Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #24–tilework

This is not much to look at—some pleasing but not especially flashy tile work, in what was my mom’s bathroom. While it’s not much to look at, it’s something I think about often, sometimes every week.

My parents’ house underwent two major phases of remodeling and renovation. One was when I was extremely young—I can barely remember scattered details of how it was before. It made sense: my parents had just recently moved in, my dad had just started tenure, and it was clearly time for them to put their stamp on their own house and better meet the needs of their young family. The second big overhaul was at the other end of family life—my brothers were either in college or on their way, and I was in high school. It made sense: my parents, successful and in the ripeness of their careers, wanted to revise the house to suit their matured desires. This would have been over a period of a few years in the early 1980’s, When I was in high school.

The early ‘80’s were a period of change not just for my family, but for entire nations. About this time, my native city started getting the nickname “Teherangeles”. A repressive regime in Iran had led to the development of a substantial Persian émigré community, and when that repressive regime was overthrown by another even more repressive regime, that community grew considerably. I was a dumbass, self-centered high schooler. I had a couple of Persian classmates, but didn’t think much about them beyond the present tense, in which one was a really nice guy with a strange name and the other was an entitled prick with a strange name. Maybe I thought about the hostages in the US embassy a little, but I certainly did not think about oppression, torture, fundamentalism, theocracy, displacement, being a refugee, being a stranger, losing everything, and having to find everything again when you had already lived most of your life.

My mom wanted some changes to the bathroom we always thought of as “hers”. Since small children no longer needed bathing, a bath was no longer necessary. A bidet would be nice. And, just a small amount of decorative niceness would be nice, a step up from plainly functional, so some tile to replace linoleum. I don’t recall how decisions were made about fixtures and woodwork and tiling and contractors and so forth, being much more concerned about high school.

I do remember talking, briefly, with the contractor doing the tile work. He was an older guy—which is to say, he was probably about as old as I am now, thinning hair tending towards grey. His English was good, not great, but far better than my mastery of any second language. I enjoyed the diversion of watching him work, patiently and evenly setting tiles on the adhesive, carefully mixing and adding the grout. I don’t know why I asked him about how he came to do tile work; such a question was pretty uncharacteristic, given how self-centered I was as a teen. But he explained that he wasn’t always a tile-setter; he had been a medical doctor, a G.P., in Iran. He was doing well under the Shah, but…a lot of narrative was elided, and he said simply that he was here now, and getting a medical license was not possible for him. He knew how to do tile work, so that’s what he did.

His narrative didn’t make that much impact on me at the time. Somehow, though, it stuck. The older I’ve gotten—the closer I’ve gotten to his age—the more I learn about the tragic story of Persia, the more I learn about displaced persons, the more I learn about refugees, the more I learn about my grandfather’s emigration, the more I learn about loss, longing, alienation…the more I think about this man, once a successful doctor, now in a strange country on the far side of the world, speaking a strange language, doing hard, physical, and not especially prestigious labor. He seemed to be OK with it, but the calm waters must have been very, very deep.

I think one of the most universal human feelings is alienation. Even among the completely settled, once in a while there is a pang of “this just isn’t my real home.” If that feeling weren’t so widespread, I don’t think there would be any need for religion. If I ever get even the slightest feeling of that separation from my true home—and being human, that happens pretty regularly—the memory of the guy setting tile in my mom’s bathroom, kneeling over his work and getting pestered by an unthinking teenager, comes to mind unbidden, to admonish me. I don’t necessarily feel better, but I can at least take stock of my blessings.