Peripheral Visions

understood my disability and how the role of anthropologist had helped me compensate for it. I used to go back and visit, dropping in without advance notice, to reaffirm my appreciation of the kindness of those who had put up with this awkward stranger, rather than simply take my notebooks and disappear. But now I went with a new kind of purpose: I went in order to have gone, to have checked in.
    There would be news of things that had happened in the village, and sometimes I had news to tell about myself, but I remember those visits as deadly boring. My pleasure at the texture of day-to-day village life had depended on learning, learning that required sustained attention and a degree of continuity, not on savoring the ungarnished present. One of the joys of language study is that everyone and everything encountered in the new language is exciting, and this is true of other patterns of behavior that an outsider needs to unravel. When I let myself abandon the effort of learning—finding the patterns, putting the small details in context—I became easily bored, and at the same time I felt inauthentic, cut off from these lives I had wanted to know.
    Perhaps in old age with a rocking chair I will find myself contented in the moment, able simply to drift and enjoy the ebb and flow of social life, as the villagers seemed able to do. For now, the nearest I come to the quiet listening of others is lulling a baby, shelling peas, sitting and looking at the flames of a fire or the flow of water in the stream beneath my window. I could pursue that quietness through the disciplines of meditation, whether as a religious practice or for personal growth, and hope it would overflow into my styles of participation. But looking back on those attacks of boredom and discomfort, it is clear to me that I could also have gone on cultivating the habit of learning and taking pleasure in noticing whether people stood or sat, how they moved their hands, the small, perennial variations in talk about the weather. I have survived many committee meetings with the same doubled attention, so that boredom was simply beside the point. I am convinced that, regardless of theology and dogma, this too is a form of spirituality.

Turning into a Toad
    I GREW UP LEARNING NATURAL HISTORY from my father, paddling in summer through the swamp in New Hampshire or wandering the California woods, absorbing his steady attention to plants and animals. In the city, I kept an aquarium and went with him to the zoo. But when we moved to Iran, doing natural history with Vanni came less easily. The mountainous desert around Tehran has, of course, its own flora and fauna, but it was hard to get to with a small child and unfamiliar to me, dry and thorny. The zoo was a scandal: tatty, miserable animals, mocked by visitors offering lighted cigarettes to the chimps and reinforcing in their children the sense that wild animals and even most pets are vicious and dirty. Persian culture values cultivated places, walled and irrigated gardens, so when Iranian families picnic farther afield they bring their rugs, the images of enclosed and hospitable spaces, along with pots of food and samovars.
    Vanni and I found our wildlife where we could: tadpoles in garden pools, beetles, a hawk with a broken wing that lived in our greenhouse but was never able to fly again. Vanni was out shopping with the housekeeper one day when they saw a large tortoise, its shell cracked in some highway encounter, and Vanni picked it up and put it in the shopping basket. The housekeeper was half hysterical when they got home, afraid to remove her passenger or to abandon the groceries. Vanni and I set the tortoise loose in our little garden, where its shell healed in the course of a year and it grazed peacefully on pansies and the excess kitchen greens the housekeeper began to enjoy hoarding for it.
    Some months later, I traveled to Europe for a conference, my first absence since the family had come to Iran. I got up to wait for a cab to the airport while the rest of the household was still asleep. The early morning is a gentle time, before the dew is dried and the sun blazing, so I stepped out in the garden to greet the tortoise (whose name was Mud) and the day, and there I saw a magnificent toad, a toad that I very much wanted Vanni to see. I put it in a large empty storage jar and set it by her bed, rushed to scribble a note to my husband to make sure it was released later in the day, and ran out to meet my