Author’s note: this is a complex piece, memoir format. It is based on
memories from me as an eight year old, a seventeen year old, a 27 year old, and
now, as a forty year old. It is me, trying to piece together my life and
memories. My relationships with my parents are very different today (as one
would expect) from when I was seventeen, and they are two of my favorite people.
I went to see
Argo because Ben Affleck was sporting a Barry Gibbs
beard, I liked the trailer, and I have an interest in Tehran. My mother taught
in Tehran at the Community School (a Presbyterian mission school) from 1966
to1969, before my parents were married. My mother met the Shah's wife, there's
even a newspaper picture of my mother with the Shah's wife. It was through some
Girl Scout event. My mother was a Girl Scout leader.
My mother is a very private person, so I'm always trying to learn more about
things that connect to her life.
Little did I know that
Argo would bring up all sorts of things about
my father. Things that were in a black box so tight that it took me until Wednesday
morning to admit them to myself, out loud. I admitted them to myself in a crazy
depressed vibe Monday night and Tuesday morning, but Wednesday, while pouring
raisins into my cereal bowl, covering the raisins with Grape Nuts and Kashi
Heart to Heart, I admitted to myself that the reason I was so upset about
Argo
was that my father wouldn't let me live in Poland when I was in college. I
had to go to college, I was
not allowed to take a semester off.
I was seventeen, depressed, homesick, and my parents were halfway across the
world. All of my abandonment issues are rooted right there in a few
conversations with my dad, me pleading to come home and him refusing.
In retrospect, I am glad, for I wouldn't love Pittsburgh as much as I do
now. I had to make it on my own. I did make it on my own. I made decisions. I
found people to help me, and through those people I found other people and it
blossomed. I found my place. I grew up fast, but I did, indeed, grow.
But more than twenty years later,
Argo, a movie about a lost piece of
American history, brought up that forgotten seed of bitterness and perceived
abandonment and bloomed itself into a tree. A rotten tree whose fruits were
disappointment and loneliness.
In 1979 and 1980, which is the time frame for the movie
Argo and the
actual events it depicts, I lived in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Due to my age and
location, I was in what could be called a black hole for news. The Internet did
not exist, and as an eight year old I didn't read the newspaper except for the
comics or watch television except for cartoons and
Little House on the
Prairie. I never saw television news coverage about hostages in Iran. I
sort of knew the hostage crisis was happening, I probably heard my parents or
other adults talking about it. But it was not a part of my memory in any sense
of the actual television coverage that shows up all over the place in
Argo.
So on Monday, I walked into a movie because Ben Affleck looked cute in the
trailer and it had to do with Tehran, a city I’m always interested in because
of my mother. I had no idea how graphic the movie would be, and I had no idea
that two of the characters were a couple I met during the time my parents lived
in Warsaw, Poland, in the early 1990s.
I heard the names, Mark and Cora L****, and I knew that I knew them. I knew
they were friends of my parents, good friends. And something deep in me might
have known they were from the Poland years. This was confirmed later.
When I graduated from high school in 1989, I moved to Pittsburgh, to go to
college. My parents moved to Poland. Polish language training had taken up an
entire year of my father's life. My father was prepared to speak Polish. He was
not prepared for what happened: the communists were voted out of office a month
after my parents’ arrival to Poland. Poland was on its way to democracy and
privatization, and my father was in for the ride of his life, as the U.S. Embassy’s
head economic advisor.
Back in Pittsburgh, I sat in the phone booth at the end of the hall in my
dorm. Poland wasn't a third world country, but it wasn't first world, either.
My phone calls had to be connected first through AT&T operators in Austria,
or Germany, and then to Poland. I would dial a number in Austria only to hear
the recording, “All circuits are busy, please try again later.” I tried again
right away until I got through, dialing up to seventeen times, praying, please
God, let me get through. There was a six hour time difference, so depending on
the time of day, I talked to my dad in his office, or I talked to my parents at
home. I don't think I ever talked to my siblings on the phone during the Poland
years. The phones could be tapped, vestiges of Polish Communism, you
couldn't be sure. And phone time cost a dollar a minute, so you didn't talk
very long.
In those phone booth conversations, it was either a business call, this is
how I'm doing, with a list of talking points, or me pleading with my father.
Please. Can't I take a semester off? And him, answering my pleas every time,
with the same answer, no.
I know more now: it was probably the hardest point of my father's career.
Communism had just fallen in Poland. My father was the head of the Economic
Department. Privatization was an unknown to most of the people he was trying to
help. The currency was going into hyper-inflation. Congressmen wanted to visit
every other week to see democracy and free trade in the making. All these
things meant my dad worked every day, all day, even Sunday. Everyone did. The officers
(mostly husbands) showed up for church in the back of the Marine Bar in the
Embassy, ate lunch with their families at the Eagle Club and then back to work.
It was probably the hardest time for my parent's marriage. I remember coming
home at Christmas and my parents were bickering. Growing up, my parents
never fought, and if they did, it was in a room far away. Were they on the
brink of divorce? This was not a place for me to come home to, this was not the
time for me to take a semester off and be in Poland. I see that now.
To be clear: Poland was not a dangerous place, nothing like Tehran in 1979.
But it was no place for a 17-year-old who wasn't sure what she wanted to do
with her life. Better for me to stay in school and work towards my bachelor's
degree in the requisite four years.
I came home every Christmas and summer vacation. Summers, I worked in the
American Embassy as an intern. My first summer, I worked in the Consular
office, where they gave out tourist visas, work visas, fiancée visas. For the
first month that I worked in the Consular office, I was responsible for reading
and retrieving cables three times a day. I was responsible for shredding cables
on a regular prescribed schedule. When Albanians protested in July, 1990, I was
responsible for writing a document in Albanian (transcribed from a cable) in
case Albanians came to the Embassy seeking asylum. Copies were given to the
Marines at Marine Post 1 and 2.
I was a normal college student with a normal summer job. Except that my
normal summer job was involved in international affairs in a country that was
undergoing political and economic transformations every week.
I worked with people who had chosen their lives to be far away from home,
defending the American way of life to the world. Warsaw was a "hardship
post," and I imagine Tehran was, too, at that time depicted in Argo. You
got "hardship pay" for being in a situation that was more dangerous,
or more squalid. Poland was not dangerous in 1989. But in 1979, Tehran was
volatile.
In
Argo, when the angry mob breaks through, gets into the Embassy
yard and then into the Embassy, it was like the worst horror movie, it was REAL
for me. When the Marines were being told to throw tear gas as a last resort,
they were
my Marines, and I remembered my crush on a marine named
Roland. When the Consular officers decide to leave, escape, because they had
access to the only direct street exit, first destroying the metal plates that
were used to imprint passports with tourist visas, I saw the Consular office in
Warsaw. It was as if I was watching two movies, one on the screen, and one tightly guarded in my memory but now playing loudly and with garish music. Only one of the movies was true.
During the whole movie, I ached to call my father and say, who are these
people? How do they fit into my story? Why didn't I know
this part of
the story, this story that belongs to me as an American child of the seventies and the story that belongs to me because I knew two of the people depicted on the huge Hollywood screen.
And when I did call, as the credits rolled, my parents didn't answer. My
mother picked up as I was in the middle of leaving a message about the movie.
Which told me one thing. They were having dinner and they had screened the call.
My parents don't have caller ID. So, right now, as Independents, they are of
course getting all sorts of annoying phone calls from both parties. And my
father, about 8 years ago, decided that he wasn't going to have dinner
interrupted, it was interrupted his whole life as a child because his father
was a pastor. The phone rang during dinner and I think maybe it not only meant
that dinner was interrupted but maybe that his father left the table and maybe
the house.
I should ask my father sometime. Because
my issue with the
fact that he screens my calls? Goes back to a different time, a time when I had to leave voice mails, which was not Poland, but
another time, when I was falling into the twisted
abyss of bipolar disorder as a 27-year-old. The voice mail person would say
"x person" is not available. And those words, that my father was not
available to me? That cracked me in a place where I was already cracked.
So while I was telling my mom about the movie, my dad was telling my brother
about how the Canadian diplomats visited the L**** while they were in Poland.
And as I'm talking to my mom, Jimmy Carter's voice comes over the credits and
my mom says where are you and I say I'm at the movies, it's the credits and she
says, I'll let you go, and we hang up. I'm so upset that I drive straight home
instead of getting dinner at Panera (but I'd had movie nachos anyways, so I
wasn't that hungry.) I ate some chocolate ice cream, took my dinner meds, and tried
home. And no one answered. Well, weren't they done with dinner? The child in me
wanted to talk to her dad. Where was he, and why wasn't he answering the
telephone? And so I had to leave a cheerful message, because my mother brought
me up right, but I felt horrible.
And so I searched the Internet for any scrap of information about the “Houseguests”
and
Argo. I read the
Wired article from 2007, I read Tony
Mendez's story in the CIA history archives online. I learned that Hollywood
did, of course, compress the timelines, dramatize dialogue and events. But the
emotional drama? That is something you can't show on camera, not really, so I
forgive Hollywood for the police cars chasing the plane, because if you are
escaping a country, in your mind, until you are safely in the air, you feel as
if police cars could be chasing you down.
Tuesday morning was so bad that I called the house but didn't leave a
message when I heard my mom's voice on the answering machine announcement. I
spent the morning huddled on my bed watching any YouTube video about Ben
Affleck and
Argo. I tried to piece things together. I cried. And as I
write this now, on Sunday morning, I can't tell you anything else, because the
black box has closed again. But I will tell you this. I had to be at work at 1
p.m. I was 15 minutes late and that is without even taking a shower. That's how
bad it was. I was glued to my bed, glued to finding any scrap of information
that might make me feel okay.
It's a bad coping strategy, I know. But research seems to be my "go
to" for "I don't understand what's going on in my mind." My
other coping strategy is writing, and rewriting, which is why this post, which
I started on Wednesday morning, is being edited on Sunday. It's now afternoon,
the seminary bells just rang out three minutes ago.
I recommend
Argo. I'm going to see it again tomorrow, partly because
there's nothing else worth watching at my Monday $5 movie theater, but partly
to open up the black box again and see if it's as scary the second time around.
Boo!
