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If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies anymore.
(Nobody in America likes grammar Nazis. Not even the neo-Nazis who live in Owasso, Oklahoma.)
But like you, I was made carefully, by a God who loved what He saw. Like you, I want a friend.
But hiding is something to do while you wait to get stronger. Deep hiding. Hiding so sneaky that it’s hidden below tears that you think are trying to hide themselves—but they’re actually decoy tears. Not real ones.
To lose something you never had can be just as painful—because it is the hope of having it that you lose.
When the immigrants came to America, they thought the streets would be paved with gold. But when they got here, they realized three things: The streets were not paved with gold. The streets were not paved at all. They were the ones expected to do the paving.
every story is the sound of a storyteller begging to stay alive.
Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead. Imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it means.
The better question is, Can God create a law so big that He himself has to obey it? Is there an idea so big that God doesn’t remember anything before it? That answer is love. Love is the object of unusual size.
Memories are tricky things. They can fade or fester. You have to seal them up tight like pickles and keep out impurities like how hurt you feel when you open them. Or they’ll ferment and poison your brain.
That was when I learned if you can’t fight, you don’t get a vote in anything.
OKLAHOMA IS THE ONLY state in the Union where it is legal to own an anti-tank sniper rifle. It shoots bullets the size of milk cartons and if you hit a deer with it, all you leave is red mist.
Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble.
Making anything assumes there’s a world worth making it for. That you’ll have someplace, like a clown’s pants, to hide it when people come to take it away. I guess I’m saying making something is a hopeful thing to do. And being hopeful in a world of pain is either brave or crazy.
Imagine colorful wooden doors in odd shapes and windows at wonky angles embedded into the rock. Sometimes the top of one house has a rickety bridge to the balcony of another. It’s a stair-step bunch of cave homes stacked around each other. And curving along the windowsills is a little river, like a stone gutter, winding around the entire village. Sometimes it goes into the house, where you could wash your hands in the constant flow of cold mountain water. Sometimes it makes a tiny waterfall cascading next to a dirt staircase leading down to a new terrace of houses.
sometimes you fall in love that way, when you’re drowning in a world of pain. It’s not a happy love. It’s just whoever manages not to hurt you all the time. You think they must be the best the world has to offer. The little window of time you aren’t in pain can seem like happiness.
The way they toss the bag of crackers at you makes you feel like the lowest thing in the world. It’s against policy to make a kid go hungry, but you can tell, you’re not their guest. If you were a guest you would be treated with kindness and tea and all the best food they could offer. Being generous to a guest is one of the most different things about these countries. In Iran, when a guest comes, you tell them they may be angels, they are welcome and the whole house is filled with the joy of their presence. And the person always apologizing is the host, that they might have more to offer. But
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The Shiites were the ones who wanted Ali—the cousin—to take over, because they said we should be like the Jews. The magic is in the blood. The people. So if the Prophet had blood relatives, they were special. The Sunnis said, No, no, the new thing to do is like the Christians. Jesus didn’t appoint cousins. He had the apostles and then later, the popes. Popes were elected. They were the best person for the job. So the Sunnis followed Abu Bakr, because he’d been Muhammad’s best advisor.
My mama is not dumb, by the way. So when you’re evaluating whether she’s sincere in her belief or a lunatic, you should know she’s got more degrees, speaks more languages, and has seen more of the world than most people you know.
A god who listens is love. A god who speaks is law.
Love is empty without justice. Justice is cruel without love.
“Yes, the salute is a Persian symbol for shielding your eyes from the light of greatness when a boss comes in the room.”
But no matter which grade or pattern—no matter even if the greatest grandmother in the whole world wove it—every rug has a Persian flaw. The artisans of Kashan and Isfahan and Tabriz and Mashad all knew that only God was perfect—the only one who could listen to and speak the perfect truth. To remind themselves, and to show their humility, they would purposefully include one missed knot in every rug, one imperfection.
You have to understand, the worst penne pasta in Italy, the tubs of it they would give refugees, was still better than the Oklahoma City Olive Garden. It was that good. The tomato sauce was rich and creamy with leaves of fresh basil, not dried. With parmesan cheese on the pasta, that was all you needed and you could eat three bowls and still crave more.
The point of the Nights is that if you spend time with each other—if we really listen in the parlors of our minds and look at each other as we were meant to be seen—then we would fall in love. We would marvel at how beautifully we were made. We would never think to be villain kings, and we would never kill each other. Just the opposite. The stories aren’t the thing. The thing is the story of the story. The spending of the time. The falling in love.
And before that a myth, a poem of what his father had been, what fathers could be, what place we took in the story of our people. He was all of Ardestan—all the saffron fields, all the walnut trees, the platter of pomegranates and wedges of cheese. He was the lonely mountain and the snake, the pheasant in the mulberry tree. He was the bull and the boulevard of jasmine. And tea. He was the house with the birds in the wall and the Ferris wheel in the desert. He was the fountains of Isfahan, the steps in the stone, cut by the hand of Farhad. He was the city of kings, and the voice of
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I thought about the long year and everything she’d done for me. How she had always known which to be—a teacher who speaks or a teacher who listens—and I said, “Thank you, Mrs. Miller.” She was the best teacher I ever had, and she was crying a little, so I walked off before she could hug me or anything.
Reader, if you think anything of Oklahomans, I hope you’ll remember Jim and Jean Dawson, who were so Christian that they let a family of refugees come live with them until they could find a home, and who made them sandwiches with Pringles chips, which is the best chip any place has to offer, and means you’re welcome, and who let them play with their grandson’s Nintendo.
There is nothing more true-blue than a pastor of a small town making a sincere speech directly at you in a room full of forty people as if they aren’t there, and expecting an uncomplicated handshake deal to come of it. And there is nothing more exactly Iranian than to sit there nodding agreeably. That’s that tarof I told you about—the polite self-annihilation. The way of saying, “In your glory I turn to elemental dust, and hope only that it does not make you sneeze.”
But that was the moment I realized that myths are just legends that everybody agrees on, and legends are just stories that got bigger over time. The story of my dad—who for one day became the king of White Water Rapids—was just another myth in the making. The way everyday concerns didn’t bother him, the rules he followed that weren’t the normal rules for heroes, all of that—made him interesting. He was the god who spoke and spoke and spoke, and you never got tired of it. But unfortunately for my sister, he was not a god who listened.
If I ever have a kid, I wouldn’t let them go, ever. Even if they had to leave Earth, and I had to follow them into airless space, I’d hold on to them and suffocate, but at least I’d have held them close. And I wouldn’t hit my wife either, not for any reason, not even if she hit me.
But what you believe about the future will change how you live in the present.
