THE GREEN BIRD, ABSENTIA

 

I recorded a bit of bird watching in my last blog and have since seen even more birds of color: red, yellow, black, brown. Those sightings prompted memories of an elusive deep green bird I glimpsed after a few weeks of a two-year sojourn in Ahwaz, Iran. As a reminder of Iran, I substituted the drawing of a scene in Iran by New Iberia artist Georgia Dugan (now deceased) for the green bird.
 


I was still suffering from culture shock when I saw the beautiful green bird sitting in the desert near Marun, Iran, where I'd accompanied my husband when he worked on a water injection project in southern Iran. I hadn't photographed any Khuzestan scenes. However, I mentioned the green bird in a poem that the National Oil Company newspaper published. The poem attracted a visit from Hassan Hosseinipour, the company editor/poet who offered me a job writing for the Yaddasht Haftegy. I never saw the green bird again, and I'm sorry that I didn't photograph him. 
 


After seeing the bird, I asked my Dutch neighbor about him as she'd been an assistant veterinarian on the Isle of Cyprus. Maude Vroon had brought rice birds in her pocket via air when she moved to Iran and was an avid bird watcher. However, she just handed me a copy of Zien Is Kennen (Look to Know) to do my search for the green bird. The text and accompanying photo seemed to identify Groene Specht, a green woodpecker. This identification amazed me since trees were scant in Khuzestan, Iran.



The green woodpecker, a European species fond of ants, probably had been pecking in an old date orchard, the site of which had been decimated and became Melli Rah subdivision. In this company-owned residential area, we lived for two years. The bird uses the same nesting hole for ten years, and I reckon he hadn't changed residence in a decade. His main fare of ants may have eventually become termites, critters that caused us to move during the last few months of our two-year sojourn.
 


Later today, I plan to search for a children's animated series entitled Bagpuss, a woodpecker. A good friend often accuses me of romanticizing my sojourn in Iran. However, I do value the two-year experience I recorded in vignettes back in the '70s. In the introduction re-published in Iran: In A Persian Market, 2015, I often repeat the lament of Omar Khayyam, 11th-century Persian poet: "The glory is departed—Where? Where? Where?"
 


And the deep green bird remains vivid in my memories of Iran.

 

Drawing by Georgia Dugan (deceased).

FOR ANNE SAYWELL, A BIT OF BIRD’S-EYE SPEEDWELL OR VERONICA PERSICA)

Blue-eyed Veronica

Today is a balmy February day, much like spring (72 degrees), and the sudden birth of flowers assures me that we’re going to enjoy the last weeks of our Louisiana sojourn. One of the small, winsome plants that have appeared near our home is thriving in a pasture for horses across Darby Lane here in New Iberia, Louisiana. 

“It’s probably too small to mention because it isn’t dramatic enough,” my botanist friend Vickie Sullivan declared. But I like this tiny blue flower called Veronica persica (Bird’s-eye Speedwell) because it isn’t a “show-off” plant. Linnaeus named the plant after St. Veronica, who appears in early Christian legends as pitying Christ on the way to Calvary and wipes his face with her handkerchief, which then receives a miraculous true image of his features.

Veronica persica has been naturalized in the US from Eurasian sources, and it seems to like horses because it grows almost under horse’s hooves near the golf club on Darby Lane. The sight of it causes me to lighten up a bit today. Yesterday, my dear British friend, Anne Saywell, passed into the “Also World” (as Sister Elizabeth of Convent of St. Mary calls the hereafter), and I was sad most of the day. 

I recently wrote a blog and published a photo of Anne Saywell that showed her in a beautiful sweater she knitted. Anne was someone I befriended in 1974 while living in Ahwaz, Iran, and we kept in touch for almost fifty years. I can’t say I “kept up with” because Anne and her friend, Maureen Allchin seemed to always be aboard cruise ships. They spent several months doing an “around the world” tour during the last decade of Anne’s life. A trip to Bulkington, Wiltshire in England was on my bucket list when Anne suddenly developed stomach pain, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and died 24 days after diagnosis.

I’m publishing Vickie Sullivan’s photograph of the beautiful tiny flower mentioned above as a small tribute to Anne Saywell, an outstanding executive in the administration of Girl Guides in England, a talented craftswoman and gardener who loved fun and games and blessed her friends with enchanting wit. She also possessed a gracious plenty of loyalty to anyone she befriended during her long life. I hope she has a good view of the Veronica persica from her new perch in the “Also World.”

 

Photograph by Victoria Sullivan

 

 

GING GANG GOOLIE GOOLIE GOOLIE GOOLIE WATCHA

Anne Saywell in hand knit jumper

The above words are often sung by Girl Scouts and Girl Guides and attributed to the authorship of Lord Baden Powell, father of Boy Scouting, but the song can be traced to a cabaret song once performed by the Swedes. If you google the words, you’re likely to turn up several song renditions, accompanied by dance and performed by Girl Scouts and Girl Guides from around the world.

I tuned in to performances recently, just after receiving sad news about the terminal illness of Anne Saywell, my good friend of nearly fifty years’ standing in England. Anne is a famous retired official of Girl Guides who could be called a human encyclopedia of songs, games, and crafts related to scouting for girls worldwide. She taught me “Ging Gang…” on a blistering day in the desert of Khuzestan Province, Iran where we led a TOFS (Troops on Foreign Soil) together for at least a year. Her leadership was an inspiration to Brits, Americans, Iranians, Turks, and other girls and leaders of a multicultural mix living in Ahwaz, Iran. Including me.

 

Diane with TOFS, Ahwaz, Iran 1974

 After playing the song via the Internet, I wrote the following:

“Tragic news arrives. A beloved friend is terminally ill. Grief closes my throat. Memory closes my eyes: Mah Jong at the Golf Club, Khuzestan Province, 120 degrees, Ahwaz, Iran, 1974. She strides across the desert, and I strain to keep up. That brisk British walk pulls me along. We’ve set out for Ahwaz after the game table, too impatient to wait for taxis. Marbles of sweat wet the long hair we both once tended. She runs out on the highway, arms flailing the air. A godsend, the Paykan taxi spins toward us. We begin to laugh. It’s red dog madness, that desert walk. Her laughter echoes. Ahwaz, Iran, 1974. Grief closes my throat. I try to let go.”

“Ging gang goolie goolie goolie goolie watcha,” old friend. I know you’re singing it right now, despite…

ANOTHER WET MORNING

“The silence of too much winter,” I once wrote in a poem, and I might add, “the winter of too much wetness,” as I look out at wet leaf piles heaped in the backyard. A prediction of fog and more rain evokes in me a desire to visit a place I love — the desert of southern California. The feeling is further enhanced when I open a folder that contains copies of postcards my mother collected on a trip to California in the 40’s — cards on which paintings of the desert were shown. The paintings appear on linen cloth cards, and, in particular, I was drawn to two: one of smoke trees in a desert wash and another of Joshua trees jutting into a blue sky.

A great classic book about the desert suitable for the kind of droopy weather we’re experiencing was written by John Van Dyke. It’s simply entitled The Desert, and if you read this tome, you might feel like trading locales, swamp country for desert terrain, for at least a week or so. The author spent three years living in and studying the environment of the desert from a naturalist’s point of view, and he paints with elegant prose what is portrayed in the renderings on the postcards I inherited from my mother.

As I finish up a book of poetry I’m writing — some of the poems based on the desert in Khuzestan Province, Iran — I’m reminded of lines in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “The worldly hope men set their hearts upon, /turns ashes or prospers, and anon,/like snow upon the desert’s dusty face,/lighting a little hour or two is gone.” Since I’ve memorized many of the quatrains in the Rubaiyat, this verse particularly resonates with me because it reminds me of how our everyday pursuits center on vanity and of how much we avoid the desert places if we can. But it’s there that we encounter the Self and our need for a more spiritually centered life. 

I’ve lived in at least two desert places: El Paso, Texas and Ahwaz, Iran, and from 1983-2007, I made annual treks to southern California where the brilliant light often restored my body and spirit. One summer while we traveled to Palmdale, California from Lake Tahoe, which straddles the line between California and Nevada, I sat in the passenger seat of a rented car during a few hours’ journey and was inspired to write 20 poems about the desert places we passed through, e.g., a brief one entitled “Sage Advisory” and another “Near Cartago, California.”

The long green fingers of sage

reach, open-handed, upward,

unafraid of the brilliant sun,

but they are closed,

will store their brilliance

and open their fingers

 only in darkness

when the desert has cooled,

when the universe becomes a plant.

and “Near Cartago, California: Population 75”

Salt flats, fields of uncommon snow

blush at the edges,

brine shrimp wriggling pink.

Not a mile away

from the turn-off to Death Valley 

Joshua trees suddenly jut up,

old men with arms linked,

standing too close to each other,

grousing in the sunlight.

And as I write this, the sky refuses to clear, so I continue going through my mother’s postcards, envisioning her delight… and loving that she, an intrepid adventurer, taught me to appreciate desert life.

DUCK—CHICKEN SOUP?

I was eating a baked Cornish hen today, and the scent of it caused a Proustian event — the smell tugged at my memory of another poultry event I experienced while sojourning in Iran back when… My reminiscence involved Isabel, a tiny Portuguese woman who lived next door to me in Melli Rah subdivision — a woman who helped me overcome the first stages of culture shock. Her remedy for all forms of culture shock: paint walls. Five layers of white paint appeared over sickly green walls that an Iranian decorator had thought would please U.S. expatriates suffering from culture shock.

Isabel, the Portuguese neighbor, helped me paint away this condition of culture shock, and when I told her I wanted to repay the favor, she just shook her head and said in her enchanting  voice: “By George, just bring me the chicken soup if I ever get sick.”

A few weeks later, Isabel began to suffer from symptoms similar to a flu bug traveling through Melli Rah subdivision and telephoned me: “Go to the Ahwaz Super and bring back a big chicken,” she instructed. 

I hadn’t learned how to drive a shift auto and had to borrow my daughter’s six-speed bicycle to make the necessary trip to the grocery. I had no idea about the speed at which the bike should be set, but it must have been “quick, the chicken soup,” because I didn’t have a chance to pedal. The super speeder flung me down the pock-marked street in 120-degree weather, and I came to an ungraceful halt, over the handlebars, and into the jube near the supermarket. Fortunately, I was unharmed and went in the market to claim a chicken.

I remember that earlier that morning I had gone to my tin desk facing the street and penned a column entitled “Persian Poultry Pretty Paltry” for the Daily Iberian, the newspaper of note in my hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana. I’d been writing an “In A Persian Market” column for several months, and when I looked in the freezer at the market, I knew why I had written the column about Iranian poultry. Chicken Little appeared to be a shriveled version of the chickens raised in America, and worse still, she was frozen solid and would take some thawing before I could cook a pot of soup and bring it to Isabel.

When I returned on the super speeder bike and delivered the bird, Isabel took one look and burst into laughter. “I might have known not to send a Louisiana Cajun to the store for a chicken,” she said. “You Cajuns think that the only kind of fowl is a duck.  That is a duck — an Iranian duck — but still a duck, you rotten neighbor.”

No, I didn’t die of embarrassment. I hired a taxi that took me to the bazaar and found a real chicken, (still a bit undersized), then made soup. By early afternoon I was able to take the requested "cure for all ills" in a large pot to Isabel’s bedside. The following day, Larry, her husband, washed and returned the pot. A week later, I became sick with a flu-like illness, and Larry asked to borrow the pot, “perfect for making chicken soup,” he said. Evidently, Isabel had no trouble finding a chicken and boiling it — she brought me a steaming pot of soup. She also returned my large, American-made vessel. However, after I recouped, Isabel fell ill again, and I made another pot of soup for her. 

In desperation, Larry cleaned and returned the pot and complained. “I know you girls have the greatest intentions to cure one another,” he said, “but I think you’re passing the germ back and forth in the pot of chicken soup. Maybe you all are really cooking sick ducks, but for good health’s sake, please don’t try to doctor one another.” 

So, Isabel and I turned off the stove and, voila, we regained good health. And I haven’t had homemade a la Iranian/Cajun, Chicken/Duck soup since we returned to the States. Maybe we just needed a genuine Louisiana fowl from Gueydan, Louisiana — Duck Capitol of the World. 

Drawings by Diane Moore

TANKS AHOY

I have a close British friend of over forty years standing whom I befriended during my sojourn in Iran in the 1970’s and with whom I still correspond. She left Iran shortly after the Iranian Revolution erupted and now lives in Bulkington Wiltshire, Great Britain or the United Kingdom or whatever designation is appropriate for what I used to simply call England. Anne is a few years younger than I am and much younger in spirit as you will discover from reading this blog. Not long ago she emailed me explaining that she had made a bucket list (which includes many risk factors) and was trying to “tick off” items before she reached 80 years of age. 

At the top of that list was her desire to drive a tank. Don’t ask me why because she was only a few years old when WWII occurred, and she wasn’t old enough to remember tanks lumbering through England. Anyway, her good friend, the Rev. Maureen Allchin, photographed the tank venture, and Anne forwarded a few of the photos just before she boarded a cruise ship bound for Iceland and Greenland where she promised to wave at me — her favorite gesture associated with her friendship with me, the armchair traveler. This year, she waved from the Arctic Circle, and the year before last, she waved from an around-the-world-in-several-months cruise.

Anne taught me to drive a Paykan automobile with a stick shift on the floor when we were together in Iran because she was the only human calm enough to ride with me through neighborhood roads in Ahwaz. These roads had what seemed to be a dip every other block. I would drive into the dip and pull out with loud gear grinding; however, Anne sat beside me, calmly imitating the Queen’s wave as I startled passersby who glimpsed the Paykan disappearing in the dips noisily and re-appearing with even louder grinding noises. But after three lessons with Anne, I was able to drive alone over the bridge that crossed the River Karun and visit with her on the other side. If you’ve ever had a Brit for a friend, you know that you do what is expected of you and you do it with good humor. 

An example of Anne’s wry humor written during the 1980’s: “Sarah was given an indescribable plastic wind instrument for her birthday. So we spend our afternoons following the score of ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ and ‘God Save the Queen.’ (Yes, ‘God Save the Queen’ from this indescribable plastic wind instrument). Wouldn’t you like for her to cross the pond and bring it with her for a long visit?”

I always look forward to Anne’s e-mails from wherever she is waving. The tank episode was slightly shocking to me, but it’s probably in line with Anne’s indomitable spirit. While we were in Iran, she talked me into joining a party of twelve children and four adults from the congregation of Good Shepherd Church in Ahwaz on a train bound for Tehran’s Garden of Evangelism (described in my books, Iran in a Persian Market and Sophie's Sojourn in Persia). The trip took sixteen hours, and most of our ride took place during the long night that we wove in and out of mountain tunnels on a narrow track between 7,000 - 9,000 ft. high that overlooked deep ravines in which I could see no bottom. Anne slept through the entire trip.

To return to the tank, I’m not sure what items are left on Anne’s “Perils of Pauline” list, but I wouldn’t be surprised if skydiving wasn’t close to the top.

Photographs by the Rev. Maureen Allchin

RE-ISSUE OF BOOK EVOKES MEMORIES

This morning, Victoria Sullivan, publisher of Border Press, and I were discussing a re-issue of my first book entitled Iran In A Persian Market. I began to reminisce about the flight to Tehran from London that my daughters and I made when we joined my husband who worked as a petroleum engineer with the National Iranian Oil Company in Ahwaz, Iran.

"I don't think things were as volatile in the 70's as they are in the Mideast now," I said, "but I do remember being herded off the plane in Tel Aviv, daughters in tow. We were greeted by soldiers holding machine guns and were placed in stalls where we were thoroughly searched. Later, someone on the plane who had previously traveled the route said that the so-called search for a bomb on the plane was only a cover-up for sales at the duty-free shops in the airport." Here's an excerpt from Sophie's Sojourn in Persia, a young adult novel I wrote, documenting this incident:

"We were supposed to be on the ground twenty minutes, and Mother told us we could stay on the plane. The captain's voice boomed over the intercom. 'All passengers must clear the plane. Take the buses to the terminal and wait for further instructions. Please clear the plane quickly. Carry all hand luggage with you...'

"As we walked down the steps toward a long bus resembling a trolley car, my mother gasped. Six soldiers wearing khaki uniforms stood in front of the bus, machine guns resting in their hands. They glared at us. The sun beat down on them, and great wet spots spread from their underarms. It was very hot....

"'It's only a checkpoint of some kind, I'm sure,' Mother reassured us. An old woman wearing a felt hat grabbed my mother's free arm and held on. 'Are we going to be shot?' she asked. Her voice quavered with fear... 'Of course not,' my mother said. 'They're probably checking the plane to see if it needs repairs or something...'

"Inside the terminal, dark-skinned women dressed exactly like the men soldiers herded us into a back room. It was filled with stalls that had dirty white curtains for doors. A woman motioned for the three of us to go into a stall. 'All of you can go in together,' she said to my mother. 'When you get inside, strip down to underclothes. Leave your bags with me...' She went over to my mother and felt her underclothing all over. My mother turned red and said pleadingly, 'You don't have to search the children that way.' The woman smiled. 'It's my job to search for weapons. My name is Leah...'

"The woman had put our bags in a corner of the stall and began to go through them. When she opened Suzy's bag (Suzy was a fictitious name for my youngest daughter) and pulled out a rubber octopus, she let out a piercing scream. The octopus dangled from a dirty string that Leah held in her hand as she ran from the room screaming and giggling...Leah and several other women ran from stall to stall, dangling the rubber animal for all to see. ...Finally, the woman took the octopus to the guard at the entrance to the room. He unbuttoned his shirt and took out a knife. Holding the octopus in the air with one hand, he slashed it three or four times in the head, then dropped it into Leah's hands. 'No explosive here,' Leah said, throwing the octopus to Mother...

"The old woman in the felt hat came over and patted Suzy on the top of her head. 'There, there,' she said. 'I just talked to Mrs. Seton.' She gestured toward a woman with bright red hair and a sharp nose sitting nearby. 'She says there was talk of a bomb threat, and that's why we had to clear the plane. They had to take out all the seats and search thoroughly. We should be leaving in thirty minutes...'

"Suzy stopped crying, but my mother's face got this tight look, and a bluish ring appeared around her mouth. 'Bombs? Who would do such a thing?' she asked. 'We aren't Arab spies!'

Mrs. Seton spoke up. 'Most of us are going somewhere in the Mideast to work or to be with husbands who work there. I don't think there was a real threat. Do you notice how many people bought gifts at the duty-free shops? I think it was a trick to get us to buy their wares...

"We boarded the plane and took off... It was evening, but the sky was blue, blue, with hardly any clouds in it. I looked down at the soldiers still standing on the airfield with their hands on the machine guns and wondered if we'd get the same kind of welcome in Tehran..."

At the time of the incident I accepted that explanation for being herded off the plane because the Israelis wanted us to shop at the duty-free stores; it was a reassuring thought for me and my young daughters, and this morning I continued to relate the experience as if all had been well during the time we spent in the airport. A few hours later, when I researched the Israeli-Palestinian situation of 1973-74, I was shocked to discover that in September of 1974, fifteen months after our encounter in Tel Aviv, a TWA jet with 88 passengers traveling from Tel Aviv to Athens, crashed into the Ionian Sea after Palestinian militants detonated a bomb hidden in the luggage compartment. The crash killed all the passengers and crew members aboard!! 

Forty-one years later, I stand guilty of "ignorance is bliss," since heretofore I believed that the investigation of the plane was a ploy to stimulate interest in duty-free goods. In any case, during the first three months in Iran when I experienced cultural shock, I avoided reading or talking about political incidents that resulted in severe consequences anywhere in the Mideast and buried the memory until I returned Stateside. I then recorded the cause of the Tel Aviv incident the way a fellow passenger had explained it when we finally resumed the journey to Tehran. The delay in Tel Aviv caused us to arrive at midnight at Mehrabad Airport and to experience another uneasy introduction to our sojourn in the Mideast.

However, I did overcome cultural shock and have written three books about our two-year stay in Iran, the last one being The Holy Present and Farda, a book of poetry recording the more fascinating aspects of this Mideastern culture and its history.

EVERYTHING IS PEACHY AGAIN

These excursions to buy peaches fresh from orchards seem to have become an obsession with me! Friends here at Sewanee gave us a tip about the best fruit in the area, and Saturday we set out for an orchard that we thought was in Tennessee but turned out to be in an adjoining state! We drove toward Winchester and veered onto Hwy. 16, which originated in the valley and led to Hwy. 79, where we began to climb, passing by granite cliffs and densely wooded areas that are characteristic of the Cumberlands. Although the highway was wide and in good condition, we had the entire road to ourselves. I began to feel we had driven onto the set of Deliverance and expected mountain men to come out of the woods to attack us at any moment. 

Several signs advertised the Walls of Jericho, and I wondered if we had driven into a time warp. I discovered later that the signs referred to Tennessee and Alabama trailheads that are part of the Skyline Wildlife Management area, which had once been the property of a Texas oil magnate who bought 60,000 acres of the land in Franklin County, Tennessee and Jackson County, Alabama during the 40's. The Nature Conservancy now owns 12,000 acres in Alabama and 8900 acres in Tennessee.

The road seemed endless, and I thought we were on a wild goose chase when we passed from Tennessee into Alabama. We turned around and after fifteen minutes and numerous attempts, I was able to get cell service and connect with the friend who had sent us peach hunting. She revealed that she had forgotten to tell us the orchard was in Alabama. Again, we turned around and retraced our route.

"We are in holy country," I told my friend Victoria who was driving. "We've passed at least three Holiness churches—the Free Holiness Church, The Holiness 79 Church, and some church with an acronym before the Holiness..."

"We can always get churched if we don't find any fruit," she said drily. I could tell that she was annoyed because even the GPS had ceased to register a speed limit for the area, which meant we were in uncharted territory.

When we had reached an elevation of 1700 feet, a sign appeared at the head of a small country road.

"Voila—Crow Mountain Orchards!" I exclaimed.

"Your favorite bird has come to the rescue," she said. "Only 7 1/2 miles more to travel... as the crow flies."

When we turned off on another lane, we began to see peach and green apple orchards and blackberry bushes growing by the roadside. We parked alongside six or seven cars and could see that the farm store didn't lack for customers—'though we wondered what highway they had traversed as no cars had passed us enroute. Inside, we found cartons of  peaches, blackberries, plums, and green apples and were given a taste of the fresh fruit. After sampling the delicious fruit, we bought peaches, blackberries, and plums and departed.

Bob Deutscher, the owner of Crow Mountain Orchards, was born and raised in Indiana and once had an active fruit operation there, but because he was forced to pick the fruit before it ripened in order to make a profit, he traveled south to find land suitable for an orchard so he could capture the early northern market. He purchased the 126-acre site on Crow Mountain in the early 70's and had plans to ship his fruit out in an effort to corner the northern wholesale market; however, the quality of his fruit actually brought people to his door. Today, most Crow Mountain produce is sold locally...even if goose girls like us have to get a bit lost before they locate the orchards. Apples from the Crow Mountain Orchards have been touted as the apples having the best color in the state and are among the tastiest, according to an Auburn horticulturist quoted on The Crow Mountain Orchards internet site.

The drive home seemed shorter, and when we brought the fruit to the Hammans, our friends who had sent us into the hinterlands, they invited us to sit a spell on their porch. We ate the plums for an appetizer and were lucky enough to be invited for supper and a rock music concert via Henry's streaming device. 

The trip reminded me of the years I spent in Iran when expatriates had to devote an entire morning to shopping for fruit and vegetables in the bazaar, but none of the Iranians' fresh produce equaled the quality of the fruit we brought back from Crow Mountain. The Hammans, who lived in Tehran several years, agreed with me, and Kathy described how ecstatic she felt when she entered a Kroger's market and found a gleaming display of delicious fresh fruit and vegetables the year they returned to the States. Her feelings resembled my own when I discovered a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce displayed on a shelf in the Ahwaz Super Store in Iran. "Hay la bas," I exclaimed when I saw the bottle of flaming sauce in a green bottle...then burst into tears!

RUMINATIONS ABOUT PERSIAN RULERS

A few days ago, I attended morning services at St. Mary’s Chapel as I usually do on Tuesdays. It was a day overhung with thick fog, and I confess that my mind was as befogged as the outdoors when the lector began reading the Old Testament lesson. I was jolted awake by the names Cyrus and Darius, two Achaemenid kings who reigned over Persia during the fifth and sixth centuries BCE. I lived in Iran (contemporary name for Persia) during the 70’s and read a lot of history about the Persian Empire when it was at its apex during the two kings’ reigns, so the names caused me to pay more attention to the reading about Cyrus freeing the Jews from Babylon captivity and supporting the beginning of the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple. I remembered that Darius, who followed Cyrus, continued generous funding for the reconstruction of this temple. This great Persian king ruled over forty different ethnic tribes in a domain that stretched from India into the Balkans, and his empire covered three million square miles.

Darius supported faiths and religions that were “alien” as long as they were peaceable, sometimes giving grants for their religious work. He favored Greek cults, supported Elamite priests, built the temple for the Egyptian god, Amun, and restored many other Greek temples that had been destroyed. In Persia he built Persepolis and Susa, promoted learning, agriculture and forestation, earning his name as the greatest of Persia’s kings. One of the sites I visited at Naqs-e-Rustam bore several inscriptions on Darius’s tomb, which was carved out of rock face, and the one that impressed me read: “I am Darius the Great King, King of Kings, King of countries containing all kinds of men. King in this great earth far and wide…”

The day following my reminiscences about Darius, I picked up the newspaper and read that the new president of Iran, Hasan Rouhani, has informed the UN General Assembly that he seeks to work with the international community, and Iran stands ready for “constructive engagement.” He has also freed political prisoners, replaced the military with the foreign ministry to lead nuclear negotiations, even acknowledged Jews worldwide by wishing them well on Rosh Hashanah. To me and many Americans, his words sound encouraging.

Having lived in Iran for two years, I have some sympathy for the people and the future of this country. My “what if” thoughts about Rouhani border on wild and crazy miracles when I express that I wish he’d take a leaf from history and would really return to the views of the ancient Achaemenian kings, Cyrus and Darius, who practiced tolerance for and generosity toward the faiths and religions of other countries.

However, most opinion pieces in the news are contrary to my “what if” feelings, and I do admit that I am skeptical about Rouhani’s declarations. A few years ago, I expressed that skepticism metaphorically in a poem entitled “Persepolis” in my book, Farda, the last verses appearing below:

“[Alexander] set fire to the state of the free,

the wealth of social accord,

destroying that final bloom,

imperial eastern civilization,

its art now reduced to building missiles,

its architecture to flimsy tents in hot wind,

ghazals about lost battles drifting…

across cloudy mirrors.”

The above picture is a segment of a painting done by Paul Schexnayder of New Iberia, Louisiana for the cover of my book, Sophie’s Sojourn in Persia.

MIST

Louisiana Mist

This morning I woke up and looked out the window at a landscape veiled in mist, a familiar scene during the fall and winter here on The Mountain at Sewanee, Tennessee. It seems that I move between mists and mists. In the summer and fall, I live at Sewanee, a place where, as one of my poems reveals, “the mist stores itself/ between the dark tree trunks/obscures the valley, /the air dense and wordless.” In the winter I live in New Iberia, Louisiana where similar mists prevail. They were once captured in the paintings of Alexander Drysdale of New Orleans, Louisiana (1870-1934) who thinned his oils with kerosene to produce the shadowy landscapes that made him famous. In later years, photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery of south Louisiana was attracted to what she called “shades of mystery and shadow” and gained national recognition for the photography of sugar cane fields shrouded in Louisiana mists.

Writers and artists have always been intrigued by mist, the condensation of water vapor that dims and obscures landscapes, often hiding such brilliance as the flaming leaves now turning orange, yellow and red on The Mountain here. Tolstoy, Faulkner, Yeats, Dickens, to name a few writers, wrote about mists hiding the changes taking place in nature or obscuring human figures so that they weren't recognizable at a few yards. The famous novelist Stephen King wrote a novella entitled The Mist, a story about people experiencing terror in a small town in Maine when it was engulfed by mist, and otherworld creatures appeared.

Here on The Mountain, we get socked in by mists and delay going down to the valley for provisions of any kind until it burns off. Those socked-in days become ones involving indoor pursuits. I know that when I return to Louisiana, there’ll also be mornings when mist will hang over the slow-moving, brown waters of the bayou, and I’ll feel a certain malaise and sense of isolation provoked by the gray landscape.

The only places I've lived where mists didn't hover over the landscape are Ahwaz, Iran and Electra, Texas. In Iran, the sky seemed to always be like a blank sheet of blue copy paper – cloudless, mist-less, and filled with merciless desert heat. However, a calendar with a painting of a misty sky hung beside my old tin desk in the front room of my home in Melli Rah and made me nostalgic for the landscapes I’m now complaining about!

Mists have actually inspired my Muse to write poetry and full-length mysteries containing numerous mentions of “mist” which I used to portray the atmosphere of south Louisiana and Mississippi; e.g., (from Chant of Death), “Insects whirred monotonously and Malachi thought how like the monk’s chants their incessant steady singing was, only the insects never seemed to sleep…As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see vague swirls of mist hanging over the lake…” Or from Goat Man Murder: “When Donald Majors returned to Pecan Grove as the sun pierced the morning mist, he discovered his sister Penelope already at breakfast…the long kitchen that faced a back gallery harbored a cheerful spirit not found elsewhere in the mansion…” (The latter mystery is presently being transposed into a script for a play by Rose Anne Raphael of New Iberia). Then there’s a scene from The Kajun Kween, my young adult book set in south Louisiana, in which Petite Marie Melancon goes into the swamp and encounters a loup garou (werewolf): “Out of the wispy mist ahead, something glowing yellow-white leaped up and floated toward the pirogue…”

There are many more allusions to mist in my writings, as well as in the works of more famous writers, and on such a misty day, I could probably spend the entire morning searching for such allusions. However, it’s 10 a.m; the bright fall leaves on the trees in my backyard are beginning to poke through the oppressive gray blanket, and I have packing to do to prepare for mists to come in bayou country.

Painting by my brother Paul Marquart

P.S. Coming Soon! A review of Dr. Victoria I. Sullivan’s and Susan Elliott’s newest book, Why Water Plants Don’t Drown, published by Pinyon Publishing, an excellent marsh plants guide with beautiful drawings and illustrations. 

ON THE USE OF THE COMMON FORK AND KNIFE

It all started with a remark made by Lady Mary, a daughter who is being urged by her aristocratic parents, the Crawleys, to marry an heir to the family fortune in the televised Downton Abbey series. The scene is a country home in Edwardian England, circa 1912, and the discussion centers on a gentleman who is sole heir to the kingdom of the Crawleys. After watching the heir’s table manners, Lady Mary remarks that she could never marry a man who couldn't hold his fork like a gentleman. “Oh,” I said to my friend who was watching the series with me: “I know how Brits feel about Americans’ table manners, and I wrote all about it in my column, Cherchez la femme, back in the 70’s.”

At noon today I unearthed a compilation of the columns, which I once planned to showcase in book form, and read aloud the column involving the use of the common fork at the lunch table. After reading it, I decided that there could be some Downton Abbey fans who would enjoy the revised column I'm posting below:

Good manners rank with good grooming and good behavior. And if you don’t believe that adage, ask the British. They’re sticklers for the proper use of china, glass, and silver. I know because I underwent considerable teasing about my American style of eating when we lived abroad.

The problem had to do with the common fork. One noonday at a church camp in the Garden of Evangelism in the Elburz Mountains near Tehran, Iran, I was casually cutting a piece of meat with knife in my right hand and fork in my left. When I transferred the fork to my right hand to devour the meat, I found several Brits looking at me and snickering. “Oh, you Americans,” one of them commented. “You always do things the wrong way—and certainly the hard way.”

If you’ve never tried eating continental style in the manner that my British friend recommended, you must try forking food “the proper way,” as the Brits say. You spear meat with you fork and cut it off with the knife. With the meat fixed on the prongs of the fork (prongs down, prongs down) you place the knife blade underneath. The Brits say, “A slight twist will help to fix it firmly.”

Don’t stop with the meat. You also pile a small amount of potatoes and vegetables on the topside of the prongs, along with the meat. The heavily-laden fork is then conveyed to the mouth by twisting the wrist and raising the forearm slightly. The biggest “no-no” is that of changing hands. And you aren’t supposed to stick your elbows out and raise your entire arm either.

I worked on this fork operation for the ten days of church camp I attended that summer of 1974, but I was still viewed as a clumsy fork user. “Why?” I asked my British friends, “why isn’t the fork used to scoop food when it is fashioned with a gentle curve in the middle for holding food?” Well, they didn’t know, and no amount of researching turned up the answer either.

Actually, mention of the fork in literature dates back to the 11^th century when a lady journeyed from Byzantium to Venice. She married a rich Doge, Domenico Selvo, in 1070. The first person in history to mention forks was an Italian named Saint Peter Damian. He wrote that this Doge’s wife from Byzantium did not touch her food with her fingers. She carried it to her mouth with certain gold, two-pronged forks she had brought with her from Byzantium. At that time, people were shocked by the lady’s extravagances, and very few people followed her example.

Well, forks aren’t everything. The Brits at the Tehran camp didn't know how to eat watermelon southern style. They tried to cut the melon in dainty snips just the way they cut meat. “Look,” I told them in my best Louisiana drawl, “watermelons are to be held. Put down those forks and knives and watch me.” I grasped a large slice of melon with both hands, lowered my face, and zipped through the choicest pulp, swooshing the melon from one side of my mouth to the other.

“But what do we do with the seeds?” they asked. Would you believe that there are now Brits who returned from their stint in Iran to live in places like Sussex, London, Surrey, and Buckinghamshire who mastered the art of spitting watermelon seeds through their teeth almost forty years ago?

Yes, I know good manners are as important as good grooming and good behavior, but we Americans also believe that good digestion is vitally important. And how can you digest food properly if you’re uptight about conveying food on a heavily-laden fork to the mouth?

Just between us, in that seed-spitting contest, I was lucky to get one watermelon seed through my teeth with the first shot (which landed in the lap of the Anglican minister who was director of the camp). And, truthfully, I always eat watermelon with a knife – sometimes with a fork.

THOUGHTS ABOUT CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION

Last week, I came across an article about an Iranian Christian pastor who had been found guilty of apostasy and sentenced to death for his unwillingness to denounce Christianity. The pastor, Youcef Nadarkhari, has been a Christian since he was a teenager and claims that he has never practiced Islam although he was born to Muslim parents. According to the Christian Post, he has been a Christian pastor for ten years and may be executed by the Iranian government for his beliefs.

This Huffington Post news alert awakened my memory of another Christian clergy-person who was nearly murdered in 1979, four years after I had returned to the U.S. after a two-year sojourn in Ahwaz, Iran. On October 26, 1979, The Rt. Rev. Hassan Dehqani-Tafti, the first Iranian born Bishop of the Episcopal Church of Iran, awakened to see the barrel of a revolver pointed at his head. He hardly hears the shots when they are fired. His wife, her left hand bleeding from a gunshot wound, pursues the fleeing attackers, and Dehqani-Tafti looks at his pillow – four small holes surround the place where his head has lain. I read this account years ago in The Hard Awakening, written by the Bishop, a book in which he also describes his experiences after the Shah was deposed. At that time church property had been confiscated, offices broken into and clergy and staff arrested. Following the attack on the Bishop, he and his wife fled to Great Britain. However, the greatest personal tragedy occurred when his son Bahram was murdered by thugs on the streets of Tehran.

I didn’t know the Bishop personally, but during my sojourn in Iran, I spent a few weeks in the summer of 1974 at a church camp in Tehran that was sponsored by the Episcopal Church in Iran and one of my roommates was the Bishop Dehqani-Tafti’s British mother-in-law, Mrs. William Thompson. She was a hardy woman who decided that the cabin in which three of us were housed was too hot, and on the first night moved her cot outdoors to sleep in the open. She spoke about her daughter marrying the Persian-born Bishop in a unique Persian/Anglican wedding and told me that he had worked with her husband, Anglican Bishop William Thompson, adding that her husband had inspired Hassan Dehqani-Tafti to become an Anglican priest.

Tehran

Our camp, built by Presbyterian missionaries, was a compound of rustic military-like barracks named “The Garden of Evangelism” and was located near muezzin calls with which we competed for listeners. Our British minister, The Rev. Phillip Saywell, played a guitar and incited us to sing loudly during the time that Muslim chants, via loudspeaker, drifted across the walls of the Garden. At the time, I had no idea that the Revolution was fomenting and that members and clergy of the Episcopal Church and Christians, in general, were an endangered species. I left Iran before the Revolution, but I remember clearly the dismay I felt when I heard that Khomeini had become the political power in this country in which I had lived and worshiped in a Christian congregation. The thought that flashed into my mind was a line from W. B. Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming:” Things fall apart/the center will not hold/mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The center of Iranian government had collapsed, and the country that had been making great strides toward emerging from a medieval-like culture had been halted in its progress.

Bishop Hassan Dehqani-Tafti stood his ground as an advocate for Christianity and the Episcopal Church in Iran for awhile, but the assassination attempt caused him to write, “Sometimes I feel so small, so weak, so near to non-entity; and the task is so gigantic and full of awe that I am tempted to regard the whole thing as unreal. But then I hear the voice of God telling me that it is his work. The weaker you are, the stronger his power; and miracles the more possible…” Following the attempted murder, the standing committee of his Diocese finally convinced him to go into exile in Great Britain.

During his tenure as Bishop, Hassan Dehqani-Tafti brought about the reorganization of an Archbishopric in Jerusalem into the Anglican Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East and became the first Presiding Bishop of this organization. After he fled to England, he became Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Winchester. He abrogated vengeance against Islam for the death of his son and became known as an advocate of peace and compassion. He often wrote about his vision for cultural unity and ecumenism. He’s noted for his poetry and watercolor renderings and was renowned as a scholar of Persian mystical poetry. From Bishop Dehqani-Tafti’s mother-in-law, I learned that while I worshiped in the Diocese, the Bishop and his wife traveled the roads of Iran, establishing boarding schools for boys and girls and expanding the church’s work with the blind – one of the schools was located near Ahwaz where I lived.

An interesting article about Iran’s decades of Christian persecution, published by the Assyrian International News Agency, can be found on the Net. After reading this article, I placed an order with Amazon for Bishop Dehqani-Tafti’s autobiography, The Unfolding Design of My World.