First Thanksgiving

By: Susan

I arrived in this country on November 26th, 1978.  It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving.  So I did not get to celebrate this uniquely American holiday until the following November.  By then I was a senior at Bellaire High School in Texas.  Earlier that month, the American embassy in Tehran was attacked and many people were taken hostage.  Being an Iranian was not a good thing! I escaped a lot of the harassment and name calling because most of my classmates assumed that I was Hispanic and I did not correct them.  By the time they would find out that I was in fact "Eye-rain-ian", they knew me enough to know that I did not support violence and aggression of any kind.  One of those classmates was Sheri.  The week before Thanksgiving she asked me how I planned to celebrate it.  I mentioned that I didn't know how.  She was shocked! She insisted that I must go to her house.  She lived with her grandparents and described their Thanksgiving meal as enormous!  On Thanksgiving day my mother dropped me off at their house.  Sheri and her family were very welcoming to me.  It's just now, thirty some years later, that I realize what open hearts and minds they had.  Sheri knew me as a person and did not categorize me based on what she was hearing and seeing in the media at the time.  Sheri herself was displaced.  One day she told me it was because she had been abused.  I didn't really know what that word meant.  Now I do.  Maybe at some level she understood my situation, being out of place, trying to adjust to a new way of doing things, trying to belong.

To this day, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Free from pressures of gift giving and decorating, we come together as families, blood relationship not always a pre-requisite.  I see immigrants from all places embrace Thanksgiving and add their own flavors to it.  I always ask my mother to make Shirin-Polo.  It's a rice dish with raisins, almonds and slivers of orange peel.  I think of it as a Persian stuffing for the turkey.

I usually tell the story of my first Thanksgiving at Sheri's house when I talk about the time I learned how culturally we have different notions of what an enormous meal is.  At my house, whenever we had guests, my mother would fix enough food to have leftovers for a week.  If the platters were cleaned off at the end of the meal, she would worry that she had let her guests down by not preparing enough food.  At Sheri's house, there was enough food:  a slice of turkey breast for each person, casserole sized dishes of macaroni and cheese and green beans, a basket of rolls.  Enough food but very different from what I was used to calling "enormous".  Over time though, I have come to realize that this is really a story about true friendship, about letting "your heart burn with loving kindness for all those who cross your path"*.

Thanksgiving meal at my mother's house

Thanksgiving is coming up in a couple of weeks.  I am so excited to have all four of my children with us this year.  And as we sit around the table, eating whatever version of the traditional Thanksgiving meal we have made our own, I will be thankful for all the good people that have crossed my path on three continents.

*taken from a quote by Bahá'u'lláh

What You Put in the Center by Carolyn Pierce

I recently came across this passage while I was reading:
       
We had one of those world maps with the U.S. right in the middle -- remember those? And one of the students looked at it and said, "How come the East Indies are in the west?" And that question got me thinking about the impact of what you put in the center, and what it does to everything else.*

I can picture exactly the map referenced in the quote. The map, presumably made by an American company, featured the United States smack-dab in the middle of the map. The U.S. looked huge compared to the rest of the countries in the world. I grew up thinking that the U.S. was the largest nation in the world. Because Russia (or the U.S.S.R., or whatever its name was at the time) was cut so that part of it was on the left side of the map and part of it was on the right side of the map, it didn't look nearly as big as it is in reality. Canada, stretching to the far north, grew smaller toward the Arctic, which fooled the eye. Imagine my surprise and disillusion when I came face-to-face with the realization that not only was the U.S. not the largest country in the world, it wasn't even the second largest! That kind of map lead me to believe a falsehood about the size of the U.S., and I am reasonably certain that it also (subliminally) led me to believe that the U.S. was the most important country on earth. Okay, maybe it is to me, but probably not to people in other countries. I wonder what the maps in their schools look like . . .

Reading this passage did make me think about maps, but it also spoke to me about other parts of life. I have heard many times the adage, "You make time for what matters", so let's take a look at our daily planners or the calendars we have hanging on the refrigerator. How often is quality time with family or friends written in? How much time each week is allocated to worship? If you wrote down the time spent in front of the TV or playing on an electronic device, would it totally fill your free time? Have you blocked out time for improving your physical health? Is there time each week for learning something new? Do you have any volunteer service penciled in? If someone else took a look at your calendar, could they see at a glance what you put in the center of your life?

As if that wasn't guilt-inducing enough, let's think about our thinking. What absorbs your thoughts? If you had a thought-o-meter, where would the needle point most often? Do you constantly think about your job, your money, your looks, your possessions, your importance in life? Do you continue to think about work even when you are relaxing with family or friends? They can tell, you know. Are your thoughts most often focused on self-pity, your trials and tribulations, how others have done you wrong -- the unpleasant things in your life? That shows on your face (and it is not pretty). Likewise, if your thoughts are most often concerned with the good things in your life (counting your blessings, so to speak), that shows on your face as well. Your thoughts are a sure indicator of what you have put in the center of your life.

Ditto for your words -- they are just thoughts with a voice.  What does your conversation reveal about what is at the center of your life?

Lest you think I am feeling "holier-than-thou", rest assured that what I am writing is very convicting for me as well. I need to examine my own calendar, my own thoughts, my own words to see what I have put at the center of my life. I'm afraid I will not be pleased by the conclusions I must draw. I feel the need to make a plaque for my wall so I can see it every day:
                                       
                                            What you put in the center impacts everything else.





*The passage (in a book called A More Beautiful Question by Warren Berger) is a quote from Deborah Meier, a revolutionary educator who founded the Central Park East schools in Harlem in the 1970s. Meier was talking about the importance of what you put in the center of the curriculum in schools, but the words spoke to me about life in general.

Who Am I? Part 2

By:  Susan

 The dreaded questions.  First night of class, first day on the job, conversation at a dinner party.  A natural, normal question:  Where are you from?  But the answer for me is complicated.  Do you want to know where I was born?  Or do you want to know where I come from intellectually, where did I get my education and where my ideas were born?  Or do you want to know where I have left my heart, where my children were born and where I found my sisters?  Because the answers are three different places on three different continents.  To be factual, I have to answer the first one.  I was born in Iran.  No, not Iraq, I say quickly, as if one is better than the other and the list of preconceived notions any more positive.  But I quickly point out that I have been living in the United States since I was fifteen years old.  Except for about twelve years when I lived in Venezuela.  To be truthful, I have to say that I am from all or none of those places; I am “ethnically ambiguous”.  

I am an Iranian who holds on to the values of deep respect for my parents, high regards for excellence in education and hospitality.  I am an American who cherishes individual thoughts and creativity and questions everything.  I am an honorary Latina because it is the culture where I raised my children and invented a whole new family with strangers who have remained close to me despite distance and time.  It is also the culture that for me is a nice blend of my Eastern and Western influences.

What defines me is not my race, culture or ethnicity.  It is not what I do or where I was born.  It is not what I have or what I want to have.  It is the core of my character.  Truthfulness, kindness, justice and compassion are not determined by the accidents of our birth or the choices we made about jobs and careers but by conscious decisions we make every day to live better, a little bit at a time.

My children sometimes wonder who they are.  Are we American, Persian or Latinos, they ask.  I tell them they are children of the Kingdom; they are the product of the East meeting the West and creating a new race of men.  Hopefully they have inherited all the gifts and positive qualities these cultures have to offer but are not tainted by the prejudices and small mindedness of their ancestors on either side.