck.

Mr. Sadr leaves the room. He returns in a minute accompanied by a large man with a kind face. This must be Mr. Raad, the poet and literary scholar Mr. Oates bragged about, saying how fortunate the Farsi school was to have Mr. Mehran Raad himself teaching the advanced class.

“Do you mind reading the story again for Mr. Raad?” Mr. Sadr asks me.

“Not at all,” I say. I read it through again.

============

Before long I decide that while it is good for me to learn my foundations from the little storybook about Sarah and Darah and their uncle with the pomegranate orchard, I am missing out on a huge opportunity to advance my listening comprehension by not paying attention to what Mr. Sadr is saying to the class all morning long.

I know full well the fastest way to learn a language is total immersion. So I begin eavesdropping on the 1st and 2nd grade. I read my primer, copy out the lesson, recite in my head, mark in light pencil the words I need pronounced for me during the break, then watch and listen to the class taking place a few rows in front of me.

For the first few weeks, I can pick out nothing. But then one day I hear “khoob” and know now it means “good,” or “okay.” I keep listening.

At the end of one Saturday, I piece together the fact that a homework assignment has been put up on the chalkboard. After Mr. Sadr leaves the room, I approach one of the little girls.

“What is the assignment?” I ask.

“We must write a one page essay about ourselves,” Khorsheed says. She is so earnest in everything she does and says. I imagine she will turn in a good essay.

That night at home I struggle with my new dictionary and my phrasebook I picked up at The World’s Biggest Bookstore in Toronto. By the end of the night, I have managed:

Hello. Good morning. My name is Kelly. I am from America. Now I live in Canada. I have a cat. My cat’s name is Nike. She is black and white.

I write big to make my essay fill the page of my little composition book.

The following Saturday when Mr. Sadr asks for a volunteer to go first in reading our essays in front of the class, I raise my hand. I know. I didn’t ask his permission to participate in first grade.

Mr. Sadr addresses me in Farsi and says a lot of stuff I do not understand. I imagine he is asking me if I have an essay and want to read it, so I nod tentatively and motion to stand. He steps back a bit, body language I take to mean, “come on up.”

I read my essay to the class.

My classmates stare silently through the reading of my essay and go on sitting silently after I’m done.

Mr. Sadr is smiling broadly and says in Farsi what I take to be something like, “Children! Didn’t Miss Kelly do a good job? Let’s give her a hand.” The children clap.

I avoid eye contact with Andrew, who still doesn’t quite get that all As are not long As.

That day when Mr. Sadr dismisses us for recess, I head down the hall to see what the vending machine has to offer. I overslept and didn’t have time to grab an apple or anything.

From behind me I suddenly hear, “Kelly! Kelly!”

I turn around. Kimia and Khorsheed are barrelling down the corridor toward me. I break out in a huge grin and await their arrival.

“Kelly, Kelly,” Khorsheed says, out of breath, “do you want one of my muffins?”

And so Kimia, Khorsheed and I plop our bums down on the waxed floor, lean against the lockers and share a baggie of muffins.

to be continued…

Kiki Goes to Kindergarten

photo: Ho Ma Li

I showed up at Centennnial Public School bright and early the Saturday morning of registration. I was excited. I gave the principal, Mr. Oates, my cheque and made my way down the long hallway to my new classroom.

Some moms in full Islamic cover were standing at the head of the class talking among themselves. I tried making eye contact and smiling as I passed by them to pick out my little bitty desk. Not one of them acknowledged me. I was invisible.

I sat there wondering what to do for twenty minutes until the teacher and more kids showed up. I tried not to let the mothers’ cliquishness get me down. They’d warm up to me. Surely.

I strained to hear them, to see if I could pick out a few words of Farsi. I couldn’t. In fact, the more I listened, the more I suspected that the language being spoken by them was not even Persian. I heard a lot of deep, way-back-of-the-throat gutterals.

It dawned on me slowly.

I was in the wrong classroom.

I stood and gathered my notebook and pens and put them back in my backpack. I picked up my coat and pushed past the clutch of women, who still did not return my smile.

I walked one classroom farther down the hall and found myself amid several beautiful black-haired young women with no trace of Islamic anything. No scarves, no manteau. They wore their thick hair loose, had on makeup and dark new jeans that showed off their darling figures, tight fuzzy sweaters. They each smiled at me as I passed by into the classroom. I smiled back and said “good morning.”

“Are you here to learn Persian?” one mother asked me.

“Yes, I am,” I answered.

“Oh! I didn’t know adults could come to the classes,” she said.

“Yes, if you pay a fee, you can sit in,” I said.

The young mother poked her son in the arm and said, “See that? You should feel privileged! This lady WANTS to learn our language!”

The boy squirmed sheepishly under his mother’s playfully shaming gaze.

Soon the teacher, Mr. Sadr, came in with his briefcase. He was only a little older than I with reddish hair and freckles, light eyes. You didn’t know there were red-headed Iranians, did you? The word Iranian means Aryan.

Mr. Sadr spent a long while talking to one mother and then another in Farsi while the kids picked out their desks and pulled binders out of backpacks. I watched Mr. Sadr’s lips and tried to imagine what he was saying. I imagined he was giving the mothers an idea what to expect, when to come pick up their children, how long the students would get for snack time and recess. Things like that.

I heard one word over and over, but didn’t know yet what it meant: “Khoob.” Mostly Mr. Sadr said it. I would need to buy a dictionary soon so I could look up words I heard.

I was not the only adult in the class. Andrew was just out of university, didn’t yet have a job, had an Iranian-born girlfriend, Kimia. Andrew was taking the class so he could understand what Kimia’s parents were saying around the dinner table.

Mr. Sadr made a class out of Andrew and me. I guess we were the kindergarten class; we sat at the very back. The middle rows were the first grade. The front row was where last year’s first grade graduates sat: second grade.

Mr. Sadr came back to Andrew and me and gave us a sheet on which was printed the Persian alphabet. Beside each squiggle was the name of the letter in English and its pronunciation. He asked us to spend a few minutes studying that, he’d be back.

Then he went to the front of the class and addressed the children.

“Bache-haa, sobh bekhair,” he said cheerfully and loudly to the group.

“Sobh bekhair,” they answered in unison.

He went around the room asking each of us to tell our names. I tried memorizing a few of them. The smart looking 8-year-old in the front row was Khorsheed. Her tiny friend was Kimia.

When he got to me and Andrew, everyone stared. Kimia’s eyes got big as she twisted around in her seat to gawk at us.

“Are you going to be in our CLASS?” the girl one row up and across the aisle from me asked.

I smiled. “Yes.”

Introductions over, Mr. Sadr continued with some sort of address or orientation to the coming year’s activities, or so I deduced from his tone and gestures, pauses and facial expressions.

I returned my gaze to the paper in front of me. Some of the letters I remembered from twenty years before. For some, I had to cheat and look at the English transcriptions: “aleph, be, pe, te, se …” I recited in my head, moving my lips. Andrew was doing the same thing in the desk behind me.

Finally the kids were busy writing something, so Mr. Sadr was free to come check on his kindergarteners.

“Okay, let me hear you say them,” he asked me.

I cleared my throat nervously. “Aleph be pe te se…. jim che he khe dal zal re ze zhe….. sin shin sad zad ta za ‘ain…. …. …. here goes nothing… ghain nailed it! fe …. …. qaf … kaf gaf lam mim nun vav he ye.” Yesssssss.

“Perfect!” Mr. Sadre proclaimed, asking me to practice writing them while he moved on to hear Andrew’s recitation.

Gosh, I love opening a crisp new spiral notebook, click-clicking my mechanical pencil to life. I lined up my coloured pens, my eraser, my highlighter. I hunkered down into my sweet tiny desk and began writing rows of handsome alephs with its sweeping hat. Rows of be (don’t forget the dot); rows of pe (three dots are fun!); rows of te (two dots on top); rows…

All around me children’s pens and pencils scratched across paper. The clock ticked toward eleven. My tummy growled.

I wondered if I would make any friends at recess.

to be continued…

Apples, Grass Sprouts and Coins

Around the time of the spring Equinox, Hamid told me about his holiday called Nowrooz or Iranian New Year. It is an ancient celebration going back to the time when Persians were Zoroastrian or even earlier, thus pre-dating the foisting of Islam on the Persian people by the Arabs.

Nourooz is preceded with a fireworks (and fire-jumping) night called “Chaharshanbe Soori”. It happens on the evening before the last Wednesday of the year. People make little fires and jump over them, saying “give me your beautiful red colour, take back my sickly palour.”

Hamid told me that Nourooz itself, the moment of Equinox, is celebrated by families around a table adorned with seven items starting with “S” in Persian: a special wheat pudding, apples, coins, sprouted grass seeds, to name some.

I’ve since learned that the Islamic Republic has tried again and again to stop people from celebrating this “pagan” holiday. They will never succeed.

=================

When Pete and I agreed, in March of 2003, that I should move out, I found a one-bedroom apartment on the 13th (labelled 14th) floor of an 18-floor apartment building on Regina Street very near both universities.

Every once in a while when I was in the elevator with a group of residents, I thought I heard Farsi being spoken. I’d listened to enough tapes of revolutionary music and poetry in Hamid’s car to know the cadence of his beautiful language.

One day I saw two old women sitting on the benches in the front courtyard. They had on the Iranian version of the full Islamic covering for women. I was sitting on another bench journalling and tried smiling and making eye contact to initiate an exchange. It occurred to me when I didn’t get a response that these elder women–possibly here visiting children and grandchildren–might not know any English.

Before long a lovely young woman with bouncy raven-black hair got out of a Nissan and started to enter the building. But first she stopped and exchanged respectful salutations with the old women. I heard, “Salaam” and “…chetor….”

That word rang a bell. As I had sat in the student union all those lunch hours 20 years before, I’d pestered the boys to give me Farsi lessons. They had taught me the entire alphabet and how to say a few phrases, nothing more than hello, goodbye, thank you, how are you, yes, no and “Do you speak Farsi?”

Chetor! That was part of “how are you,” I now recalled.

Then one day very soon after that I was riding down in the elevator with a mother and daughter pair. They were chattering away in Farsi. The university-age woman was holding a silver platter on which were some apples, a bowl of something resembling pudding, some coins and a few other items.

My heartbeat quickened after I decided I would say something to them. I had a few more floors to go, giving me time to screw up my courage.

“Happy New Year,” I finally managed, smiling.

“Oh! Thank you!” they both said, exiting a few floors before the lobby.

==================

One evening in August of that year, I was wandering around Uptown Waterloo, a section of town where the main street is lined with funky shops and cafes. A new store had just opened called Mediterranean Market. There was Persian writing on the large glass store front. I had to go in.

Behind the counter stood a huge bull of a man with a head of thick, salt and pepper hair and sun-browned, leathery skin. At his side was a lad of about nine, who jumped to my aid as soon as I started asking questions of the silent man.

This boy was beautiful beyond description. His dark brown eyes were accentuated by the longest black eyelashes I’d ever seen. He had a head of thick hair like his father, and his face and arms were covered in soft, swirling black hair the way some babies are born.

The boy took me up one aisle and down the next, asking, “Do you need rice? Next week my father is getting in fresh bread from Toronto. This is rose water. It’s good for your skin. You should buy these.”

“What are they?” I asked, looking at the bag of shriveled white things resembling dried apple slices.

The boy didn’t know the English word for them, but he proceeded to tell me what to do with them. I should leave them soaking in water all day. Then I should rinse them off and dice them up and put them in my yogurt! I wouldn’t be sorry.

I could not resist this little salesman’s pitch. I took the bag of shrivelly things from him.

To go with the shrivelly things, I asked the boy’s father to measure me out some yogurt from the big store of it in the deli case. In there were four kinds of cheese resembling feta. Then there were the sweets. I ignored those for now.

Every time the man had something to say to me, he said it in Farsi to the boy, who said it to me in English.

The bells on the door tinkled behind me as I walked out into the night. I decided right there on the spot that the next time I came back to shop at the store, I would converse with the man in HIS language.

I needed something to keep me out of trouble, after all, if I was going to go a whole year without dating. Entering analysis that month had me feeling good about myself. And it had been over a decade since I last studied a foreign language. I’d left them all behind, letting them grow rusty from disuse. I’d burned out, I think, after learning so many. It got to be old hat. Onto other things!

I hadn’t realized it at the time that during my marriage my self-esteem had suffered a blow. He doesn’t mean to be, but Pete is a micro-manager and constant critic of everything around him. At his folks’ house, he follows his mom around reminding her when to put in the potatoes lest dinner should run too late. He warns his dad not to let the steaks burn. He lets his mom know if the turnip dish is not quite up to par this time. When he finds out which kind of pie she picked up at the grocery store, he’ll often say, “MUM! What were you thinking?”

After three years living with a man who nit picked constantly over how I did everything I did, who was no longer attracted to me when I put on five pounds, who begged me to work out at the Y more so I’d be hot and have a flat tummy, who at the end would not return my nightly “I love you,” ….after three years of that, I was beaten down and didn’t know it.

That summer I began to realize how my self-image had suffered. Around Pete I was the silly, bumbling girl who needed him to guide me through the morning. See, I was addicted to sugar and if I didn’t keep my blood sugar perfectly even with constant snacks, I got dopey. Yes, I did dumb things. Often, in fact. But I’m not a dumb person.

It took getting away from the marriage for me to remember that. I am not dumb! I am not fat!

I needed to engage in one of the things that makes me feel smart.

The next day at work I told my friend Miranda that I was going to learn Farsi, picking back up the only language I’d ever failed to learn in spite of wanting to. Back when I was 20, there had not been good texts available. I had surfed the net the night before and found CD sets, books, online tutorials with audio clips…you name it. I was JAZZED.

Miranda asked me if I knew about Saturday school.

“No, what’s that?”

“Oh, every language is taught in Kitchener-Waterloo on Saturdays. The Chinese children learn their parents’ language at this elementary school, the Romanian ones learn at that school. They probably have Farsi, too,” she said, and told me to look under Waterloo Region District School Board.

I found it. Amazingly, registration day was the following Saturday. School started the first Saturday in September. It was free for public school children, but adults could join the classes for a fee of $189 for the year. I did the math. That was about $8 per class. I printed off the registration form.

to be continued…

The Iranian Revolution

I hated gym class. I was a pasty white bookworm who didn’t like dressing in front of other girls. I was no good at any sport, the kid picked last to join a team. They put me in left field; one day the ball was falling right toward the spot where I was standing. Do you think I raised my glove to catch it? Of course not. I knew how fast that object was moving through space. I covered my head and closed my eyes.

The gym teacher was sympathetic and allowed me to sit in the bleachers every day, just so long as I “dressed out.” Sometimes she could coax me down to attempt somersaults on the mat or walking on a balance beam. But the rest of the time I was allowed to sit out. She knew I couldn’t possibly have a stomach ache every single day, but after a while I didn’t even have to make things up. I slinked up to sit in the bleachers and she didn’t challenge me. Bless her for that.

Midway through the year, I found I had a bleacher warming companion. Here name was Afsaneh and her family had just moved from Iran. This was around the time of the Iranian Revolution.

Afsaneh and I sat up in the bleachers and she told me a little about herself. She and her younger sister Parvaneh lived in an apartment with their dad. This was the year I discovered I could learn Spanish and German at the same time, so I asked her about her language. She told me it was Farsi (Persian) and that it was not written like English.

“Really?” I was intrigued. “Show me!”

And so softspoken Afsaneh with her jet black hair, olive complexion and long, black eyelashes took out a piece of paper and wrote something in Persian for me. It didn’t look so hard. I told her I wanted to learn her language. I asked her to give me some words to memorize by the next day. She seemed doubtful. But I begged.

“Ok,” she relented. This is kafsh. It means shoe. This is keshmesh. It means raisin. I loved the way she wrote. The letter shin looked like waves on the ocean with three little dots up top. Mim reminded me of an inchworm. Kaf was confident, a big sabre-like stroke sliding down doward its main stem. I was captivated. The fact that we started on the right side of the paper and wrote toward the left just added to the mystique of this beautiful language. To my ear, it was every bit as lovely as Portuguese.

===============

In 1982-1983, I was a sophomore at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I don’t remember exactly how I met them–perhaps it was through my East Indian friend Shailesh. I just remember spending every lunch break in the student union with a small group of Iranian men. The one I got to know first was Hamid, a tall, slender man with sallow skin and a mop of loose brown curls, glasses. He was an artist.

As I got to know this group of very political intellectuals, I came to learn a lot about their country, culture and past. They were all Marxists, for one. They admired Che Guevara and lamented what was happening back home. Though the Shah had been a puppet of the U.S. government–installed by the CIA–the Ayatollah was probably not the answer to Iran’s problems. Well, some of them believed the Ayatollah could wrest their country back from American control. Others thought he was just as bad as the regime he replaced. They debated this endlessly.

Hamid and I started dating. The first time I came to his rented house on Capitol, which he shared with two housemates, I wandered around staring at his large paintings and mixed media works. They were all so dark and sad.

Hamid told me his brother had been imprisoned in Iran. Imprisoned and tortured. Hamid’s work was about oppression, the darkness of living in a land where you are not free to express your beliefs, are not free to shape the future of your country. Hamid showed me a photo album containing pictures of some of his brother’s art. Each work conveyed very powerfully the feeling of being captive in a tiny, dark cell with no sunlight… held by sadistic people who do unspeakable things to you out of sight or earshot of the world.

These men were so gracious toward me. They were so utterly polite and respectful. Warm. I felt like a sister in their presence. When it was time to eat, someone made traditional Iranian rice. We spread a blanket on the floor and gathered around the rice pot. Soon the boys were squabbling over how large a piece of tadig each was going to get. There was only so much of the golden crusty layer from the bottom of the pot to go around.

“Kelly should get the first piece. She is our guest,” one said. And so I was given the choicest piece of tadig.

It has always surprised me to discover that some people think Persians are an Arab people. They are not. I have a decided bias toward Iranians–due to my experiences in their company. And as ugly as it sounds, my feelings toward Arab peoples are not very warm.

I only had two types of exchanges with the Arab students on campus. Not all, but many of them drove to school in expensive new cars with ostentatious gold trim and little flashy lights around the personalized plates. I had a few of them ask me to write papers for them at $50 a pop. I refused, but offered to tutor them through writing their own paper for free. They said no thank you, they could find someone else to write the paper for $50.

And I accepted a couple of invitations to go out on dates. Those left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I got the feeling that the Arab man feels contempt for the western woman, but not so much contempt that he wouldn’t try to get her into bed if he could find a way to do so that didn’t violate his religious tenents. There are loopholes, you see…loopholes that allow him to fool around before marriage. Arab women have no such loopholes.

It didn’t take long before I was avoiding the Arabs on campus. This is terrible to admit, but I didn’t like the sound of their language, either.

to be continued…

GF IV: What Ever Happened to the…You Know

I went through many phases with my devoteeism.

At first it was the deep, dark secret that made me feel only shame: shame for finding pleasure in something that was rooted in another’s misfortune, shame for not being able to be physically attracted to a man I loved who loved me, shame around the way this attraction drove me to slink around underground.

Part of what made it so hard to come out of the closet was the attitude of some members of the disabled community. There had been an article in one of the disability culture magazines about US. It was entitled Caveat Dater and warned people, especially unsuspecting women, of the typical behaviour patterns of a devotee.

In the chatrooms, devs spent HOURS kvetching about how the behaviours of a few bad apples were giving us all a bad reputation. Some devotees stalk. Some take photos surreptitiously in public and then post them on the internet. Some make videos, no less, and do the same. Yes, there are devotees who don’t care about anything but getting their fix. They use women for the sexual rush and then discard them.

There was anecdotal evidence around every corner that devotees could not be trusted to become faithful partners. We were always going to search out a higher rush. There was the story from Britain of the “one crutch girl” who came home one day to find her devotee boyfriend having sex with a “two crutch girl.”

But then there were couples like Rick and Joni, who had been together a long time. There were others among us who said, “No, I’m not like that. I am searching for my soul mate. If I ever found him/her, I would NEVER cheat.” That’s how I felt.

And indeed, once Pete and I married, the physical response to strangers in public stopped. I was so relieved, you can’t even imagine. The entire energy of the paraphilia was able to be focused in the marriage. That was wonderful. Wonderful.

But when we split up, I was right back where I’d started. I was tempted to join my old chat rooms, the dating clubs that help people with disabilities meet those interested in dating them.

One thing that tortured me through all this was the lack of integrity in my life. I so wanted to come clean, just be out of the closet once and for all. Even while married to Pete, it was still a secret from those around us. He knew, but we never told anyone else. I assumed he wouldn’t want anyone to know, so I was quiet. Had he taken an open attitude to it, I would have as well. It would have required a large dose of humour, and neither he nor I have that personality type.

It’s ironic, you know. There are all these people with disabilities out there in the world wishing others saw them as sexual beings. Society neuters them. We are very uncomfortable as a culture with the idea of the sexual gimp. But these folks are just like everyone else.

Just imagine for a moment that you broke your leg and had to use crutches. Did your sex drive go away? Imagine you broke your neck and ended up a quadriplegic. Once you got out of rehab and started living life again, do you imagine you would not still yearn to make love with your partner?

I thought it was such a pity that I had this attraction in a world full of lonely gimps, yet we couldn’t quite get together. I found it very difficult to meet someone with whom I was compatible. I remember back in Little Rock giving my brother the odd ride to a board meeting where I would see fellows in wheelchairs. But the only cute one carried a plastic 7-11 cup with him so he could spit out his tobacco juice. Yeah. Slim pickins there in Arkansas.

I got a HUGE crush on a guy who used to shop in the bookstore. His mother had taken thalidomide, and he used a wheelchair and had a beautiful golden retriever service dog who helped him get about and reach things. I became quite obsessed with him for a while. My coworker, a devout Catholic who had almost become a nun at one time in her life and who spent a lot of time talking to this customer, informed me that he was making plans to join the Jesuit order. Sigh.

Yeah, it’s hard to meet guys when you’re a devotee. How to you broach the subject? Is it going to offend him that your initial attraction to him was mostly physical? Many people with disabilities do get freaked out by that.

Over a decade ago, I was lying in bed one weekend morning listening to NPR. A man was being interviewed. This man, Mark O’Brien, had lived his whole life since the age of 6 in an iron lung. Polio had ravaged his body.

Mark was a poet, so the interviewer asked him to recite one of his poems. Mark timed his phrasing to the exhalation of the iron lung and squeaked out the stanzas of his poem. I lay motionless so as not to miss a word.

The interviewer asked Mark about his experience with a sexual surrogate, which he’d written about. He told the story–Google Mark O’Brien and surrogate to find it. It’s very touching. When the news story was over, I thought I’d found my calling in life. I would become a surrogate!

I sent off for the application to the school in California that could certify me. I would have to go out there for a two week intensive training. It would cost about the same amount I had in my savings account. But when the literature came in the mail and I read through the Code of Ethics, I realized I shouldn’t do it. There was no way I could separate the clinical from the emotional and not fall in love with any of my clients. I didn’t have good boundary skills. Another potential solution withered.

When Pete and I separated, I moved to an apartment and lived there for a year on my own before filing for divorce. I’d read that a one-year separation makes the legalities of divorce go much more smoothly in this province. I didn’t date during that year, which makes it the longest period I’d ever gone without a boyfriend since age 13. I was a serious relationship addict, never having managed to let more than a few weeks go by between one breakup and the next hookup.

But I was steadfast this time.

Four months into that year, my fortieth birthday upon me, I told Mom during one of our Sunday phone chats that I was toying with the idea of getting back in some sort of counselling. I felt stuck and perhaps it was time again to get the help of an objective third party to show me the stuff in my blind spots, to help shake things up.

Mom had just come into a small inheritance from the liquidating of her late parents’ estate, and she made me an incredible offer. If I would seek out a Jungian analyst this time, she would pay for it…up to a certain amount. A certain large amount.

And so I Googled “Jungian Analysts Ontario” and found Anna, whose practice is a short bus ride or even quicker bike ride from where I work. After passing the “do we have good chemistry together” test with flying colours, I went out and bought the tiny paperback Digesting Jung at a used bookstore. That story is in my archives way back at the beginning.

Soon I got the hang of it. Journal all my dreams. Bring my dream journal with me to the sessions. I learned the meanings of concepts like animus, anima, shadow and complex. I grasped the idea behind complex very quickly and came up with my own lingo to describle to Anna what I was feeling at times. I often said, “I was in the grips of a complex.”

These are times when I act in ways I don’t want to act. For example, when I would go into a trancelike state and do anything and everything to try to bump into a certain person with whom I was obsessed, I was in the grips of a complex.

Anna gave me excellent tools for learning to become more conscious. That is my goal in analysis. The books call the process individuation. I guess that is the big picture. But my everyday goal is to be fully aware of all my motives and bring them to consciousness so that I can make fully informed decisions regarding how I want to act. I want all my life choices to have conscious motives under them. I do not want to be under the control of these shadowy manipulators and saboteurs, defense mechanisms that sprang to life during my childhood to help me cope with awful situations but which are NO LONGER NEEDED.

Anna helps me identify these parts of me, name them, contain them. You can’t kill them off. No, they will always be there. But you can shrink them, negotiate with them, show them who’s boss. They don’t belong in the driver’s seat. Dreams help enormously with this task, as does journalling to them, writing letters to these parts of you, talking to them.

For example, I’ve come to know a part of me that wants me to feel unworthy. In the beginning I had to dialogue with it and say “Who are you? What do you want?” Then listen for the answer. Nowadays I’m on familiar terms with that part of me, so before any big event when I suspect it will try to sabotage my success, I’ll just take a moment to have a little chat with it. I’ll say, “Listen, this is important to me. I don’t need you around today. Here’s five dollars; go see a movie.” Anna says another good one is “go look for sea shells.”

I was several months into analysis before the gimp subject came up. To be honest, I didn’t want to get into it with her. I’d finally come to accept that as who I was. Just like being gay or straight, I was HARD WIRED this way. I was not totally out of the closet yet, but that was my goal…to live a life of integrity. I knew I’d get there slowly and didn’t feel I needed any help in that area of my life. Also, I’d never met a therapist who’d even heard of devoteeism. So I often felt defensive and overwhelmed by the task of introducing them to the phenomenon.

But letting Anna know about this could not be avoided once I had a gimp dream to report. “It was one of my gimp dreams,” I said one day sitting on her comfy low sofa.

“One of your what?” she said, straining to hear and understand what I was saying.

“I have dreams about gimpy people, crips.” I gave her a cursory review of the whole thing, uncomfortable the entire time I was talking about it. It was one of my dream motifs. I had house dreams, nomad dreams, gimp dreams. Anna took some serious notes that day.

Between that session and the next, I found an article to bring with me. It was a scholarly work explaining the nature of paraphilias. I gave it to Anna so she could get up to speed. I continued from the previous week telling her the history. I closed with a fatalistic, “It’s how I’m wired.”

“I don’t buy it,” she said, staring right at me, unblinking.

I felt dismissed, my own knowledge of myself invalidated. “I don’t CARE if you buy it or not, I’m telling you how it feels!” I stared back, unblinking.

I told her it was my sexual orientation and I had done a lot of work on accepting myself this way. She wanted to talk about my feelings about my brother. My father. Sigh.

Ok, why not? So we spent a session talking about what it had been like having Mikey come tumbling into our world when I was 18 months old. We talked about my father and his illness. We talked about the other adults around me who had physical disabilities.

Anna asked me about the gimp dreams. We talked about one I’d just had…the feelings in the dream.

Anna is good at drilling down. I’ve been in and out of talk therapy my whole adult life, plus I’m an open person. So I am good at going deeper, peeling back the layers of denial crusted over the real feelings beneath something.

Anna asked me what the feeling was when I see a disabled person in public and feel the attraction. Not the physical feeling, but what were the emotions and thoughts.

I began to cry. This happens when she hits a nerve. I am so overcome by the sudden truth hitting me, I can’t speak at first and can only blow my nose and dab at my eyes under my glasses.

“I think that if I don’t become that person’s lover, who will? It’s as if God has given me a mission, a calling. I am the one who must touch lepers and love the unlovable.”

“How is it that you didn’t end up in a helping profession?” Anna asked.

“I don’t know. I think it’s because when I was in school, I didn’t have the self-confidence to pursue any career path. But I often have imagined that in the Middle Ages, I was one of those monks who tended the lepers.”

We talked more about how, after my father died, I was left to help mom with my brother. She didn’t call on me all that much. But she has had mild depression her whole life and does drink. I imagine there was some part of me that felt I had to rise to certain tasks at hand.

The conversations around this subject were hard for me at first. I didn’t want to explore them, but I agreed to do so just enough to appease Anna, to be a good, cooperative analysand. But I was eager to get back to other subjects. And we did.

One morning some weeks later I woke up and the paraphilia was gone.

Gone.

It had simply lifted.

I didn’t dare believe it at first. So I dusted off some old fantasies to test it. Nothing.

Here’s the weird part. There was no new sexuality in its place. I was completely and utterly as asexual as I was when I was 8 years old. Holy Hannah, where’s my journal? I coudn’t WAIT to tell Anna.

Well, this brings me to a whole new storyline, which is the story of why I began learning Persian and what that has to do with the birth of a natural sexuality inside me. I’m sure Mo won’t let me go too long without writing it out for you here.

GF III: The Marriage

Hi, Mo,
Ready for part III, eh? Ok, here goes.

Pete’s apartment in a highrise is quite small. He has a long, narrow kitchen/dining area, long, shotgun living room, small bathroom with no tub, just a shower modified so the shower chair can be rolled right in, one cramped bedroom and one very small spare room. The place looked like a dorm room: Star Wars posters were the only decor.

Fast forward a year or so and we were doing pretty well. I had organized everything, taken the movie posters down and painted the rooms cheery colours (I did a fantastic job single-handedly, I might add), had put up artwork and had filled the windowsills with plants. They hung from the ceiling in front of every window, too, in macrame hangers from Ten Thousand Villages. My kitties had since died. Prozie was hit by a car and Isis got cancer. We had two new tuxedo cats, Zelus and Nike, who were the light of our lives.

Pete had gotten a job with the Independent Living Centre (ILC) as a consumer coach. He had the philosophy of self-direction down, but not all new consumers did. Say an attendant starts work and his past job was in a residential facility for people with developmental disabilities. That PCA comes to the ILC conditioned to doing a lot of thinking on behalf of the people he serves. It will take a strong consumer to break him of those habits.

At a facility like the one he’s come from, it’s very possible that a nurse came around and handed out medicine to the residents. In an ILC project, the entire burden of thinking and decision-making is on the consumer. If the consumer says, “Give me three of those blue pills and one of the white ones,” then that’s what the PCA does. If the dosage is wrong, the entire fault belongs to the consumer. The PCA learns to follow instructions and not judge those instructions or help the consumer think.

Some consumers came to the project fresh from their parents’ home, where mommy and daddy thought for them. Their independent thinking muscles need flexing. They need coaching in how to direct a PCA to do his/her job. That’s where the consumer coach was to come in. It was good to see Pete employed instead of just drawing a disability cheque. His lifelong depression eased up during this time.

I remember when Pete and I were talking on the phone between Waterloo and Little Rock. One day we talked about our television habits. I had said, “I watch about an hour of TV a week. I like 60 Minutes. The rest of the time I throw a table cloth over the thing.”

Pete had said, “Yeah, it’s mostly garbage.”

“Oh, you don’t watch much TV either?” I perked up. He said something that I took for confirmation.

Here’s the part where I caution everybody in the whole world to GET TO KNOW a person before you marry her or him.

On weekends or every day during periods of unemployment, Pete turned the television on at around 9:00 in the morning. Unless we were going out, he didn’t turn it off until 11:30 that night. Bedtime.

This became the source of much friction between us. I reasoned, “I live here too. I should get to decide what we watch 50% of the time.”

Well, Pete reacted about as viscerally as the old wino did when I tried to reclaim the last half of the bottle of wine I’d paid for and had shared with him. Ever try to take food away from a starving dog? Ever try to take drugs away from an addict? Yeah. There was no way I was going to win that one. Pete insisted he HAD to see Star Trek original series and Star Trek II and III and Next Generation and the one with Whoopie and …well, you get it. Then there were the cop shows. Saturday there were special tech product reviews that he could NOT miss. Oh, and don’t even THINK of touching that remote control when it’s time for the Simpsons.

So then I tried to negotiate just certain times of day…after his block of favourites…when I could choose what to watch. Finally he caved. Ok. I could have TWO HOURS a day to his twelve.

“It’s my turn to choose now?”

“Yes,” he said, dejectedly.

“You’re SURE?” I tested.

“Yeah, go ahead. Put on what you want to watch.”

“Excellent!” I beamed. I choose SILENCE! and I grabbed the remote, aimed it at the box and hit POWER OFF. Blessed silence. Blessed blooming silence.

“WHAT???” Pete began to panic. What did I expect him to do for an hour? I told him that was entirely up to him, I was going to read a book. He said he couldn’t just sit and stare at the walls. That wasn’t fair to him. So I offered to set him up with a book on his tray. Or play Scrabble with him. No, that takes too much concentration. Pete had to bob his head up and down a bit to make breathing easier, and you can’t bob and read at the same time, he explained. He always had an answer.

I remember when Immigration singled out my application for permanent residence status in order to interview us due to the nature of our courtship: so quick, having met online and all that. So one Saturday the fellow called to do the interview over the phone. By the time Pete called my name and woke me from my delicious weekend slumber, his part of the interview was over. It was my turn.

The man asked me to tell him what Pete and I liked to do together, what we did for fun. I remember exactly what I said.

“Well, I like to play bridge. Pete likes computer games. Pete likes to watch TV and I like to try to get him to turn off the TV and read with me.”

The man laughed softly in spite of himself. We passed.

There were good times, don’t get me wrong. The attraction and the marriage had all revolved around the physical chemistry, and that remained good to the end. But everything else slowly fell apart.

One of my best memories is of going with him to the mall. He could cut through the foot traffic much more deftly and quickly than I could walking, so I would jump up on the back of his chair, my feet resting on the shelf that held the huge black battery, my hands gripping the handles of his chair for dear life as he sped through the crowds, veering when someone cut him off suddenly. I’d shreik and holler like a back-chair driver, “Watch out! OW! PEEEETE! Slow down!”

But I loved it. We made people smile.

We both loved food, and Pete is a fantastic cook. Starting in his teens when he’d be home with his dad during summer breaks, Pete had watched cooking shows. He’d absorbed all the lessons and knew how to marinate meat, sear a steak, roast garlic, rub blackening into a fish for grilling, you name it. And he could walk even the greenest attendant through all the steps, directing the couscous and the soup and the fish to come off the stove at the same time. Brilliant. Nothing ever burned. Everything was always exquisite.

We liked watching food tv and enjoyed trying new dishes. When we were shopping for ingredients, cooking or eating, we were at peace.

Peter is a very smart man, an articulate person, a lover of animals. He is not a lover of his fellow humans. And he is THE most pessimistic and cynical individual I’ve ever met. Mr. Doom and Gloom himself.

We’d be on the highway heading over to Galt to his folks’ house for one of the grandmother’s birthday or something and right around the edge of Kitchener, he’d say, with hurt and sadness in his voice, “See all those trees? They’ll all be gone in five years’ time.”

“PETE! STOP IT” I’d say. “You don’t KNOW that.”

Or when we’d drive past the huge complex of Research in Motion buildings, he’d predict the whole series of office buildings would be a ghost town in two years. See, there was this lawsuit. There were layoffs. The stock was down. Sad, so sad.

“PETE, STOP IT!”

Well, he’s not here to defend himself, so I won’t go on. You can see how the two of us would be at odds. I thrive on optimism, which gathers so much momentum that it becomes magic. I can’t be surrounded by the toxicity of a doom and gloomer.

Pete and I tried several things to remedy the television situation. We tried earplugs for me (I coudn’t hear the birdies or the wind in the pines outside our patio door). We tried good headphones for him..wireless ones. They made his head sweaty. Bless him for giving it a good old college try.

No, nothing was working. I was snapping at him a lot. He was feeling like a tresspasser in his own home. Walking on eggshells. It wasn’t pretty. We bickered non-stop, even in front of other people. It didn’t help that we were both insecure to the point of needing to be right all the time.

I remember when I was up here for the wedding; by chance I ended up on the same train as his beautiful young cousin, whom I’d just met that weekend. She was headed to London to visit a friend and I was headed to the Greyhound station. We sat together and chatted.

“Everyone is really curious to see how this is going to work…you and Pete,” she told me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, Pete always has to be right,” she said.

“Oh. Well this IS going to be interesting then. Because I always have to be right.”

Though I think I’ve made great progress and no longer have to be right with my friends and coworkers and the rest of the world, when I’m in a relationship where I don’t feel secure in the other’s love, the stubborn know-it-all who is never wrong about anything surfaces.

Finally one day during year three, I was at the end of my rope. I had to get away from the television, had to have a place I could go to get away from it. I had suggested over and over that we move out, buy a bigger place to live. Pete kept saying that was impossible. We coudn’t afford to do it…not with the remodeling that would be required for accessibility, not on what I made and he brought in.

“I’ll learn more VBA! I’ll get promoted!” I would say.

He always had a reason why it wouldn’t work. Much later he would admit to me his real reason. He didn’t trust our marriage. If he moved out and into a house with me and then our marriage ended, he would have to get back on a 3-year waiting list for a setup like he now had. He wouldn’t take that risk.

It was a Saturday morning when I sat zombie-eyed on the sofa in my pyjamas as the usual stream of programming flickered in front of my eyes. “My soul is dying, Pete. I think I have to move out.”

“It’s Saturday. Maybe you should buy a paper. Start looking today,” he said.

Oh. Okay then.

And so we separated in March of 2002. I was 39.

I trust Mo won’t let me delay Part IV for too long. But right now I have to sleep.