The last book
I must have been a year away from starting school when my mom started reading Sa'di's "Golestan" to me at bed times

April 20, 2006
iranian.com

I think the greater part of my childhood was spent reading - or being read to. The former was a result of being read a particular book so many times that I was memorized it letter by letter. I actually believed that I could read - after all, I could take the book and read it from start to finish all on my own. I even knew exactly where to turn the page.

Everyone in the family pitched in to read to me - my dad, my grandparents, aunts and uncles, but I think my mom was the one who spent literally most of her 20s reading to a kid. My earliest memories of her somehow or other contain a book; whether she was in the kitchen, the living room, or covered in the darkness of my bedroom as she came in to read to me before I fell asleep.

I was lucky enough to have been bred as that fading generation of kids who had at least one parent caring for them through out the day. And despite man having conquered the moon, the seas and the atom, I don't think he's been able to answer this age old question: "Does career come first or your kids?" I know kids who barely get read five books at home throughout their childhood.

There are lots of books I loved being read to, but one particular event in the choice of the book I will most certainly never forget. I must have been a year away from starting school when my mom started reading Sa'di "Golestan" to me at bed times. She'd randomly open a page, read the Persian which I understood nothing. And then she'd "translate" ... either into clear Persian, or, later on, English. This went on to the time I was in Grade 3. And so it became the last book I was ever read to.

I have very distinct memories of his stories. As if they were read only yesterday. Life had its ups and downs, but man somehow always triumphantly conquered. There was this amazing, humanitarian side to his tales; a wonderfully deep, intelligent humor. And just plain, bold common sense: Things that in our hectic, illusive, modern lifestyles we've long forgotten.

I can't even begin to explain all the emotions and thoughts that would come to me from a ten line story. I would always recall them by "the guy whose stories make sense". For instance, one story was of a man who comes across a city on his journey and is desperately in need of help. He comes across two men; one shuns him while the other most graciously offers him a hand. Years later, the three meet again in different circumstances. When the two men ask for his hand as their ship was sinking, he reaches out to save the man who helped him years before. That story has always lurked in the deep end of my mind: what goes around comes around.

It has been years - exactly from Grade 3 - that I have read Saadi. But his name will forever coincide with this warm, wonderful feeling of childhood I will always and forever carry with me.

Watching my mother's face in the darkness of the room, her beautiful, angelic voice warmer than anything I have yet to find in this world. And although while she was reading I hadn't a clue as to what her words meant, there was an underlying tangibility that told me ... for that one particular moment at least, my ears were privy to the most glorious things there will ever be to hear in the world.