WHOZYSTAN??

 
I love geography. I always have. In fact, when I was a little kid, I had many books, and, right up there with "Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes" and "The Three Little Pigs" was a Geography book. It showed volcanoes and oceans, and people who live in faraway places. 

My grandfather was an electrician on a ship, and traveled the world, bringing back souvenirs and tall tales about his many adventures in Singapore, Tanjung Priok, and Dar es-Salaam. 

As a child of six, I recall complimenting a lady from India on her beautiful Sari, while nearby a lady from Oklahoma was agog over such an "outlandish getup."

I moved from cosmopolitan Washington, DC to New Orleans. Inasmuch as New Orleans was a world port, and its citizens should have been worldly, I learned very quickly that this was not the case. 

The week after Thanksgiving, 1962, the subject in class was what neat thing our families did for Thanksgiving. It was interesting to me learning how these kids, very new to me, spent this holiday.
They all said practically the same thing. 

My Uncle Johnny was at that time a Communications Attaché at the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. The country was a monarchy in those days. The King of Afghanistan held a Thanksgiving Day banquet for the embassy staff. They were his personal guests. 

When it came to me to say what we did for that day, I said: "Oh, we all got together for turkey at my Aunt Anna's, but," I added proudly, "My Uncle Johnny had Thanksgiving with the King of Afghanistan!"

"WHOZISTAN?" Mrs. Moser, our third-grade teacher asked. (I guess New Orleans was not a hot-bed of Afghani activity back then! Today, everybody knows where Afghanistan is. Funny how we seem to learn geography from wars!)

"No," I replied, "Afghanistan! Khusestan is in Iran."(Pronounced Khoozystan, it is a province of Iran.)

That answer was met at first with blank stares and silence. The kids looked around at each other and then to the "cool" kids of the class for cues as to how they should respond to this. Instead of, for once, impressing my peers with something neat one of MY family members did, I got the strangest looks from everybody, and they evidently thought I was just making stuff up. There were a few giggles and mostly blank stares. In hindsight, I guess I should've just left the answer at the turkey dinners at Aunt Anna's!

In defense of my classmates, these were little kids, used to having children's conversations. They, like me, were in the springtime of their lives, and faraway places with strange-sounding names were unfamiliar to them. 

It was only the third grade. We were all just kids.