{"id":855,"date":"2005-11-28T15:36:26","date_gmt":"2005-11-28T23:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=855"},"modified":"2005-11-28T15:36:26","modified_gmt":"2005-11-28T23:36:26","slug":"my-forebearance-is-in-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2005\/11\/28\/my-forebearance-is-in-need\/","title":{"rendered":"My forebearance is in need"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I woke up uncertain,
\nand you know that gives me the fits,
\nso I left this land of fungible convictions,
\nbecause it seemed like the pits
\nAnd when I say, “conviction”,
\nI mean it’s something to abjure
\nand when I say “uncertain”,
\nI mean to doubt I’ll not turn out a caricature.
\nSo I set off in search of my forbears,
\n‘coz my forebearance was in need.<\/i><\/p>\n

— Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, “Ballad of the Sin Eater”<\/p>\n

So this weekend I was back in Santa Monica. I don’t say “home” (although that’s what’s marked on my cell phone), because it’s not really my home anymore. The Bay Area is my home now. This is where I hang my hat, or in my case, kick off my Birkenstocks. I didn’t see any of my friends (not cause I didn’t want to, it just didn’t work out), a few of which were in town, nor did I make any pilgrimages to some of my favorite eateries (Mashti Malone’s, Diddy Reise, The Apple Pan, Bay Cities Deli). I spent the bulk of my weekend hanging out at the house with my folks, my brother, and my cousin Reza. I also got a couple of driving lessons from Grandpa and my dad on how to drive stickshift. Probably around Xmas time, or definately by January, I’ll be the proud new owner of a manual transmission Volkswagen Golf — my Mom’s old ride, that was bought from a Swiss diplomat in Los Angeles a few years ago. <\/p>\n

All that aside, one of my favorite moments this past weekend was spending time with my little cousin Roya<\/a>, who is about to turn four. She’s the youngest of my cousin Ali’s three kids, and I first met her this past summer at a family wedding in DC. Given that she was born to two Americanized Iranians, she speaks fluent English and Farsi at the level of a four-year-old. She’s really cute and is still young enough to not know that I don’t speak fluent Farsi — she speaks at about my level. I can ask her simple questions in Farsi and she’ll respond. Then I’ll switch to English and she’ll switch languages with no problem. She’s taken to calling me “Bearded Cyrus” (\u00d8\u00b3\u00db\u0152\u00d8\u00b1\u00d9\u02c6\u00d8\u00b3 \u00d8\u00b1\u00db\u0152\u00d8\u00b4\u00d9\u2021\u00db\u0152) to distinguish me from the other Cyrus in our family. <\/p>\n

On Thanksgiving, toward the tail end of the evening, she and I sat in the children’s library\/playroom. I grabbed a Farsi kid’s book that’s used for teaching letters of the alphabet that has pictures to go along with it. \u00d8\u00a7 is for \u00d8\u00a7\u00d8\u00b3\u00d8\u00a8 and so on. (“Alef” is for “Asb” [horse].) We went through the whole book, that included a section for numbers 1-10 at the back and she did the whole book in Farsi and English. I was pretty impressed. She even tossed in a few Spanish words that she knew, particularly around the numbers section. Why don’t more parents teach their children their mother tougne, no matter if it’s a semi-obscure language like Farsi? If my Dad had taught me when I was that young I would be fluent by now. <\/p>\n

Of the six grandchildren on my Dad’s side, the only one who currently speaks fluent Farsi is my cousin Babak, now a law student at Berkeley. Four of us speak fluent French (Babak, Romain, S\u00c3\u00a9bastien, and me), four of us speak fluent English (Babak, me, Alex and Reza). The more I interact with my family, the more I realize that I need<\/i> to learn Farsi. I’ve taken some classes at Berkeley, and today I understand more than I can speak. I’ve decided that sometime within the next three to five years that I need to live in Iran for at least a few months. (Being the son of an Iranian makes me eligible to be drafted, which is not a prospect that I relish. As a result, I’m only allowed to stay in the country for three months without being drafted.) I want my children to be able to speak at least English, French and Farsi. Spanish would probably also be useful, but I think three is good to start with. <\/p>\n

The older I get, the more I feel a connection, or at least I want to feel a connection to my Persian heritage. Sitting here in my office in San Francisco, I’ve got pistachios on my desk, a poster of the Iranian national soccer team from 1998 above me, and a copy of Rosetta Stone Farsi<\/a> next to my computer monitor. <\/p>\n

After we finished the first Farsi book, she wanted to switch to an English book. I let her look at it while I found another Farsi children’s book to read. It was a similar alphabet book. I kept interrupting her with questions: “What animal is this?” and so on as I flipped through it. I eventually got to the last page and asked her what it was. After answering correctly, Roya said in a very exasparated voice:<\/p>\n

\u00da\u00a9\u00d8\u00aa\u00d8\u00a7\u00d8\u00a8 \u00d8\u00aa\u00d9\u2026\u00d8\u00a7\u00d9\u2026 \u00d8\u00b4\u00d8\u00af\u00d9\u2021 \u00d8\u0178 (Ketab tamaam shodeh?)<\/p>\n

(Is the book [finally] over?)<\/p>\n

I chuckled. She does speak my language, after all. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I woke up uncertain, and you know that gives me the fits, so I left this land of fungible convictions, because it seemed like the pits And when I say, “conviction”, I mean it’s something to abjure and when I say “uncertain”, I mean to doubt I’ll not turn out a caricature. So I set off in search of my forbears, ‘coz my forebearance was in need. — Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, “Ballad of the Sin Eater” So…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[147],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-personal","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-dN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}