11 October, 2009
A fortuitous turn of circumstances brought Nasrin’s sister Nahid and her cousin Farid and his wife to Orange County the same evening that I wa able to reunite with cousins Seattle Ben Lang and Dallasite soon-to-be San Clemente Johnny Mack (aka Red Dog) and his wife Karen.
At the same time there turned up an old Tehrani school friend of Farid’s, in town for the same Saturday celebration and reunion of Alborz College in Tehran that had brought Farid here and which Nasrin had organized with a colleague from Oxford.
Nasrin had prepared the diner last Wednesday by ordering in a Persian buffet from our favorite local restaurant, Hatam. But first we had some beer and wine, plus the scrumptious Pacific Northwest salmon Ben had brought as a gift. Johnny Mack’s jar of home-made hot sauce is waiting in the icebox for the first proper occasion.
I won’t try to recapture all that went on in our hearts and minds, or the vibes two days later when I met Johnny Mack Dog and Ben on the beach at San Clemente. But perhaps something of the gist of this multicultural evening can be grasped by how we had to translate kinship terminology from Persian into English.
Farid is Nasrin’s pesar-khaleh, the son of her maternal aunt, just “cousin” in English. But Johnny Mack and Ben, cousins in our shared notion of these things, are two different kinds of cuz in Persian. Ben, being the son of my father’s brother is my pesar-amou. Red Dog, Johnny Mack, is son of my father’s sister, so is my pesar-ammeh. I am Ben’s pesar-amou, as he is mine, since I am related to him through the brothers of our fathers. But I am Johnny Mack’s pesar-dai, son of his maternal uncle.
Now, to be sure, as Johnny Mack, observed, we Texans also have another concept of interest, kissin’ cousins. We decided not to get into that discussion nor to inquire too deep into how many other cousins there might be who were not official members of the family (no Wiki available for such Jeffersonian fine-grain, though I know they are out there).
Ben wields a mean fiddle, and in various styles. The Seattle Lang’s have been playing cajun music for decades now (The Riptide Ramblers), and Ben has his own group, Trio à Propos, which specializes in gypsy jazz and café music. I was surprised to learn that Ben and I can speak French together. After a brief jam among the three of us, myself clumsily chording along, I sang the bossa nova standard “Manhã de carnaval” to Ben’s accompaniment, and then Red Dog and Ben cut loose on the repertoire they had been working on together. At some point soon brother Steve, who plays in a band in Austin, The Diminished 7, will be here for a jam with as many of the cousins as we can gather.
Finally, I noticed a strange thing. Johnny Mack and I share the same rhythms of cussing. This is something which only became clear when he and Ben and I were out on the beach by ourselves. Whatever species of swamp animals we may have descended from – East Texas is after part of our make-up – we have been learned by our women to behave as best we can like proper gentlemen.
Watch out. I can already tell that this event will engender a gamut of future blogs. But enough for today.
I’ll close with some teasers, two photos sent by Jane Lang, the wife of my amou, zan-e-amou (thanks “Aunt Jane”). These photos come from the late twenties: Gramma Lang, Esther, our madar-bozorg pedari, and Grampa Lang, John P, our pedar-bozorg-pedari. He was “Bunco” to me but not to Ben and Johnny Mack, whose branches of the family tree speak a slightly different dialect.
Yy