Time moves quickly and sometimes you get caught up in a time warp and don't realize the passing of years or the way you've evolved. It happened to me.
We moved to College Hills neighborhood in Glendale when my son was six months old. For 27 years I took the same route day after day to reach our home. One day, recently, as I drove in my immediate neighborhood, I found myself thinking that after all these years, I still don't know the names of the little side streets that cross Glenoaks Bld, the main artery I use to come home.
I left Iran because of the Islamic Revolution in 1978, and haven't been back to Tehran. But I can still see in my mind's eye the neighborhood's that we frequented in Tehran and hear all the hustle and bustle.
When I was young often we walked from grandma's home to ours. I had invented a game to play by myself. When I was alone I would shut my eyes and visualize all the shops we passed on our way home. I was thrilled that I could remember all the stores from one end of the street to the other in the right order.
Grandma lived in an apartment on the new part of Lalaeh-zar street in Tehran. The old Laleh-zar was built in the 1870s, by the order of Shah Nasser-edin who traveled to Europe and became dazzled by the European architecture. Returning home he ordained to build a street with the same look of what he had seen in Europe. That's how Laleh-zar, which means "fields of tulips,"came alive.
Today on the Internet I see pictures of the remains of the old mansions built for the wealthy people in the early days when the streets was built. But when I was growing up in Tehran, Laleh-zar that had become a commercial distric and where we shopped for clothing and household items had a stark contrast to the imposing street that the Shah had envisioned. It was a narrow two lane street with a jumble of filthy store-front businesses.
