You don’t want to think of it as some kind of jewel, as something like a glass of water to a man dying of thirst. You don’t want to think of yourself as crawling through a desert here in America just because your skin is brown and your country’s name is spoken of with fear and disfavor. You want to think that just because you work at a school in the afternoons and a little American boy asks you where you are from and you say, “Iran,” and just because it occurs to you that the first time that this little American boy is hearing about Iran, he is hearing its name spoken with love, that there’s no reason to get melodramatic about it. You want to think that just because the name comes to him nice and easy because it is coming from a man whom he has played some catch with and drawn some pictures with, that you should remember that you are a thirty-five-year-old man and he is a five-year-old boy, and that you should display the level of dispassion corresponding to your age, even if you can’t help but think that maybe for the rest of his life, when he hears the name “Iran,” he will think of a friendly teacher.
Anyway, you think, hearing a country’s name spoken of with love by a man from that country is what is supposed to happen. It’s not something to get excited about. Except that it is, when there is so much that isn’t supposed to happen, namely, American bombs falling on Iranian people, on little boys and men and on little girls and women. Those bombs can turn all men and women into little boys and girls, in their memory of life and in their desire for it, for the joy in a single moment of it. And they can turn little boys and girls into men and women, in their awareness of the presence of death in a single moment of it.
So the distinctions between you and a little American boy can become vague at a moment like that, and there’s no reason to not think of it as a jewel considering that life is a jewel. And if it makes you feel like a little boy to think of it like that, that is not all you are. You are a man too. But it’s worth remembering that it’s not little boys who are talking of dropping those bombs, it is men, so the level at which you meet a little American boy on equal terms is nothing to fear, and it’s okay to think of what is supposed to happen as a jewel.
