Remembering Haleh

It has been over fifteen years since I last heard her voice on the phone, reassuring me all would be fine and that I should not worry. She said our faith in the benevolence of God and what is to come should be our anchor. I remember for the following few weeks I kept wondering if I should call again, knowing she was not feeling well and probably not in a condition to talk until one evening my mom told me she had passed on.

It is not an exaggeration to say there is not a single day since then that I do not think about my youngest aunt, Haleh, at some point during the day. A cross between an older sister and younger mother, I still listen to a song I first heard her sing during her first visit back from Spain. Completely captivated by her voice as she played her guitar, swaying her shoulders from side to side, as an 11 year old boy I imagined how some day I’d get to learn Spanish, play guitar and sing like her. Upbeat, funny and full of life I still remember her taking me to the movies to watch Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, women’s basketball game and other events where she’d sing and tickle me as I sat by her.  

I didn’t see my aunt again until a few years later when I moved to Catalunya too, where she had gotten married and settled near Barcelona. It seems strange now when I think she was only 28 at the time, but her young age never stopped her from being a voice of reason, a guide throughout my life even many years after I left and our contact was limited to few letters and phone calls a year or occasional visits. 

Each year, and specially as I get close to the anniversary of her passing, I go through many “what would she say” moments. I ask her questions, tell her of my dilemmas and then listen to her voice softly advising me, with a couple of funny inserts in between. Then, and almost without fail, I get the urge to listen to El Vendedor, the song I most vividly remember her sing. I listen to it over and over, dissecting the lyrics as I try to remember each wall and perspective in her beautifully decorated living room where she’d sing the song. 

A short walk with her along the city’s old Gothic quarter is enough to make me smile. She, as always, covers me with a blanket of warmth, knowing what I care to say, saying what I care to know…

In the calm and quite of her smiling face, along the imaginary streets where she paces, something lurks, something chases; something I have never forgotten about, from a time I have never written about.

I become sixteen again:

Drowning myself in her love

Cleansing myself in her strums

Clothing myself in the meandering melodies of her amorphous songs;

I’ll see you again one day

To float adrift in the plain of your white

O! Queen of unforgettable hearts,
Poet of untenable loves,

Troubadour of unforeseen roads, I am

The shapeless raft of the seeker of your peace

Trans-ported through ether and space,

Cast in the shadow of the parallel of your rhymes

Crossing your path in the perpendicular of time

Listen to "El Vendedor"

How To Propose To A Woman While Eating Swedish Meatballs At IKEA

These meatballs are harder to digest than your proposal

Since the beginning of time men have tried to one-up each other when it comes to capturing the heart of their beloved. From romantic clichés of proposing in Paris on top of Eiffel Tower to popping the question while on a Safari in Africa, men have tried and women have rejoiced in recounting the story to their female friends: “Oh, he was so nervous, it was so romantic; he’d been acting very suspicious for a couple of days, I knew there was something off; he wasn't himself; he knelt down in front of me with a diamond ring in hand…; it was beautiful, it was wonderful, delightful, delirious, delectable, delovely”.

Well, who knows, maybe this is an important gesture, we can’t really know for sure. But just in case it is, I think I've just came up with one of the most original proposals in the history of mankind (as in man-kind). Whereas common sense and wisdom points to a unique act of over-the-top romantic significance, I thought maybe one should look for the most common, least unique experience. Hence, the idea of proposing at an IKEA restaurant. You’re probably thinking “poppycock, this is an awful idea; she’ll kill me if I ever did something like that”. I cannot guarantee there won’t be an attempt on your life but I assure you the idea is worth exploring.

Just think about it. First of all, you are taking her to a chain furniture store; the last thing she’d expect is a proposal. Therefore, you manage to surprise her (check mark). As you’re walking through the maze-like path inside the store you can pause in the bedroom section and say something like “I can’t wait til we put our bed together, look we can add a Vejmon side table for $2.99”. She’ll be a bit disoriented; first because she expects the bed to be bought from a more reputable place and two, she assumes you’ll be putting the bed frame together while she caresses the duvet covers; and third, a side table for $2.99? What the hell is that? What is it made of? Cardboard?!

Regardless, you have managed to somewhat puzzle her so the element of shock will be even stronger when she hears the proposal. Then, as you go through kids section you can drop a Woody Allen-like comment such as “let’s have three kids honey, one of each sex”. She’ll laugh but deep down she is confused which means you’ll have a better chance of getting a positive response before she comes to her senses.

Then, the master piece, the coup de grâce if you will.  You take her to the infamous IKEA restaurant and choose the best deal on the menu (usually Swedish meatballs with side of vegetables for $5.99). Go wild, I mean after all how many times does a man get to propose to the love of his life? Two, three, four times max? Add a side of vegetable for extra $1.29. You don’t need to go crazy, just one side for both of you, you can say something like “I’m getting one because I want to share everything in my life with you”. Then, you sit down and look into her eyes from across the table. As you’re applying the tomato sauce to your meatballs (and maintaining your eye contact with her) you pop the question: “You know honey, everyone always wants to choose a unique place, a “this is me” location for the most important moment of his life. But I wanted to do something different and choose a “this is not me” place to express how I feel about you; and I think nothing does that better than this setting, in the midst of these cold Scandinavian designed tables, minimalist and impersonal, Bergmanesque and suicidal. Oh, darling, let me be the one putting together your bed and reading the assembly instruction for your cabinets; let me be the one pulling out the sofa bed and wonder what all those extra screws are for. Oh darling, (use a 1930s movie for proper intonation for the following sentence) I love you, you know I do. Will you marry me, oh darling will you, will you? 

Remember, you never stop enjoying your meatballs throughout the whole ordeal. It’s actually not that bad for a furniture store.

At this point a couple of things will have happened. She has gotten up and thrown the tray in your face while swearing at you for being cheap and pathetic (obviously she hasn't seen the bigger picture here). Or, she was so dumb-founded by what has just transpired that she said yes while trying to digest the events of the evening (and the meatballs).

What you have done here, she’ll realize soon enough, is your ingenious idea of choosing a franchise, a place with many branches across the world to propose in order to be reminded of your affection for each other in any country, and soon enough, every city on the planet you go to. There is one Eiffel tower, one Sagrada Famila, one tower of London, but there are hundreds of IKEAs all over the world. No matter where you go, there is a branch that will remind you of how much you love each other, there are, in other words, hundreds of places where you made your proposal.

And when you think about it (unless you prefer not to) what better place to express your love than a furniture store where you are asked to put the pieces of something together? You are putting together a common future (albeit without a guidebook) with many pieces that don’t quite fit and are mostly assembled wrong; but through repeated efforts and couple of broken legs and chipped exteriors you’ll manage to live together happily ever after. Isn't that worth taking a risk and proposing in the restaurant of a furniture store? If it isn't, then I don’t know what is.

Good luck.

Am I Free Range?

Live Free Range Or Die Hard

Having solved all the significant issues facing our world, issues such as racism, ethnic cleansing, child labour, child soldiers, poverty and sexual slavery of helpless young girls, I decided to focus my attention on improving my dietary intake. After all, what better way to say I care about our planet than to say I want my food to be organic; not for selfish reasons, but because of the benefits it presents to the carrots and radishes inhabiting our planet and their right to grow under humane conditions. I myself had refused to accept, for the longest time, the wholesale massacre of vegetables under the banner of vegetarianism. I refused the word organic describing food since I assumed anything I eat would be, by definition, organic, which is why I eat it, and not synthetic, which is usually what I wear. However, with the advent of Obama and the coalition of hope I decided to reconsider my rigid and dogmatic view of the world and read more about healthier lifestyle: less fat, more exercise, and so on. 

One of the topics that truly captured my imagination was the issue of free range animal husbandry. At first I thought this is another alternative life style where one, after a certain period of courtship, takes a chicken or a rooster as spouse. The mechanics of such a relationship didn’t quite make sense to me but I kept my mouth shut since I did not want to be accused of bigotry. After all, who am I to judge? It wasn`t until sometime later when I realized I was reading about how chickens, eggs, and livestock in general are taken care of and produced for the purpose of human consumption. But as I read more and more I came to a radical and eye opening realization: that I am not free range. So I asked myself, isn’t it hypocritical for me to expect the animal I eat to have a better lifestyle than me?

You may ask, what do you mean? This doesn’t make sense. Well, let me explain. The definition of free range, to be clear, is: “a method of farming husbandry where the animals can roam freely for food, rather than being confined in an enclosure. On many farms, the outdoors ranging area is fenced, thereby technically making this an enclosure, however, free range systems usually offer the opportunity for extensive locomotion and sunlight prevented by indoor housing systems”. 

Well, are we, these dwellers of modern urban landscape, buried in our iPods, iPads, iMacs and other iCraps, truly roaming free? Do we see enough sunlight? Do we even notice the sun when we’re outside typing on our virtual keyboard searching for the weather condition as we are soaked wet under the pouring rain? Do we have a big enough enclosure within our cubicles, cars, local buses and subways breathing air conditioned air and observing the world under a neon light through a window, whether made of glass or version 8? Do we, these Pub inhabiting, sports-watching, video-game-in-the-basement-playing global villagers have a big enough space and a wide enough fence enclosure to roam? Would we be able to lay eggs that a free-range-chicken buys? Do we have tenderloins tender enough for a cow to buy on its local super market, preferably at full price and without a coupon? If the roles were reversed, would Donald Duck, as the inspector of organic human farms, certify us as organic, with no anti-biotic residue and chemical free? Would Donald approve our life style as stress free lives in green pastures with enough sunlight to brighten our days and pleasant enough to force us to take the drastic and dramatic step of saying hi to a stranger in the elevator? Would Donald, certify us as free range?

In all fairness, I do think of myself as a tender, somewhat delicious man, but I am not sure if I would pass this test. The fact is, I am not free range. I can only dream of being in such a farm, roaming freely with chickens and cows in peace and harmony. What would life be like with such freedom? How would I interact with my fellow free rangers? Would free love rule the farm? Would cows and chickens be able to discuss human condition? Would they be able to lead normal lives and date and form a family? If a chicken and a cow met, would they be able to date and form a family? Would their kids be shunned by the larger free range community because of their mixed background? Would their relationship be considered a lesbian relationship and would they avoid discussing the day when they will be on the McDonald’s menu list?

The fact is we will never know, and most of these questions are irrelevant to the original question anyway. But one thing we do know is we have a long way to go to reach the type of living standards we promote for our livestock. I am free, but not within range. And maybe that’s the safest way to live.   

Six Degrees Of Separation, Five Links And A Chain

Hungarian Playwrite, Frigyes Karinthy

A few months ago I received a call from my parents to see if Toronto had been impacted by hurricane Sandy and how this was affecting my daily commute. Then, they went on to say how closely they were following the situation in New York and expressed their heart-felt sympathy for what people in North-East US were going through and how they wished for everyone to be able to go back to their homes and families. As we continued our conversation we talked about anything ranging from the lady who got hit in Toronto by a flying board sign to the civil war in Syria. During the conversation it never felt I was talking to someone living in Tehran. New York and Damascus felt just around the corner, with familiar streets, images and sounds.

In 1929, the Hungarian playwright, Frigyes Karinthy, proposed the theory of Six Degrees of Separation in a short paper called “Chains”, whereby anyone on the planet can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of five intermediaries. Looking at the daily news I can’t help but think that our link to human kind is much closer than the five links Karinthy talks about. We have gone beyond acquaintances to connect to a Mongolian farmer. The reporter and the cameraman have become our world consciousness, if they only knew it.

Karinthy observes in his essay “Planet earth has never been so tiny as it is now. It shrunk…due to quickening pulse of both physical and verbal communication”. So tiny! Isn’t that interesting? Seven billion people on earth moving randomly, their inherent potentialities undiscovered; disconnected though language, culture and race, seemingly carrying a chaotic and arrhythmic momentum, all converging their focus on pain and sufferings of distant lands and alien nations. One planet so small as to manifest the characteristics of a quantum particle, so tiny, that its force of attraction manifests as if it were a sub-atomic entity. This “son of man”, so dispersed and disenchanted, the wayfarer of an as yet undiscovered order, reacting viscerally to journey back to its point of origin in order to discover it essential unity, complete and strong.

We have a “small world problem”(1) where the chaos of our independence clouds the pattern of our interdependence. We are linked through our fear, love, humanity, likeness and diversity. We zoom in ever so closely to see but the recurring pattern of human heart manifesting nothing but its own fractal image on a global scale. Why, the question is, such a small world refuses to recognize its singularity?

It is interesting that we live in such a contradictory condition. On the one hand, our individualism, self-centric and self-serving attitude looking to maximize our pleasure and comfort, and on the other, our regard and concern for those who suffer: we want are diamonds to be mined humanely, our coffee to be free trade and are concerned about child labour when buying a shirt made in the developing world. We love our freedom and comfort but this nagging, ever present conscience prompts us to act or at least think. This emerging global conscience is the chain that is beginning to bind us together. A concert to end poverty won’t end it since it can never address the underlying problems that have got us here, but it is a proof of our desire to act, of our hope for the betterment of the world around us and of our thoughts being guided by a “world embracing”(2) view. We may have not truly become a global village, I think we are some distance from getting there, but we have managed to at least consider and define ourselves not only as citizens of a country but also of a turbulent and crisis ridden world. We ask our politicians to act during crisis in other parts of the world and show our displeasure when our institutions fail to recognize the acts of injustice. The cynic amongst us removes himself from the civil society while the activist uses acts of civic empowerment and civil disobedience to correct it. No matter how, we seem to have become either passive or active links in the chain that links us all together.

As we navigate between the old world and the emerging global civilization we should think of ourselves as the modern day pilgrims of a spiritual Mayflower sailing towards a new age. The journey may be hard, but our resolve is strong; the ocean of hardship may be turbulent, but the desire to see the new world gives us a perspective that makes the voyage worthwhile. The question now is no longer “whether” but “when”. The ideal no longer a work of science fiction but an unfolding story broadcast daily through our news networks, albeit in bits and pieces.

We have managed to take the first step. We are beginning to recognize the truth that always was: the essential unity of our humanity beyond seemingly irreconcilable differences. Everyone is a potential friend or relative, six degrees removed. Now we know.

Footnotes:

        1- The small-world experiment comprised several experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and other researchers examining the average path length for social networks of people in the United States. The research was ground breaking in that it suggested that human society is a small-world-type network characterized by short path-lengths. The experiments are often associated with the phrase "six degrees of separation", although Milgram did not use this term himself.

        2- Baha'u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 94: O friends! It behoveth you to refresh and revive your souls through the gracious favors which in this Divine, this soul-stirring Springtime are being showered upon you. The Day Star of His great glory hath shed its radiance upon you, and the clouds of His limitless grace have overshadowed you. How high the reward of him that hath not deprived himself of so great a bounty, nor failed to recognize the beauty of his Best-Beloved in this, His new attire. Watch over yourselves, for the Evil One is lying in wait, ready to entrap you. Gird yourselves against his wicked devices, and, led by the light of the name of the All-Seeing God, make your escape from the darkness that surroundeth you. Let your vision be world-embracing, rather than confined to your own self. The Evil One is he that hindereth the rise and obstructeth the spiritual progress of the children of men.