Esfahan, Iran, Peanut Butter and Bubba

We were a military family that moved a lot even for the military. I went to eleven different schools, and traveled through fifteen different countries all before graduating from high school. I was the self-appointed travel guide for the family. I used to love to learn all about the places we were going to, the lay of the land, the language and all the tourist traps. Then I'd fill my family in as we traveled whether they liked it or not.

So in my junior year when my social studies teacher took us on a field trip to the holy city of Esfahan, Iran, I was ecstatic. Four days and three nights of ancient palaces, gardens and museums. And shopping. In the biggest bazaar on the planet.

I was a little surprised when my brother Bubba got on the bus. Culture to Bubba was playing chicken in the traffic jam every week when the Iranians went to prayer. He'd walk across the hoods of their cars. When the irate driver got out and yelled at him, he'd just grin and call him a can of green beans before moving onto the next victim. Don't really know what satisfaction Bubba got out of calling people cans of green beans, but with Bubba it was safer not to ask and just marvel in his existence.

When we checked into our hotel that first night in Esfahan, I figured I better go check up on my culturally retarded brother. When I got to his room, he had gathered most of my classmates together. He'd smuggled black market peanut butter onto the bus, and he was trying to convince my classmates to put the peanut butter on bread and throw it to the beggars in the street from his balcony.

"Bubba," I said, "this is the dumbest thing you've ever done. These people know all about lamb and rice, but they don't know anything about American Peanut Butter. They will choke, and you will go to prison. Find someone else to terrorize." I gave the evil eye to my classmates and figured that took care of it. I had shopping to do and no time to waste.

Esfahan was an ancient wonder. I saw tiled mosaics as intricate as any oil painting. All the streets were lined with brass and crystal lampposts. My imagination saw Rudolph Valentino riding a stallion through the streets, looking for me as I conversed with vendors selling jewelry from all over the world. That's when I saw it. There in a shop window, a small silver brooch with turquoise inlay. It had my name all over it. I bent over, trying to get a closer look when someone pinched my butt.

This wasn't a "cute" pinch. It was a twisting burn like acid pinch. When I swung around, the first person I saw was a tall Persian man with a grin from ear to ear. Without a second thought my fist hit his grin. He was shocked. His friends were shocked. I was totally shocked and still in pinch pain.

He jumped at me, his friends jumped on him and I slammed myself back against the store window. Then people passing by started getting jostled. They jostled back. Before I knew it a whole city block was pushing and shoving and yelling at each other. Police sirens sounded in the background.

A little known fact about Iran during 1972. Women didn't really go into boxing. I was in deep trouble and getting deeper all the time. Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw him. Bent over double, laughing so hard he was crying. Bubba. And I remembered there was only one human being on this planet that could deliver a twisty burning pinch like that. I chased him all the way back to the hotel. Unfortunately for us, the police beat us home. Our teachers had no choice but to confine us to our rooms for the night.

In hindsight, I should have been more patient with my brother. I should have listened to him, offered him my viewpoint and then helped him come to a compromise in his great humanitarian project. The people living in the street didn't have any guaranteed meals. There weren't any food stamps or government subsidized housing. What if Bubba was the next great humanitarian genius of our world? And just when my head started swelling with pride, the peanut butter ran out.

It didn't take us long to figure out that we didn't know enough Farsi to explain the situation to the growing crowd in the street below. And Bubba, the great humanitarian, decided if we just yelled out the Persian we did know, they would understand what we couldn't explain. Before I could be patient with my brother, listen to his side, and come to a compromise, my whole class started calling those poor hungry people sons of camels.

Apparently, there isn't anything worse you can call a Persian than a son of a camel. I was horrified. So were the people in the street. In fact, they decided to crawl up the side of the hotel just to be sure they were hearing us right. We did the only thing we could do. We ran to the next floor.

They kept coming, so we kept right on going to the fifth floor. The whole time Bubba was yelling one Persian curse word after another. By now the crowd had figured that if they stood on each other's shoulders, they could form a human ladder. We hit the sixth floor and flew right on through to the seventh and eighth. We panicked at the ninth, but caught our wind on the tenth and just when we figured we were home free; we hit the rooftop. Nowhere else to go.

Lucky for us, the hotel clerk realized he had a growth on his building that wasn't there when he came on that night, and he called the police. Who as it turned out had met me and Bubba earlier that night. Our teachers had no choice but to cancel our field trip and return us immediately to our parents.

There were a whole lot of things I wanted to do that weekend, but seeing my Father at one o'clock in the morning was not one of them. He said if we didn't get deported for causing the largest number of assault and battery arrests in the holiest city on the planet, we would be executed for inciting a riot of the lower class through illegal use of black market peanut butter. He had no choice but to ground us for the rest of our natural born lives.

The sins of children eventually are forgiven, and Dad called last week to tell me I was a free woman. I got to thinking. Someone had to do something about the sibling rivalry in my family. That's why I took out the personal add in the local paper for Bubba. Read something like this: Six foot two. Blue eyed blonde haired hunk of a man searching for the woman of his dreams.

Dad told me 3,000 women surrounded Bubba in his trailer house in South Texas. He was so overwhelmed, he cried. Dad only wanted to know one thing. Did I really have to add, "only ugly women need apply."

/www.associatedcontent.com/article/1465560/prom_night.html?cat=44