Welcome to my blog

Hello and welcome to my new blog!

Over the years many people have suggested that I write a memoir, a very daunting task. On these pages I'll be jotting down memories from my childhood in Iran through my school days in England and years beyond.

The title, Blazoned Days, comes from a Wallace Stevens poem:
From this the poem springs
That we live in a world that's not our own
And much more not ourselves
And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

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Memories

My mother takes me downstairs to visit the neighbors. I am bewildered because we are on cordial terms with them but not particularly friendly and we’ve never been inside their home before.   An extended family lives there, including a newly married couple.   As we enter the house, we are ushered into the young wife’s bedroom, where she lies in bed surrounded by family members and guests.   Beside her bed is what looks like a chamber pot half full of blood with a fleshy blob floating in it.   After a while, the mother-in-law hands me the pot and asks me to show it around to everyone in the room, as though I am serving a platter of cookies.   Each woman peers in, shakes her head and murmurs something sympathetic.   I feel like I am being helpful, but I dislike the task. Memories are odd things.   We can’t be sure that they are accurate.   I have a hard time making sense of this bizarre memory, but it recurs, triggered by nothing in particular.   Why was I there? Why was I asked to show
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Bessie

I have been thinking about the invisible among us.   Bessie was the maid at the boarding house, owned by Mrs. Harris, where I spent vacations from boarding school in England.   At that time, I never considered her or thought much about what her life might be like, but a few months ago I was reading Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, a novel about a char woman who saves her money to go to the House of Dior to buy a beautiful gown.   I thought of Bessie. Bessie would have never dreamt of such an adventure. She was old and walked in a stiff-ankled stomp.   She was skinny with grizzled hair that escaped her cap, part of the uniform she wore, a black dress under a white apron—an unkempt imitation of the maids in the estates of England at the turn of the 20 th century. She lived in the underbelly of the house and served as cook and housekeeper. I never bothered to find out exactly where Bessie “lived”, where she slept or passed her off time, if she had any, but she may have had a room in the base
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Witch Hunts

The first time I landed in the United States, I flew in to Idlewild Airport (now JFK) in New York. As I waited for my luggage it was hard to miss a huge billboard exhorting us to KEEP GOD IN AMERICA.   Was God about to hop the next flight out? Over the years I have come to realize how ubiquitous this kind of easy religiosity is in the United States.   It is easy to proclaim KEEP GOD IN AMERICA, but what does that entail? I say easy because it seems to require little more than spouting simplistic aphorisms and feeling self-righteous.   It parrots mindless adages about morality and good and evil without actually considering the actions that would make them meaningful.   It is on a par with platitudes like “America, love it or leave it.” “America right or wrong.”   How do people think they are contributing to the well-being of their country or themselves with simplistic jingoism, be it religious or nationalistic? Watching some films from the 1950s, I would guess that this kind of piet
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