bill of rights
I don’t know if this is a typical thing amongst other cultures, but picking up the bill for a meal amongst Persian people is more than just a simple gesture of courtesy…it’s a friggin sport. It involves so many phases and hurdles of formality and humility, I think people have scripted versions I swear.
I noticed this today while at Javan Restaurant in West LA with my brother and mother. I was wildly entertained with the dialog which was contained to our table alone, but I can’t help but let my focus wander to seeing what other Iranian families are like, and seeing how their generations of people interact with the younger kids completely Americanized, but still holding some root to their Eastern past.
I woke up this morning to no electricity. And with no electrcity, this meant no driving out of my garage since the door was apparently too difficult for anyone on the premises to figure out how to manually open. My usual Sunday visits to see my family got shifted to their having to pick me up to go to an early (like really early) lunch for some chelow kabab. So early, we were the first people in the place, and apparently too early for us to get my favorite Persian food on the planet, tahdig. This was highly disappointing , to say the least.
Ah the Sunday family antics. The comedy gold captured in that meal in itself was enough to supply a poorly scripted minority sitcom for ABC, but we won’t go there since a lot of it simply gets lost in the idioms between Farsi and English.
There really is nothing funnier than my mother trying to set me up with people… except her trying to do this with my older brother.
“Why don’t you go see the woman I told you about? You never trust my sense in women.” my mother would mutter while sipping on her yogurt drink.
“Because mother, there’s no way I’d go about it the way you suggest.”
“Mom’s trying to set you up again?”
“Yes, but this time her idea of my introduction is just retarded.”
“Mom?”
She just looks away…
“Come on Leyla, she wants me to walk into some random bank and walk up to the teller there and tell her how my momma sent me to meet her.”
Enter cackles of laughter.
Sadly, her efforts are not all that non-beneficial I realize.
