Day of Memories

I spent the afternoon going through pictures, and then I watched the movie Argo. It was an intense day of memories.

My collage of individual photos - most of the frames were found at Saver's this afternoon.

Old family photos - not put together yet because I have to get copies made - with a shot of candles from the Cathedral in Mexico City.  A bit hard to tell here, but I think it'll work:

My paternal grandmother crocheting an afghan:

My mother in better times:

I was living in Spain at the time the hostages were taken in Tehran.

It was a difficult time to be an American abroad.

One of my literature professors asked the Americans in the class if we weren’t angry with the French student in the class. “Why?”, we asked. Well, he said, it was the French who gave the Ayatollah Khomeini refuge all of those years, allowing him to muster forces and go back to Iran.

If anyone understands that individuals are not responsible for their nation’s actions, we told him, it is Americans. We didn’t blame her for anything.

There were times that year when I claimed to be some nationality other than American. I was Canadian, Swedish, and Venezuelan at different times.

A young man from Iran was studying in Salamanca that year too. People used to wonder that we were friends, given that our countries were having such troubles. Again, the individual prevailed. When I returned to Salamanca with Pato a couple of years later, Monseur was still there, but he wasn’t a student any more. He was selling jewelry and stuff from a table just outside the Plaza Mayor. He was from somewhere near the Iraq boarder, and because of the Iran-Iraq War (remember that one?), he had not heard from his family in a couple of years.

The movie also reminded me of the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets. I was traveling in Germany, Switzerland and Austria at the time with my boyfriend. We didn’t really know what Afghanistan was. I’m sure there are no 19-20 year olds in the U.S. now who haven’t heard of Afghanistan.

That made me also remember that when I was in Edinburgh in 1974, touring Holyrood palace.  The tour group was kicked out because the Shah of Iran had arrived, and that was where he was being put up.

We didn’t know who the Shah of Iran was.

Little did we know how much of a ruckus he would cause when we put him up at some hospital in the U.S. just five years later.