SAFEWAY

I’m watching the surface of a rock-lined pond, safe in my ‘Jappalachian’ garden in East Tennessee. For the moment, the water is still, and the moss-brown depths remind me of the color of your eyes. 

I admit I was intimidated the first time you spoke to me, demanding, “Why do you not look me in the eye?”

I scanned the mailroom, wishing I could hide in one of the cubby holes guarding envelopes addressed to the math department faculty. I’d only seen you a handful of times and didn’t yet know your name. Someone had said it wasn’t appropriate for American women to look into the eyes of Middle Eastern men.

“Is it because you tink you are better than me?” Your second question ended in a chuckle. Derisive or sympathetic, I couldn’t tell. But I liked how you said “tink” for “think.”

“Of course not!” I looked directly at you for the first time. You were about my height, short for a man. Soft curls framed an olive face. Your eyes were mischievous and affectionate. 

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I’ve never met anyone from . . .” I realized I didn’t know your country of origin. 

“Ear-On.” You pronounced it deliberately, the way it should be said. “I’m from Iran.”

It was 1982 and you’d come from Shiraz to Kansas State to study geometry. Appalachia hadn’t exposed me to many people from other countries. The Iran hostage crisis in the rearview mirror, Reagan-era propaganda portrayed all Iranians as evil. I’d unwittingly absorbed that prejudice.

Though I remember only a windswept dustbowl, Manhattan, Kansas, was known as “The Little Apple.” Like its larger namesake, our Manhattan was a melting pot, drawing scores of international students to KSU’s graduate programs. Weekend parties included friends from Argentina, Italy, Israel, Egypt, India, and Japan. 

You rode your bike to school from the little house you rented on Ratone Street. We called it Rat One. Every night you raced home to watch the news—CBS with Dan Rather, NBC with Tom Brokaw, and ABC with Peter Jennings—switching between channels to get every scrap of coverage. I’d arrive in time for the closing ‘animal story,’ your favorite part about a crow that solved a difficult puzzle, a dog that got its family out before fire consumed their house, or pandas pampering a new baby at the San Diego Zoo. 

Exhausted from graduate teaching assistant life, you’d scrunch around in your overstuffed chair and feign wanting to be a proper host. But I’d help myself to a drink and we’d settle in to watch Marx Brothers movies. We loved that scene in A Night at the Opera when Harpo tries to hide from villains and clumsily topples one row of adjoining theater seats after another, revealing himself to the enemy. Laughing hysterically, I searched for your beady eyes and saw by the television’s glow that you were crying.

I didn’t understand politics. I didn’t have to. After I went home, you’d dial in more news on the shortwave radio, listening to broadcasts from Germany, where you had relatives, to get the non-American–non-Iranian perspective.

One night you had a toothache and rode to my apartment to kill the pain by drinking an entire bottle of cough syrup. You told me some housecats in Iran are green. I insisted you meant gray. 

You always questioned any use of the word “should.” Many of our discussions explored whether a person, or a government, could tell someone what he or she should do. 

We sang along to “Rock the Casbah” riding in my car to the Safeway, which you pronounced with a “v” instead of a “w.” “Why do they call it safe vay?” you asked, half joking. “If my country bombs your country, should we come here?”

One day as we passed in the hall, you shouted, “I got a spoon too big for my mouth!” 

“What?” 

“I bought a car!” 

“You mean you bit off more than you can chew.”

Later, you explained that Persian has idioms, homonyms, and satire just like English. You showed me an Iranian cartoon that derived its humor from the name of one political leader being similar to a word for part of the male anatomy. 

Once, riding in your car, we played a cassette tape of a woman singing plaintively in Persian. I asked you to translate. “She is saying she loves him, and she wants the best for him, but he has to go avay, and she doesn’t tink she will ever see him again.”

After the Iran–Contra affair broke out in ’86, you got your degree. You enjoyed the freedoms of the US, but you wanted to marry a traditional Iranian woman and have a family. And so, unceremoniously, you went home. 

Being wily, you arranged academic positions that allowed you to visit America three more times. As if no time had passed, we resumed our debates about green cats and what those in power should do to ensure world peace. 

Yesterday, my country bombed your country. Your internet suspended, you may not even know this yet. But I know you. Know that, like me, you just want all people to get along. 

I found a picture of you sitting on the roof at Rat One. The sun is shining. There isn’t even any wind. Yet you hold a black umbrella, your deadpan expression reminiscent of Harpo Marx. It’s taken forty years for me understand this gesture. You have never known safety. Could never leave your house—not in Iran, not in Germany, not in America—without wondering if someone was lurking nearby, about to rain on your parade. 

Back in my Jappalachian garden in East Tennessee, the pond’s stillness has been replaced by wondrous patterns. Incoming liquid from a nearby creek breaks the refracted light into glyphs that, for me, today, resemble Farsi script. The moss-brown depths are no longer visible. But we are connected. Because we are alike. And I am entranced by this shimmering geometry.

~June 22, 2025