Iraj Isaac Rahmim
How I Came to be An American-A Memoir or some years after I arrived in America to study, when my mother called from Tehran, which was every two weeks on Friday no matter what-illness or shortage or war or bombs- I made her put the phone down and ring the outside doorbell to our house so that I could hear my dog, Lady, bark in response. The calls were mostly very early in the morning US time. Sitting in my small apartment, alone and in the dark, with rented or old and cheap furnishings, I would listen to the voices on the line: my mother, my very young sister who was eleven when I left, Lady, my grandfather who had moved to Tehran after the death of my grandmother, and family friends and relatives if they were there. I imagined the living room. A modern one, or lrooni-passand-to the liking of Iranians, as we say- with gleaming, speckled marble floors and wallpapers of intricate green-and-pink-and-white designs and large, colorful rugs from Tabriz and Kashan and Isfahan with medallions at the center. As a child, I imagined the medallions to be islands at war whose fractal-like borders I defended using toy soldiers and boats and little plastic tanks and, also, whatever was handy-inverted sneakers as aircraft carriers, nail clippers as swift boats-in bloody battles where I always conquered the savage enemy. During my mother's calls, I saw glass everywhere: the main door to the living room made of obscuring, CorsicatHype glass with a light green frame; tall windows opened to the front balcony upon which we sat, mesmerized by the small scalloped blue fountain with water spouting out of the open mouth of the duck statue at the top, its neck craned sl-yward; and chandeliers, large ones, gaudy ones with hundreds of crystals refracting light from a dozen bulbs within. Bright, bright, bright, I imagined my family, bathed in Iran's rainbow of colors as they congregated around the phone, passing the mouthpiece around, and as I lay in bed in my darkened, single room, just awakened by the harsh rings thousands of miles to this side of the globe.
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I left Iran at sixteen, by coincidence only months before the 1978 Revolution. I first flew to Oklahoma City which I did not like and, then, to San Diego where I lived alone and went to a public high school some miles away from my apartment. It had become fashionable among the circle of my friends and that of our comfortably middle-class family for teenage sons and daughters to go on summer language and culture trips to Europe and, then, America to study. This was common among the well-to-do Jews and Christians ofTehran, many of whom had become successful through study and hard work after freedoms of residence and education and housing granted them during the liberalizing years of the Pahlavi dynasty. In the manner we begin to remember the best of what is far in time or place Summer路 Fall 2009
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