My mom arrived at JFK airport last night around 9, but it took her another two hours to get to my apartment in the East Village because she insisted on taking the train and talking to strangers along the way. When she finally got to my place, I was a mess of worry and I chastised her for talking to random people at night on the subway. "Don't you know someone recently got abducted and chopped into pieces because they asked for directions?" I told her. It was at that moment I realized that the roles had switched and now *I* was the one staying up and being worried about my mother's safety.
I'm really excited to have my mom here and to show her the City. I often wonder what her life would have been like if she was not culturally restrained to a certain path. Would her life have looked like mine right now? As I watch the way she marvels at all the little things--the fruit stand! all these people on the streets! cleaning your own apartment!--I have to think that she is living vicariously.
It was a little over 30 years ago that she flew to the same airport--John F. Kennedy International--to meet my father who had matriculated into a Columbia PhD program before transferring to the University of Washington to be closer to his aunt in Seattle. They had gotten married a year before in Iran and he had come to the U.S. first to stake it out. He met her in the airport at the gate like we used to be able to do before 9/11. "He brought me a dozen roses," she remembers. "And he had rented a convertible, which I thought was so American." Now they sleep in different beds. And she takes great joy in taking the subway to Manhattan to meet her daughter.
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