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- [01:32]
Dan Kennedy
Hey, welcome to the Moth podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. Thanks for tuning in for some more stories this week. So last week on the podcast we shared stories about the transformative qualities of travel and that was the first of a two part series. This is the second part of that series. You have effectively binged the entire series. We're going to be finishing up today with a couple of more stories about travel. The first, from Reza Jalali, was told at a Moth mainstage that we held up in Portland, Maine a few years ago. The theme of the night was into the Wild. Here's Reza live at the Moth.
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Reza Jalali
So we were in a car traveling in Kurdistan, heading for the border to meet the war. Or to be exact, the war's aftermath. Eighteen years earlier, the war between Iran and Iraq had ended and I wanted to visit my birthplace, small border town, to see for myself the war's aftermath. The war had happened in the 80s when I was away attending college. Despite the distance, I'd followed the news of the conflict closely. My family still lived there and I wanted to make sure they were safe. As the war continued, it became an eight year old war. I gave up hope. I I started to lose hope for the town, its inhabitants, and seeing my family again every now and then I would get a call or a letter from my mother, who was alive back then, and my siblings, all older than me, to let me know they were okay. To be honest, there was this nagging guilt, for even though I followed the news closely and I was frightened by the news of the war, secretly I felt relieved for having missed the war. I'd asked my siblings to take me to the town I'd left as a young man. They were surprised and sounded unhappy. Why would you want to go there? There's nothing to see. A town ravished by the war. Don't punish yourself. But I was stubborn. I longed to see my birthplace, where I'd spend a happy, happy childhood, where most people knew your parents and your name. I remembered its flat rooftops, crowded on summer nights by families spending the night there. To escape the heat, we ate late dinners. The men played loud games of backgammon, argued politics and whispered, sharing anti government news and rumors, while the younger women chewed on roasted pumpkin seeds and gossiped. And mothers, being mothers, told wild stories to sleepy children. Even now, if I were to close my eyes, I still could see the star pinned the sky, the large yellow moon, and feel the hot wind and the smell of the desert outdoors. We slept on raised wooden beds under white cotton mosquito nets, fearful of the tiny yellow scorpions which could be hiding inside our shoes, left for the night under the bed. At dawn, we woke up to the sound of azan, the Islamic call to prayer breaking the night silence and barking of stray dogs that followed only to fall back to sleep watching the stars fade away and the sky changing colors. That was a sweet, sweet life. In summer we went to open air cinemas. It's very much like the drive in theater you have in the US except we sat on folding chairs rather than being inside a car, mesmerized, watching Liz Taylor come to life on large screen, speaking in Farsi as if she'd done it all her life. Because Hollywood movies were dubbed Tufarsi, I was naive enough to think that the town with the river which crisscrossed the town would be there, unchanged, frozen in time, waiting for me to return. So here we were, my siblings driving me to the border town which had been at home till the war had come, uninvited, unwelcome, like a toothache. As we drove closer to the border, I saw the destruction caused by the war. We passed villages, some in ruins, some rebuilt after the war. Most houses were built of hardened earth, leaning on each other as if taking a nap. They almost looked the same as before, except now there were cars here and there and satellite dishes sat on rooftops reflecting the sun. During last night's arguments, my relatives had said that all the palm trees, the orange and lemon, the mulberry trees filled with noisy spirals, had been burned down by the Iraqi soldiers. The roaring river with millions of fish had become a stream. I didn't believe them, thinking they were making it up to have me change my mind. How could all the fish and the birds be gone? But a small voice inside my head said, what if they were right? What if they were right? What if the cinema, the flat rooftops, my oldest school, all had vanished? What if I went to my childhood neighborhood and found a stranger opening a door to a house built after the war in the place of what was our home? We were stopped at a military checkpoint. I had lived in the US for so long that I started to feel anxious and became frightened. But the uniformed man looked quite bored. A guy with a lowered machine gun came and asked questions. He didn't bother to search the car. As we drove away, I was told that the checkpoints, the searchings of the cars and questionings were part of the new reality in Kurdistan, Iran. My sister gave me a bottle of water. As I sipped some and watched a group of nomads traveling with all they owned. You see, in my family there is this story going back to my childhood. It starts with a knock at the door, my mother carrying me. I must have been a few months old. The youngest of her nine children opens the door to find a group of singing gypsy women. One of them offers to tell my mother's fortune in exchange for money. My mother, curious, stretches one hand out while holding on tight to me. The gypsy peeks at my face and sighs. Your baby shall drink much water in a strange lands. My mother gets upset on hearing that her youngest child might move to faraway lands to live among strangers and never to return. As I grew up, every time I heard this story, I felt sad and made a childish, perhaps childish, promise that I would never abandon my mother. Back in the car, my brother Ahmad pointed at the approaching mountains, tall and majestic, the sharp tops puncturing the palest sky. I started to feel anxious. It meant we were very close to our destination. I did not know what to expect. So I loved it when we stopped at this roadsider stand where a young boy wearing the Kurdisher style loose pants tied in the ankles stood selling locally grown vegetables, herbs and berries. I wanted to see if he had any of my favorite berries, but it bothered me that he greeted me in Farsi rather than Kurdish, mistaking me for a tourist. I touched my face. Of course I shaved my mustache. I did not look like a local person. Most Kurdish men have some serious mustaches. Going all kinds, Walrus, handelbar, even the pencil thin. I'm ashamed to say Kurdistan can be a serious mustache country. Watching the boy, I calculated his age, and I saw him as an infant, surviving the daily bombings, the shrieking missiles passing overhead to rain terror on the cities further inside Iran. He must have belonged to a local Kurdish tribe whose ancient and nomadic lifestyles were interrupted every now and then by political unrest, revolutions and invasions. I thought, this land, the mountains where he's home. I felt as an intruder. I had no business to be there. I started to doubt what I was doing there. I'd left a long time ago, and with my departure, I'd not only betrayed my mother and the promise I had made to her, but the town and my childhood friends. I was gone for years, and now I was back as a tourist with a camera and a spectator. With or without a mustache, I was an outsider, a foreigner. I decided I could not go to my birthplace. I'd lost my resolve to come face to face with war. I walked to the car and sat inside. I told my sister maybe it was better to hang on to the old memories and to save the romanticized and somewhat exaggerated pictures of the life before war. I asked them we should turn around. This time they did not argue. With my brothers sitting in the front talking to one another, we went back the same way we had traveled that day, leaving behind the mountains and the boy, I started to weep. My sister reached out to hold my hand. Watching her wrinkled hand covering mine and my aging siblings, their hairs grayed, faces wrinkled, I thought with some relief that revolutions happen, wars come and go, loved ones age, but the stars rise and shine in the sky. Night after night, the shy Kurdish girls will gossip. Boys with curly hair will chase a ball. The Islamic call will wake up the faithful, and wild vegetables will grow in the mountains of Kurdistan. And sometimes, sometimes men missing what was once home will cry silently in order to become old men. Thank you.
- [15:01]
Dan Kennedy
That's Reza Jalali. Since Reza revisited his hometown, he says the area has gotten worse. He writes, I'm concerned and heartbroken to see how the political and religious conflicts continue to impact the region and the area where I was born and grew up. I wake up at night worrying that there might be a war between the US and Iran in the near future. But I'm still hopeful, hope for the future is what helps displaced people carry on when living in exile. Reza Jalali is a writer, educator, and a community activist who has taught at the Bangor Theological Seminary and the University of Southern Maine. To see pictures of Reza, his family and more, just Visit our site, themoth.org closing us out on the Moth podcast this week we have a story from Emily Matusic. And she told this at one of our open mic story slams in New Orleans. The theme of the night was voyage. Here's Emily live at the Moth.
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Emily Matusik
Thank you very much. Here she comes. Are you ready? All right. So I was standing on the driveway in the Nebraska heat with my parents, looking at the ass end of our SUV with the hatch open and studying my suitcases and a bunch of identical white Rubbermaid containers that are all labeled with my mother's perfect block lettering. And they say things like electronics and school supplies and medicine. And they're neatly organized with everything that I'm going to need for my first year in college. There are a variety of different post it notes, different colors and sizes, and there are backup batteries for the clip on reading lamp that's going to go on my bed. And there are at least three different kinds of over the counter analgesics for whatever comes up. And we are debating if the suitcase should maybe move over there and the hamper move over there and trying to maximize the space. And everybody's really anxious and they're anxious for a reason. This is a big deal. My mom is sending her eldest daughter, her eldest child three states away to go to college. And college hasn't been something that my family has been very good at. My aunts, my cousins, they've tried. And my dad has been the only one so far that has made it through this higher education gauntlet and come out with a bachelor's degree. So we're all super anxious. And I'm grateful. I'm grateful for all that they're doing. But this event, this reason that we're out on the driveway, my mother refers to it as a practice pack. I mean, we're not even hitting the road for 48 hours. And so we maximize the space in this SUV and then we take each Rubbermaid container out and we put it back in the living room. And the dry one went really well. And we wait. And this is her way of being supportive. And they have this really weird way of being supportive. But I so appreciate it. And at the same time, I'm so ready to get the hell out of there. I mean, I just, I've always Been so independent as a baby, I didn't really like to be held. I wanted to explore things on my own. And when I turned six and got tired of the training wheels and my dad was there, like, ready for his Kodak moment of fatherhood, and he grabs the back of my seat and I very politely told him to let go. I'm going to figure it out myself. And this just continues through adolescence. So I am so ready to get out of Nebraska, and I can't wait to live with an awesome roommate and study amazing things and have my world blown open. And so this is the place we're in. And this is absolutely how I'm feeling 48 hours later at like 6am when we are back on that driveway and everything is back where we put it two days ago. And as my dad closes the hatch, I'm kind of realizing that my childhood is over. Like, this is not another adventure. Like, the stakes are higher and the distance is much longer than it's been before. And this is a whole different ball game. So I get in the car with my dad and I cry all the way to the Kansas state line. And we drive for two days and 900 miles. And we arrive in Houston, Texas a couple days later. And we get there, we find a new home for all the Rubbermaid containers in my dorm room, and we meet my roommate. We go to the welcome lunch, but we duck out early so we can finish getting my room set up before the parents have to leave at 1:00. And we're trying to get this fitted sheet on this extra long twin bed. And I look my dad square in the eyes with kind of the gravity of all of these emotions that I should have been feeling the past six months. I knew this was coming, but they didn't really hit until the last couple days, until we were on the road, until we were doing this. I look him straight in the eye and I say, yeah, I don't want to do this, Dad. I don't want to do this at all. Let's pick it all up, let's put it back in the car, and I'm just going to go with you back to Nebraska, and I'm going to enroll at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. And I just. This is. I kind of overshot it a little bit on this one. Like, just, just take me home. And my dad just blinks a few times and then he says, you can't do this to me, Emmy. You can't. You cannot do this to me. You can't offer me this like there is nothing that I want to do right now more than to scoop you up and just bring you home to your mom. Like you can't, you can't put this on the table. Like this isn't. No. So you need to give it a semester and you need to see how it goes. And when you come home at Christmas, if you still feel this way, we will have this conversation, but you gotta give it a shot. And I, like, I feel the crying in my chest and it's coming up through my throat. And then my roommate walks in the door with her family and they're making small talk and we're unpacking and this intense father daughter moment just kind of dissipates into the like social niceties of roommate getting to know you Talk. And it's 1:00 and my dad leaves. So I did. I stayed that semester and I stayed seven more semesters. And about four years later my parents came back down to Texas and they watched me walk across the stage and they watched the semi second person in our family and the first woman in our whole family get her bachelor's degree from rice University in 2005. Thank you. And in stark contrast to our practice pack that happened in Nebraska four years before, we headed back to my crappy little off campus apartment and all those Rubbermaid containers were there, their contents no longer correlated to the label anymore and we just threw them in the back willy nilly and headed off out of Houston and onto our next voyage. Thank you.
- [22:42]
Dan Kennedy
That was Emily Matuszik. Emily is an avid people watcher and collector of moments. She spends her days wrestling with juicy questions about organizational strategy. In her career as a non profit manager, Emily recently boomeranged back to Houston, Texas where she lives right down the street from her alma mater, Rice University with her husband and 8 month old daughter. To see pictures of Emily's journey from high school graduation to dorm room move in day, just Visit our website themoth.org and you can check them out there. Do you have a story of being on the road? A story of a trip that transformed you travel adventure? We want to hear it. You can pitch it to us by calling 1-877-799-MOTH or you can hit our site and just record it right there. We have a little pitch section. We listen to every pitch that we receive and a lot of those stories from the Pitch line are the stories we develop for our live events. So check out the site themoth.org or call the Pitch line. We would really love to hear from you. And I think on that note, I think it's perfectly appropriate to wish you a story worthy week from all of us here at the Moth in New York. And we hope to hear that story soon.
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TurboTax Sponsor
Dan Kennedy is the author of Loser Goes First, Rock on and American Spirit. He's also a regular host and storyteller.
- [24:02]
Dan Kennedy
With the Moth Podcast production by Timothy Lou Lee. The Moth Podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange helping make public radio more public@prx.org.