Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

This piece should have been submitted by March 1, 2015, for consideration for the September 2015 issue.

Is ignorance bliss? Or does a positive attitude beget positive results?

I married for the first time at 20 years old. Too young. And to the wrong man.

But the first few months felt like success. I’m still trying to figure out if it was because he and I were actually on the same page working towards the same goals or if I just didn’t know enough to recognize failure when it stared me in the face.

We were both still students, though set to graduate with our bachelor’s degrees within five months. We each had part-time jobs. His salary paid the rent. My salary paid for groceries. That’s all the expenses we had, and we had them all covered. At least for the six months our student loans were deferred and the four months of grace on our car loan. We didn’t have a plan for what we would do then. We just thought we’d figure it out when we needed to.

“Balancing The Account By Hand” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by  kenteegardin 

My part-time job was very part time. I worked 16 hours a week at 70 cents an hour. After withholding, my take-home pay each week was $7.67 cents. So long as I had three pennies to round the amount up to $7.70, I could cash the check at the Black Hawk bar next door to the movie theatre where I was an usher. The bar wouldn’t hand out pennies, and I didn’t want to settle for $7.65. Because that was all I had to buy groceries and all the other non-grocery items, such as toilet paper and shampoo, each week.

We got our checks every Friday evening. Saturday mornings, I headed for the warehouse grocery store in town with my detailed list of necessities. In order to stretch the money, I picked up canned and packaged goods first. Each shopper was handed a grease pen on arrival with instructions to write the prices on the items as we picked them up. I am amazed now at the trust the store placed in all its customers. But it never occurred to me to write anything other than the listed price. The act of writing also helped me total up the prices as I walked up and down the aisles.

Once I had the cans, boxes, and paper products I needed, I calculated how much money I had available for meat. Ground beef was about 49 cents a pound in those days, chicken was even cheaper, but only sold as a whole bird, and a package of hotdogs was also 49 cents. So for every dollar I didn’t need for canned goods, I could buy two pounds of beef, two packages of hot dogs, or a chicken. That determined the proportion of meat to rice or noodles in the meals I could prepare for the upcoming week.

It never occurred to me to complain that I had so little money. I had what I had. And that had to be enough. So it was.

Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

This piece should have been submitted by May 1, 2014, for consideration for the November 2014 issue.

More than 40 years ago, I lived and worked in Tehran, Iran. While there, I met several members of a Jewish Iranian family. I dated one of the younger sons of the family, Abraham, throughout the two plus years I was there.

I never expected more from the relationship–just pleasant company and someone to explain aspects of the culture that confused me. I never expected to see anyone in the family again, though I kept up a correspondence with Abraham until the Iranian revolution disrupted most communication between Americans and Iranians.

Seven years after I left Iran, while I was working as a consular officer at the US Consulate General in Stuttgart, Germany, I learned that Abraham had been arrested by Revolutionary Guards shortly after the revolution got underway. He was executed by the ruling regime. I cried myself to sleep for days afterwards.

I learned of Abraham’s death through one of his nephews, also named Abraham, who had managed to escape Iran and settle in Los Angeles with his family. Most of his larger family, including his father, Abraham’s brother, had also settled in Los Angeles. When they learned I was trying to find Abraham, the nephew gave his phone number to the person I had asked for help along with the invitation for me to call him. When I called, he pretended to be Abraham, but I knew the voice was wrong. After a few tentative comments, he asked if I had heard that his uncle had been executed by the government. I asked him who he was, and he admitted he was the “other” Abraham.

A few days after that conversation with Abraham the nephew, he called me. It was about 2 a.m. in Germany so I wasn’t really awake when I answered the phone. So when he asked me to help his wife’s aunt get a visa to the US, I agreed and then immediately realized this was not a good idea. The aunt had previously been refused a visa in another country.

I told my boss about the telephone call that morning ,and she advised that I contact Abraham to tell him I wouldn’t be able to interview his wife’s aunt, that she should instead return to the consulate where she had applied before.

Abraham tried to change my mind, referring to my friendship with his uncle and the hospitality his family had shown me. I continued to refuse, and in the end he said he would instead tell his wife’s aunt she should apply in Madrid.

In Madrid? It didn’t make any sense to me. And that made me suspicious. What was going on in Madrid that would make Abraham think it was a place his wife’s aunt might get a visa? Should I mention this strange conversation as well to my boss? Or should I just forget about it? I didn’t really know anything. I only had suspicions.

I said nothing.

A few months later, I learned that a consular officer in Madrid was arrested for fraudulently issuing visas to Iranian citizens in exchange for money.

Was I wrong not to have said something? After all, it was likely officials in Washington had already begun to suspect the consular officer given the short time between my conversation with Abraham and the officer’s arrest.

Or was I right to have said nothing since to do so might add to the grief of a family who had meant so much to me when I lived among them?

Each month, The Sun magazine offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, and photos in a black-and-white format without advertising. Each issue includes provocative ideas from people of science, religion, philosophy, the arts, or a combination. Each issue also includes Readers Write, a feature compiling nonfiction submissions from the magazine’s readers on an intentionally broad topic. Occasionally I submit pieces for consideration. More often, I write essays on the topics too late to submit them.

This piece should have been submitted by February 1, 2016, for consideration for the August 2016 issue.

My grandfather made the downpayment on the house my parents moved into when they married, a one-story, two-bedroom bungalow on a quiet, two-block long street–Dudrey Court–in the county seat. The house was big enough for the first four children while we were all under ten–boys and girls shared bedrooms in those days–but my parents hoped for five children, which would be difficult to manage without a third bedroom.

Anticipating that fifth child, Dad converted the attic of the house into a third bedroom. My sister and I moved upstairs and the boys kept the downstairs room. Both rooms were now large enough for three children.

But the fifth child turned out to be twins, two boys. While the boys’ bedroom would work for a couple of years, Dad decided we needed a bigger house. I didn’t want to move. My friends lived in the neighborhood. And I really didn’t want to move to the other side of town. If we moved further south, I would have to switch schools, and that would mean not having the same orchestra teacher, Mr. Pulicicchio, I had had since fourth grade.

I don’t think my parents were eager to move from Dudrey Court either. After looking at a few houses outside the neighborhood, my dad made a decision that surprised everyone. He placed an offer on the only house on Dudrey Court that was for sale, a two-story, two-bedroom house across the street. That house was on a larger lot than our house, large enough to add two more bedrooms at the back of the house.

For another year, four of us shared a bedroom again, but this one had a walk-in closet so big my desk fit in it, giving me as much privacy as I needed. During that year, Dad added two more bedrooms, a master bedroom for Mom and Dad, a small bedroom for the twins, and once again my sister and I moved out of the shared bedroom into our own.

For more than 60 years Dad lived in one of those two houses on Dudrey Court. We kids enjoyed those houses, too, but we grew up and moved away, coming back to spend time in that second house for holidays. Grandpa made a good choice when he selected the house my parents first moved into.