Tag: Iran

Zarathustra aka Zoroaster

On By Sandra YeamanIn Blogging2 Comments

Last week I attended a lecture at OASIS in San Diego on Zoroastrianism. I worried that there might not be enough interest in the topic for the lecture to be held. I hadn’t preregistered because I am on call for jury duty this month so I couldn’t commit to attending.

When I arrived, I was delighted to discover more than two dozen people had registered. My assumption that few people in the area knew anything about the subject–or were interested in learning more–was banished.

My interest stems from having arrived in Tehran, Iran, in April of 1975, at the tail end of the ten days of celebration for Nowruz, the Persian new year. And I learned that the observation of Nowruz goes back to the time of Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra.

I thought I already knew a lot about Zoroastrianism, having not only observed Nowruz celebrations in Iran but also having visited the sites of some of the earliest Persian fire temples near Persepolis in southwestern Iran. Fire serves as a symbol of the religion, perhaps because the underground natural gas reserves made it possible for flames to continue burning without the need to add fuel.

Also I could recognize, for example, the farvahar, a symbol of Zoroastrianism carved into the rocks near those same sites, as seen in the image at the top of this post. I knew–or thought I did–that Zoroastrianism is (there are still followers around the world) a dualistic, not monotheistic, religion in which two gods, Ahura Mazda, the god of good, and Angra Mainyu, the god of evil, are in a constant struggle. Okay, I only remembered the name of Ahura Mazda, but I knew there is also a name of the force of evil, and I looked forward to being reminded of it. Many scholars believe the dualist aspect of Zoroastrianism was imposed later, that originally Ahura Mazda was the only god, as in monotheistic religions, with Angra Mainyu serving as an opposing, but not equal, force. This is the opinion of the lecturer.

I also knew that Iranians consider Zoroastrians among the people of the book, a term used in Islamic literature to identify those non-Muslims who were to be protected under Islam because they also follow a monotheistic belief system including an end-of-day’s judgment that will separate the good from the evil and that the belief system has been written down into a sacred text. But I thought the dualism I understood to be part of Zoroastrianism wouldn’t qualify. I also knew nothing about a Zoroastrian sacred text.

I learned that what I didn’t know about Zoroastrianism would fill volumes while what I knew that was accurate would fit on a the back of a postage stamp. Let me explain some of the surprising aspects of Zoroastrianism I learned from the lecture.

First, I learned the basic principles of Zoroastrianism: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. I recognize them as consistent with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and perhaps a few East Asian religions.

Second, I learned the the symbolism of the farvahar and was reminded of how important a role symbolism plays in my 21st century Christian life.

The three bands of feathers in the wings of the farvahar represent the three principles: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. The three bands in the skirt of the human depicted on the farvahar represent the contrasting ideas: bad thoughts, bad words, bad deeds. The challenge is to keep them in balance. The circle the figure appears almost to be riding on represents the immortality of the spirit. The two sashes that end in loops or claws below the circle represent good and evil with the representation of good on the side the figure is facing and evil behind it. One of the figure’s hands points upward, representing struggle. The other hand holds a ring which may represent loyalty and faithfulness.

Third, the lecturer pointed out that Jews during the Babylonian captivity would have encountered Zoroastrianism and its rituals and traditions, many of which may have been adopted when they returned to Judah after the Persian king Cyrus the Great defeated the Babylonians and released the captive Judeans. I knew that not all the Judeans returned since a remnant of those who stayed behind made up the Iranian Jewish population I met while I was in Iran. There I learned that Esther of the eponymous Biblical book married Xerxes I, the fourth ruler of Persia after Cyrus the Great, a reflection that Jews remained in Persia for many generations after they were permitted to return.

Some of those traditions include the expectation that a messiah will come to the earth, that people will face judgment after death, the concept of heaven and hell, and free will.

Fourth, Zoroastrians referred to their priests as magi. Therefore, the three kings who traveled from the east to visit the baby Jesus were likely Zoroastrians.

Fifth, the Zoroastrian scripture is the Avesta which contains four segments:

While the above may be interesting, they are all just details from the lecture.

The more important lesson is that history goes back further than we sometimes want. We can’t just draw a line in our past and claim anything that happened before that date is no longer important. We cannot simply reset history.

If we stop studying history from the earliest point at which the conditions are consistent with what we believe is right or ideal, we will not understand how interrelated we all are, how our ideas have antecedents that we should understand before we insist we are right and everyone else is wrong. If we want to understand others, we should go back in history to find what we share, what we have in common, in order to bring those ideas forward.

Happy Nowruz which falls this year on March 20.  Saale no mobaark.

Photo credit: By Napishtim – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

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My Most Memorable Independence Days

On By Sandra YeamanIn Blogging1 Comment

fireworks over a city

Happy Fourth of July!

As we approached celebrating our country’s 241st birthday, I thought about a couple of my memorable Fourths of July. Two things made the two mentioned below memorable: they diverged from the usual picnics and fireworks, and both involve Iran.

July 4, 1976

The first was July 4, 1976, our Bicentennial Independence Day. While Americans in the US experienced months of listening to 76 Trombones as a lead-up to the big day, I was one of 25 American teachers with the University of Southern California among an estimated 25,000 Americans living and working in Iran. The week before July 4, the US Embassy contacted all businesses with American employees to advise that we keep our celebrations low key. While rumors of disgruntled persons planning to do harm to Americans by attacking locations where large numbers gathered had not become common at that point, the embassy advised that we avoid large gatherings to reduce the possibility of such an attack being carried out.

A group of us from USC drove out of the city to a grove of trees beside a creek near Karaj, a village to the northwest of Tehran. We held our low-key picnic there, out of sight from everyone. We weren’t afraid. We were just being cautious.

We talked a lot about the successful raid on Entebbe Airport in Uganda earlier that day. Israeli commandos freed 102 of the 104 Air France passengers and crew who had been held there since June 27 after their flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked. The success of the rescue contributed to our sense that we in the West were invulnerable.

Three years after the Bicentennial Independence Day, on November 4, 1979, American employees at the US Embassy in Tehran were taken hostage by Iranian students who wanted to overthrow Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the autocratic ruler they blamed the US for putting into power through a coup in 1953 that removed the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The recently released Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954 papers prove the students were right about the role of the US and the CIA in removing Mossadegh and returning the Shah to power. We learned we are not invulnerable.

Six months after the students kidnapped US diplomats, our attempt to repeat the success of Entebbe failed spectacularly in the deserts of Iran outside Tehran. Instead of bringing home the 52 hostages, the bodies of eight service members who died were left behind. We learned we are not infallible.

July 4, 1988

The second memorable Independence Day came twelve years later, in 1988, the day after the United States Navy guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over Iran’s territorial waters of the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard. The plane was on a flight from Bandar Abbas in southwestern Iran to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

I was working then at the US Embassy in Doha, Qatar, directly across the Persian Gulf from Iran and to the northwest of the United Arab Emirates. We spent that July 4th on the phone calling all those we had previously invited to celebrate July 4th with the ambassador to tell them we had canceled the event. We were learning to admit when we are responsible.

In spite of the dark lessons of these two unique observations of Independence Day, I returned from the first committed to celebrate the rights and privileges I have as a citizen, having learned how many people in the world do not have that freedom. I became involved in local politics. I caucused in my precinct. I served as a delegate in my district. I attended state conventions as an observer. I attended district meetings between election cycles.

I encouraged my friends to do the same, even friends whose political viewpoints did not match mine. I knew it is important that we all take part in the system we have in order that we not allow someone to take it away.

The only presidential election I missed voting in was in 2000 when I was in Yemen, dealing with the “new normal” of life in Yemen after the USS Cole had been attacked. I didn’t think it mattered if one person missed voting that year. The outcome of that election made it clear how wrong I was. Every vote counts.

What have you learned from your Independence Day celebrations?

Eight-Week Challenge: Weeks Three and Four

On By Sandra YeamanIn Blogging1 Comment

Weeks Three and Four: small improvements from Weeks One or Two. Again, a reminder of my goals:

  • eat more nutritious food with fewer empty calories,
  • walk at least 5,000 steps per day,
  • spend one day a week reading the backlog of magazines sitting on the end table, and
  • write at least 500 words per day for at least five days each week.

My first goal, eating more nutritious food with fewer empty calories, continues on track. I did learn, however, that relying on nuts for nutrition isn’t as simple as pouring them from the giant bag of pecans, almonds, or walnuts I bring home from Costco. They need to be soaked first. And just dipping them into a bowl of water for 20 minutes before eating them isn’t enough of a soak.

My writing teacher pointed out the practice of soaking nuts to me when she assumed I already knew about it because it is commonplace in the parts of the Middle East she knew. I managed to live eight years in Middle Eastern countries without ever realizing the nuts people served had been soaked first. That’s likely because once soaked, the nuts were dried for storage.

Initially, I assumed the soaking was to make the nuts (or beans or other whole grains) more easily digestible, but a woman from my church filled me in on the most important reason nuts and grains should be soaked before eating: nuts are covered in enzyme inhibitors. Their purpose is to prevent premature germination and to store nutrients for plant growth. But when humans eat foods with these chemicals, the enzyme inhibitors reduce the absorption of important minerals and proteins causing nutrient deficiencies. Soaking and sprouting bypass this issue as they activate the seed and neutralize the inhibitors.

For a handy chart of how long to soak nuts, beans, and grains, check out this post from DaNelle of weedemandreap.

I’ve been working on how to soak and then dehydrate nuts and grains one at a time, starting with pecans which require four to six hours of soaking (add salt to the filtered water) followed by dehydrating. The dehydrating instructions DaNelle referred to (Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions) recommend placing the drained nuts on a cookie sheet and then placing it in an oven set no higher than 150 degrees for 12 to 24 hours. My oven won’t go any lower than 170 degrees, and so far I’ve been satisfied with drying the nuts in the oven for two hours. At that point they are crispy, slightly salty, and can be stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator for at least a week.

In Week Two, I met my goal of walking at least 5,000 steps each day only twice (Monday and Tuesday). In Week Three I upped that to three times, and in Week Four, four times. And I increased the number of days I met my writing goal from one in Week Two to four in Week Three, but I fell back to three in Week Four.

I’m still reading other women’s stories about living in (and leaving) Iran. I’ve knocked off four of the eight library books in the reading about Iran series. Well, I finished reading three, and I read enough of one more to decide I probably wouldn’t learn much from it, so I moved it to the bottom of the pile, to be picked up and finished only after I read the two remaining books.

Journey from the Land of No: a girlhood caught in revolutionary Iran, Roya Hakakian. Hakakian’s story touched me more than others because her family is Jewish, as is the Iranian family I spent most of my time in Iran among.

While I lived in Iran, I saw no evidence of anti-Semitism or discrimination against Jews. But I was an outsider, an observer without enough common experience to notice the subtleties in behavior. I didn’t know how well known certain members of the Jewish community were, especially since many of the family names appeared Armenian.

Through Hakakian’s story, I learned I knew only half of the story of Habib Elghanian‘s arrest in 1975 shortly after I arrived in Iran. I knew he founded Plasco, a company that sold anything and everything made of plastic. In 1975, when the Shah’s government imposed a freeze on prices throughout the country in an attempt to stop runaway inflation, Plasco raised its prices anyway. And Elghanian was arrested, an action we Americans understood telegraphed a message to other businessmen that the government meant business. That’s the half of the story I knew. What I didn’t know is that Elghanian was a leader among the Tehran Jewish community. He was released within a few days, but less than four years later, after Khomeini returned to Tehran and established the Islamic Republic of Iran, Elghanian became the first Jew to be executed by the Iranian revolutionary guards, on May 9, 1979.

Hakakian’s story touched me so deeply because the third Jew to be executed by the Iranian revolutionary guards, on July 31, 1980, was my friend, Abraham Beroukhim. After reading Hakakian’s story, I searched for information about Abraham, Abie as I knew him, and I found an interview with his nephew and other related pieces. The research suddenly became very personal.

Camelia: Save Yourself by Telling the Truth—A Memoir of Iran, Camelia Entekhabifard. Entekhabifard’s story is similar to many other tales of how the Iranian government mistrusts journalists, both those from outside the country and those who took on the role as loyal citizens. Imprisonment seems inevitable. Even after being released from prison, the former prisoners are not free. They are expected to spy on others, to report on anything suspicious they see or hear.

Even After All This Time: A Story of Love, Revolution, and Leaving Iran, Afschineh Latifi. The most impressive character in Latifi’s story is her mother. No more than a few years older than I am, she was widowed and left to raise four children when her husband, Col. Latifi, was executed by the Iranian government in the early days of the revolution. Latifi’s mother is not the first strong woman to appear in the series of books I am reading, but her resolve, determination, and devotion to ensuring her children grew up as their father wanted are inspiring. She kept her eyes on the future, never sinking into the pit of remorse or disappointment about the past. When faced by a setback, she dug until she found the gold nugget of joy, an opportunity.

Oh, and I did read a few magazines, too. Making progress.

Eight-Week Challenge: Week Two

On By Sandra YeamanIn Blogging2 Comments

Week Two: not much difference from Week One. Again, a reminder of my goals:

  • eat more nutritious food with fewer empty calories,
  • walk at least 5,000 steps per day,
  • spend one day a week reading the backlog of magazines sitting on the end table, and
  • write at least 500 words per day for at least five days each week.

A summary:

  • Food: Close enough.
  • Walking: Not enough.
  • Magazines: Whew!
  • Writing: Oh well.

As for my last two goals: I am writing, though I’m in the research phase, not the putting words to paper phase.

I’ve been struggling with whether my story of life in Iran in the mid-1970s (what we now know were the good old days) is worth telling, or more precisely, what audience may be interested in the lessons I learned during my 28 months there. As part of my survey of comparable or competitive books, I’ve requested a hold on every book in the San Diego County Library on Iran if it deals with the period spanning 1950 to the present, with an occasional book dealing with history from before that time. All those books are showing up at the same time. I have eight checked out right now. Reading those must be my priority. Those magazines can wait.

This week I’ve read the following:

Sky of Red Poppies, Zohreh Ghahremani. A coming of age novel of two schoolgirls from families professing opposite political viewpoints in 1960s Iran. It was my great luck to meet the author this week at an event sponsored by San Diego Writers, Ink, where she read a portion of a short story included in SDWI’s 10th anniversary A Year in Ink anthology. I’ll be reading more of her work. The Moon Daughter is on my to-read list.

Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America, Firoozeh Dumas. A memoir focusing on the humor the author sees, perhaps only in hindsight, about her years as an Iranian émigré. Her comments regarding the prevalence of Iranians having nose jobs reminded me of the fact that nearly everyone I met in Iran asked how long ago I had had my nose done. Apparently, the one I was born with was the Iranian ideal. I contacted the author via Twitter and exchanged flattering comments, mine about her writing, hers about my nose.

Esther: Royal Beauty, Angela Hunt. When I expressed surprise that there were Jews living in Iran, my new Persian friend, Abie Beroukhim, explained that Esther of the Bible was Queen Esther, wife of the Persian King Xerxes. She and her guardian, Mordecai, who served in King Xerxes’s court, were part of the Jewish diaspora that chose to remain in what became Persia instead of returning to Jerusalem from Babylon when Xerxes’s predecessor several times removed, Cyrus the Great, released them from captivity in 539 BCE.

(An aside: Having read this story, I conducted a Google search for Abraham Beroukhim, Abie’s full name, and found this interview with his nephew of the same name. I’m glad that I had previously learned the sad news that Abie had been arrested in the early days of the revolution because reading—or hearing—about it from this link would have been too much of a shock. What happened to Abie is one of the reasons I want to complete my story—he was a major player.)

Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope, Shirin Ebadi and Azadeh Moaveni. This is the first of Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi’s books detailing her struggles in Iran to defend those facing political persecution or the uneven impact of Iranian legal judgments on women who are considered worth only half the value of men. The most heartrending story in this book concerns the rape of a girl by three men who were arrested and charged. One of the men committed suicide and wasn’t tried. The other two men were tried and sentenced to be executed, but the girl’s family was expected to pay blood money to cover the value of the two men’s lives. In their struggle for justice for their daughter, they lost all their possessions, still failing to come up with the amount demanded of them. As a result, the two men were released.

Honeymoon in Tehran: Two Years of Love and Danger in Iran, Azadeh Moaveni. The author grew up in California as a result of her parents being caught there when the revolution broke out. In spite of her parents’ objections, she returned to Tehran, intending to remain, working as a journalist for Time. She fell in love, married, and gave birth to a child while in Iran. Nonetheless, the challenges of remaining true to her profession while not crossing lines her security services minder continually reminded her of proved insurmountable.

Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran, Shirin Ebadi. The most recent of Shirin Ebadi’s books explains how and why she now lives in exile, unable to return in spite of having earlier chosen to remain in Iran, fighting injustice from inside, no matter what machinations the government devised to frustrate her in their attempts to get her to stop her advocacy for human rights in Iran.

So I’m writing through the research and reading I’m doing. That’s good enough for now.

Happy Independence Day

On By Sandra YeamanIn BloggingLeave a comment

When my husband’s Time magazine arrived with its headline, “240 Reasons to Celebrate Independence Day,” I was reminded of my most memorable Fourth of July, the one 40 years ago, our country’s bicentennial. But unlike most Americans around in 1976, no fireworks or sparklers featured in my bicentennial celebration.

On July 4, 1976, I was living in Tehran, Iran.

Earlier that week, Ed, the director of the English teaching program I worked for, received a phone call from the US embassy advising him that Americans in Iran should keep a low profile on Independence Day. The embassy suggested that we not gather in a public place or take part in any showy displays.

On the morning of July 4, a group of us headed out of town, in the direction of Karaj Dam. Very few of us had cars; so six or more crowded into the few we had, including one old enough to be classified an antique, the car I chose. Fortunately, Ed assured us that he wouldn’t leave us behind if anything happened to the car. As the director of the program, Ed had been assigned a car and driver, a shiny new car and an accomplished and very competent driver.

We couldn’t resist testing Ed. A few miles out of town, our driver, Dick, pulled over to the side of the road, and we waited. Within ten minutes, we saw Ed’s car coming back on the other side of the road. Dick pulled back onto the road, revving up to top speed (about 50 mph) as quickly as possible with a car full of laughing colleagues.

Ed’s driver caught up with and passed us, and we all waved and smiled, satisfied that we had proved Ed meant what he said, and that we could also have some fun along the hour-long drive.

Like the children in the story of the boy who cried wolf, we just had to try the same the same gag. Again, we saw Ed’s car return, and again, Dick accelerated onto the road, speeding ahead until Ed’s driver caught up with us and zoomed ahead.

Also like the story of the boy who cried wolf, something did go wrong. Dick’s car slowed, in spite of the pressure he kept on the accelerator. It continued to slow. Dick pulled the car over to the side of the road, got out, and popped the hood open. The rest of us in the car speculated whether Ed would return a third time, or would he decide, like the townspeople in the fable, that we were just playing around.

Ed and those with him were better people than fable villagers. They returned a third time. Someone fixed whatever caused the problem. And we continued on our way to a picnic area beside a stream near Karaj Dam.

No fireworks. No sparklers. But plenty of celebration, surrounded by good friends as well as some new ones.

That warning from the embassy foreshadowed much of the rest of my life. Seven years later I joined the US Foreign Service where preparations for Independence Day celebrations took up a lot of my time for many years to come. Sometimes I was even responsible for making warning message calls.

Happy Fourth of July on this, our country’s 240th year of independence.

 

I is for Iran

On By Sandra YeamanIn Blogging8 Comments

I loved it and I hated it on the same day every day for 882 days. It was Iran, and my love-hate relationship began on April 2, 1975, at the start of what I referred to as the world’s most elaborate April Fool’s gag.

Two years before, I hadn’t thought such an adventure possible. At that time, I lived in Berkeley, California, with my husband and our cat named Kitty. I planned to enroll in graduate school in the winter. Without warning my husband told me he thought we should divorce. It was simple and amicable: we had no property to split, no home to sell, no children. But simple doesn’t mean painless.

For most of the first year in grad school, I had nightmares, dreaming that I either chased my husband or was chased by him. My subconscious wanted to hit him, to hurt him, but I never caught him. And I didn’t want to be hurt any more, though why I thought he was trying to do so remains a mystery of the dream state. I woke up exhausted. Then, for months I had no dreams at all.

Toward the end of year two, he appeared in a dream, a guest at a party. I introduced him to other partygoers, referring to him as a friend. No chase scenes, no anxieties. The difference was so pronounced I wrote him a letter describing the dream. He wrote back, admitting that he hadn’t handled suggesting our separation well, asking for forgiveness, though not reconciliation.

Two weeks later, the University of Southern California offered me a job in Iran. The timing was right. Painful as it was, I knew that if we hadn’t divorced, I wouldn’t be at the beginning of this adventure. A door had to close for me to see the open door next to it.

***

April 2 began in London where the New York to Tehran Iran Air flight picked up a small number of passengers for the final leg. Passengers originating from New York filled most of the seats. Ten of us from USC—nine teachers and the man who hired us, Bill, the director of USC’s American Language Institute—joined them. We stood out from the rest. We were taller. Our skin, lighter. We were foreigners.

I hope there is space in the overhead compartment for my violin. There had been no problem on the flight from Los Angeles to London, but that plane was much bigger: two seats on each side of the plane with a center section of five seats across. So large, I could imagine I was on a train or a boat, not a plane, as I wandered up and down the aisles.

This plane had three seats on either side of the aisle, the size I was used to for domestic flights from California, my adopted home, to Minnesota, my birthplace. The overhead bins reduced headroom, making the plane feel even smaller. The thought of spending six hours shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow, and knee-to-knee on such a small plane brought on anxiety, especially since my boarding pass was for the middle seat. There was nowhere to escape the crowding, like my 4,000 member hometown church’s pews at a Christmas or Easter service.

“Hey, Roger,” Annie said. “Is this our row? I’ve been counting them.” She pointed to the strange symbol under the overhead bins and held up her boarding pass.

Annie and I had been roommates in San Francisco. She wanted to teach in Spain. But my offer came through first, and she traded being faced with finding a new roommate and simultaneously looking for a job for a guaranteed position just a bit east of her goal.

“Yeah, this is row 22,” Roger said. He had been in the Peace Corps in Ahwaz, Iran, ten years before, the only one of us who had lived in Iran. “They use Hindi numerals in Iran. The 1 and 9 look similar to our numbers. The rest are like chicken scratches. You’ll get used to them.”

Annie squeezed her way to the window seat. I pushed and rearranged the bags and bundles already in the overhead compartment above our seats until my violin case fit and then settled in the center seat. Roger took the aisle seat, to keep us protected from intrusion by prying eyes and hands across the aisle, he said.

Ahead of us, Bob and his wife, Nancy, stood in the aisle next to row 21. Already in that row, I saw a man wearing a heavy winter jacket in the window seat. Boxes tied with twine and fabric bundles filled the area under the seat in front of him as well as under the middle and aisle seats. An additional case rested on each of the two otherwise empty seats, as though they marked them as saved for companions. But Bob and Nancy’s boarding passes bore 21B and 21C.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Bob to the man in 21A. “Are these your suitcases?”

“Sorry, no Eengleesi.”

Bob looked up, noticed a woman in uniform with the Iran Air logo on her hat, and motioned to her. Pointing to the items on seats 21B and 21C, Bob chose his words diplomatically, not wanting a confrontation, simply pointing out the problem, just as any other Midwesterner would do. “These spaces are already full,” he said. “Where can we put our carry-on?”

“You shouldn’t have brought so much with you,” the attendant replied and then broke away to continue moving to the front of the plane. Nancy’s mouth dropped open.

“Welcome to Iran,” said Roger. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I have Valium,” offered Annie. She and I had laughed when her doctor handed over a container with thirty 1-mg tablets of the anxiety-reducing medication in response to her request for something to deal with motion sickness. She had expected him to give her two or three tablets of Dramamine. Before we left, Annie counted out fifteen tablets for me and kept fifteen for herself. We never dreamed we would take them all. But by the time I left Iran 822 days later, I had replaced my fifteen tablets many times. No prescription required. Even 10-mg strength.

“Let me help,” said Roger as he got out of his seat and took one of Nancy’s bags. He squeezed it into an overhead bin a few rows behind us. Bob did the same with another bag several rows in front. The man in the window seat picked up the parcels on the middle and aisle seat and placed them on his lap, apparently prepared to hold them for the entire flight.

“You better take the middle seat,” Roger said to Nancy. “You can stuff your purse between you and the guy next to you. It’s a better option than the aisle seat. No one will bother Bob when walking down the aisle.”

Once all passengers were seated, a male flight attendant read the standard safety instructions, first in Farsi and then in English. During the announcement, I watched a second male attendant across the aisle lean back as he lowered both his seat and the seat-back tray, and lit up a cigarette. The final statement of the standard instructions also differed from what we expected: “Let us know if there is anything we can do to make your flight comfortable.”

“Don’t they usually say ‘more comfortable’?” I asked Annie and Roger.

“Welcome to Iran,” Roger said one more time.

Ten hours after leaving London, we arrived in Tehran after a stop in Ahwaz to clear customs and immigration. Bill would return to LA once USC sent someone as director of the Iran program. Annie and I were the last two teachers Bill hired, just two weeks before we left. I was single and, at 26, the youngest of the group. I was also the most naïve.

The above is the opening to the draft of my first memoir with the working title Stuck in Stage Two: A Memoir of Cross-Cultural Confrontations and Misunderstandings.