On Iran

I’ve never been to Iran. I regularly embarrass myself by mispronouncing it. Often, I conflate its history, culture and politics with those of its neighboring countries. Until a few months ago, I couldn’t place it on a map. And yet, when my grandmother speaks of her experiences there, I am transported like a child being read a bedtime story. 

If you ask my grandmother — a mother, a wife, an educator — why she was in Iran, she’ll begin her tale with her husband’s involvement in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. She might discuss her time in Italy or the American South, which traced her path to Iran. You may think you’ve heard a story like this before. You may come to your own conclusion based on many other military families’ stories: you’d assume my grandmother lived in Iran to support her husband’s work.

You’d be wrong — or, at least, only partly right. Her desire to keep her family together explains how she got there, but it leaves out an essential truth: my grandmother loved living in Iran.

The moments my grandmother recalls are not stoic or grand events. She remembers the everyday rhythms, the luminous details, the comforting familiarity. Her stories of Iran are ones of community, collaboration, and unexpected moments of hilarity and humanity.

Her stories of Iran are ones of community, collaboration, and unexpected moments of hilarity and humanity.

She had a bus driver, she once told me, who was an ultra-professional and determined navigator in charge of getting the educators to school and back. Despite being from a completely different time and place, this Iranian stranger reminded me so much of my own guides in life.

She giggled, recalling the unexpected importance —and frustrating translations — of teaching the youth of Iran the English word “wire.” There’s a big difference, she noted, between calling something “wired” versus “weird.”

I heard the joy she felt circulate through her again as she relived an experience of a young man belly dancing to the bewildered amusement of his American teachers, my grandmother included.

“I had never seen any type of belly dancing before,” she told me with a chuckle. “Boy, was he something.”

I naively expected a story about a shirtless man making a fool of himself, but it was a graceful and controlled performance, met with earnest appreciation from the American educators. Less than a year later, that very cultural tradition, along with most other public dances, would be criminalized and labeled “indecent acts.”

It didn’t happen overnight, she said, but eventually, she felt shifts in the routine, fragments in the familiarity and changes in the everyday rhythm.

It didn’t happen overnight, she said, but eventually, she felt shifts in the routine, fragments in the familiarity and changes in the everyday rhythm.

The bus driver’s routes were my grandmother’s first glimpses of change. To ensure his passengers’ safety, the drive to school became longer, more convoluted and deathly silent.

A few weeks later, my grandfather asks my grandmother a question she’s never heard before, and she’d never expect: “Do you know what to do if a Molotov cocktail is thrown at your car?”

Of course, she didn’t.

“You hope it doesn’t explode,” he told her. “Just keep driving. Don’t look back.”

My grandfather — the hardened, industrious Chief Master Sergeant Terrence Oliss — didn’t make the information easily digestible with an “it’s unlikely” or a “don’t worry.” He said it candidly, like it was cooking advice. My grandmother, as she does now, put on a brave face and remembered what to do if a Molotov cocktail were ever thrown at her car.

Before she’d ever need to use that information, my grandmother evacuated Iran with her children. She was separated from her husband for weeks, including on Christmas Day. Their home in Iran was turned into an American safehouse, where my grandfather would stay up at night, sorting through hundreds of his family’s personal items, trying to determine the most important ones to mail to America before he could reunite there with his family.

As she reflects on her past with a chocolate chip cookie and tea, she wonders about the future. She questions the safety of those whom she knew so well; if her old home still stands; if her students remain in Tehran today.

I wonder, as her eyes focus on nothing in particular, if my grandmother’s more worried about the future of Iran than she’s letting on. Is she doing what she was taught — and not looking back?

Photograph provided by Michael Oliss.