How It All (May Have) Started

When I was 11 years old my mother, father and my three sisters, two younger, one two years older, boarded a plane for Shiraz, Iran, all in homemade dresses that (looking back on things culturally and years later) were clearly too short, and one duffel bag each.  My father was a physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.  He'd worked there since all four of us were born in a housing compound that has since been razed to make way for projects in Baltimore's blighted inner city.  A country boy with no indoor plumbing until he was six, my father hitchhiked to Hopkins for his med school interview and hitchhiked back home, six hours each way from Athens, Ohio.  He was accepted.  Fifteen years later this same man was invited by the Shah of Iran to set up a teaching school for medical interns at his university in the center of Shiraz.  My father had made it.

My mother was an Ohio girl too.  When she moved to Baltimore to join my father in med school she had never left her own state.  When they took us to Iran in 1973, six years before the same Shah was deposed and later assassinated in his party's revolution, my mother and father had never left the East Coast.