Yesterday, we went to Talaghan, to a village near a place by Alborz mountain ranges where my little brother’s wife is originally from. They have a house over there. The weather was perfect, sky was blue with white clouds and the mountain peaks were covered with snow. The hills surrounding the village were green with grass and the lake behind a dam nearby was filled to its highest elevation with blueish colored water, reflecting the clouds on its surface. I took a hike, about 1.5 miles each way, in the hills along a creek that runs by the village, which eventually goes into the lake. There were many wild flowers and reed along the creek. I spent part of the time taking pictures of the beautiful land. On my way back I pooped in a remote location out in the wilderness, in the open, without care. It was the best poop of my life, surrounded by the majestic Alborz mountains and the flowering hills.
The drive from Tehran to the village area was a breeze. We drove on a decent six-lane freeway from Tehran all the way to an off-ramp exit that we had to take to go to the village, and from the off-ramp there was a two-lane road to the village, part of it still under construction. In Shahrak we stopped in the best restaurant in town, the only restaurant in that town, and ate a combination of koobideh and barg chelo kabab. And, sorry to say, we enjoyed it. I thanked all the revolutionaries who had given up their lives for me, so one day I could eat a decent meal and enjoy the experience.
On our way back to Teharn we passed Azadi Stadium. A game between Esteghlal and Zoab’e Aahan had just ended and there was a great traffic jam around the stadium. Smog was unbearable in the area. By asking other people in other cars, I found out that Esteghlal had won the match, but I didn’t find out what the score was. Esteghlal fans waved their flags, a lot of cars honked their horns, and the winners were jubilant, but there were no shouts of any political slogans.
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Today, with my lunch at one of my brothers’ house I ate two cloves of preserved garlic (seer torshi) that were blacker than charcoal. They were guaranteed to be older than 25 years. At the table a discussion about benefits of seer torshi ensued. Preserved seer is supposed to be a cure for many illnesses, including reducing blood pressure, healing aching joints, cleaning the blood, and killing all kinds of germs in the body. I wondered out loud if it had any effects on the reproductive organs, since those things were so potent that they had given me a hard-on under the table. There was a burst of laughter around the table, but at the end there was no consensus on whether seer had any effect of the weewee. However, this line of conversation moved towards the idea that eating sheep testicles would cause a newly pregnant woman to deliver a boy. They said one of my nieces ate sheep testicles for two months in the early stages of her pregnancy in an effort to have her second child as a boy, her first being a girl. At the end she did deliver a boy. I said our mother must have eaten a lot of sheep testicles, because all together she delivered nine boys, seven of them surviving. There was another round of laughter around the table. I asked how do you know with any certainty that eating sheep balls was the reason for our niece to have a boy the second time around, after all the chances of having any of the two genders is 50/50. There was no clear answer, so I continued to ask another profound question, because I was in a profound-question-asking mood. I asked, if eating sheep balls produces boys, what part of a sheep has to be eaten in order to give birth to girls. It’s a legitimate question, is it not?
Eat balls —> give birth to boys
Eat what to deliver girls?
One of the other stories that came up during lunch was about our mother having made some seer torshi sometime after we left Iran to go to school in the USA. After she passed away my little brother had gone to great lengths to protect those preserved seers, till we returned to Iran one day, and then would sit down together and eat those seers in honor of our mother. One day my little brother came home and saw one of my other brothers was sitting down for lunch and was eating those seers, nonchalantly. They had a big fight over it, great material for laughter now.
Soon, once my other brother arrives here from USA, we will all sit together and eat what’s left of the seers that was made by our mother some thirty years ago.
