sunny darius reigns economically in greece & Argentina
In the excitement of visitors, Persian New Year, bionic eyes, broken museum exhibits and chopped down trees, we somehow missed an opportunity to devote significant attention to Darius’ birthday.
“We somehow missed an opportunity?” Nazy asks. “What do you mean by ‘we’”?
“I missed an opportunity,” I reply. “And, it is hard to believe,” I thought. “Darius is so good at generating material for The Weekly Letter. In fact, he was generating material before there was a weekly letter.”
Flashback
Memphis, Tennessee
It was very early. (Very, very early.) Darius, about three years old, was standing next to our bed. He pulled the comforter off of my head and..
“It’s time to get up, Daddy,” He said cheerfully.
“No, Darius,” I replied. “It is not time to get up. It is too early.”
“No it’s not Daddy. It’s time.”
“Tell you what, Darius. You go and look out the window in your bedroom. If you see the sun, I will get up.” “And,” I thought, “if you see the sun at 3;00AM, I want to know who teleported our house north of the Arctic Circle.”
I could hear him trundling back to his room and could tell that he had looked out the window. He came back to our bedroom. I knew he was just standing by the bed. I pulled back the cover..
“Well, Darius?” I asked.
“Maybe the yellow sun is hiding behind the black clouds, Daddy.” Darius replied. Creatively.
“No, Darius. Go back to bed now.”
End Flashback
Dar is, of course, no longer a little boy. He’s a college professor. He’s not living in Memphis. Nor is he living in Kansas, He’s living in Beirut. But, I thought: “He is still clever.”
“You’re giving a talk about economics in Grεεce?”
“Yep. I’m catching a 3:30AM flight.”
“Is that so you can sneak into the country?”
“Dad!”
“There is no economy in Grεεce, Dar. They are great at statues but..”
“Great at statues, Dad? Remember when we visited the country together? You said that Mount Olympus looked like a field of glacially strewn debris.”
“But if you put it all together, Dar, the statues would be great.”
“It is a wonderful place to have an economics conference.”
“Athens?”
“Thessaloniki?”
“Gesundheit.”
“It saves the university money.”
“You need to think about your own economics, Dar. The money you save them is not likely to end up in your salary.”
“No, but it will make it possible for me to go to the next conference - in Buenos Aires, Argentina.”
“Argentina? There’s another economic powerhouse. Giving economics lectures in Argentina and Greece is like giving good governance talks in Somalia or human rights speeches in North Korea, or democracy at work seminars in Washington, DC. That’s like choosing a teaching position in Iceland instead of California because you want ‘financial stability.” I blustered. “Wait a minute,” I thought. “You already did that.”
“I’m doing this to get tenured, Dad.”
“That makes sense.”
Nazy and I will be visiting Beirut in the last half of May. It’s the first extended vacation we’ve had since we moved from Switzerland. I wanted to go to Australia and New Zealand, but Nazy reminded me that we don’t have any offspring in either of those countries. This revelation caused me to dispatch an immediate email:
To: The Big Dar, Beirut, Lebanon
From: The Grand(est)Dad
Subject: Next job
Have you thought of looking for teaching positions in Australia or New Zealand?
Love,
Dad
I was about to send the message when Nazy suggested that I replace “Australia and New Zealand “with “‘California”.
“Of course, dear.” I replied. “There go my vacation plans,” I thought.
After a well-received talk, Darius returned to Beirut where he is getting ready to move to a more spacious and comfortable apartment.
“Since I got here, Dad,” Darius explained, “I’ve been living in a dorm. It’s time to get a real home. This one has two bedrooms and an actual living room.”
“I thought you said that finding good accommodation, at a reasonable price, was impossible in Beirut. How did you do it?”
“I didn’t find it. Christiane found it.”
“She didn’t think much of your dorm?”
“Right. They new place is not in Al Hamra..”
“Does that mean the ‘call to prayers’ loudspeaker will not be 3 feet from your window?”
“You’ll just have to see when you get here, Dad.”
While I was thinking about Darius in Memphis, I remembered the newspaper clipping that my sister Marjorie had brought. Times (and prices) have changed since then - I don’t think we could get a Persian Hyacinth for $10 nowadays. (The photo is Nazy, me and Mitra.)
For more photos of Darius, click here
For last week's letter click here
