A month later, during a trip to the post office, the postal clerk informed my father that he had received a letter about a month earlier that could not be delivered. Apparently, the letter was addressed to the school, but since my father was no longer teaching, the post office had not delivered it. The clerk handed my father an envelope. It was his acceptance letter to Texas A&M, courtesy of a Fulbright grant, along with a scholarship from the Ford Foundation. The letter stated that he was expected in Texas by a certain date for a forty-day orientation program. My father looked at the calendar. That certain date had been a week ago.

Frantic, he ran to his boss and asked for five days off. Having never set foot outside Iran, he needed to go to Tehran to obtain a passport. He didn’t quit his job, fearing that having missed the orientation, he might have lost the scholarship.

In Tehran, he headed straight to the passport office and handed the administrator his identification booklet. The administrator leafed through it, handed it back to my father, and said, “I’m sorry. There’s a page missing.” Sure enough, the last page, the death certificate, was missing. “But I’m alive!” my father pleaded. No matter. He was told he had to obtain another identification booklet, a process that takes three months.

My father’s five-day trip to Tehran turned into a twenty-fiveday stay, during which he ran around frantically recounting his story to everyone, hoping that someone might know someone who might be able to expedite the process. A kind administrator finally decided to help, supplying him with an identification booklet within a week. He then obtained a passport. Next stop was the American embassy, where he was issued a visa within a couple of hours.

He then returned to Abadan, quit his job, bid a teary good-bye to his sister Sedigeh and her family, and boarded a plane bound for Texas. By the time he arrived in Austin, he had already missed thirty-five days of the forty-day orientation.

For the remaining five days, he was assigned to a room with a Japanese student who found Americans morally bankrupt. For five days, my father listened to his roommate pontificate on the dangers of their new loose surroundings. On the last night of orientation, during the farewell dinner, one student became completely drunk, draped a tablecloth over his body, and danced wildly on the tables. He was hauled away by the organizers, but not before my father recognized the wild and crazy guy as his roommate.