At 8:05 pm on Friday, July, 3, I took a step forward in the path of this river of no returns. Actually, I was propelled forward by the birth of “Hudson Reza William Roberge”, who forever transformed my status in life from father to grandfather.
I did not and do not have the time to reflect on how it would or would not change my perspective and attitude towards life . Instead, during the entire journey to New York City on the eve of his birth, one question consumed me unrelentingly: what type of world will he, my grandson, face and inhabit? A night later, when I see him for the first time and hear his name, I realize that I have found the answer to my question. The answer to the question that had not let me alone until that very moment was his name in itself: Hudson – Reza – William – Roberge.Hudson is the river that flows past my daughter’s home, and the place where she witnessed, within steps of her front door, the greatest miracle of this century – the crash landing of a passenger airplane into that very river without a single passenger suffering so much as a bloody nose.
Reza, derived from the second half of my name, who was born and raised in Darab, wed in Tehran and became a father in Washington, DC.
William is the namesake of his other grandfather, an American. And Roberge, his forefathers who hailed from Normandy in France and arrived here by way of Quebec, the Francophone province of Canada. In this vein, the world that Hudson Reza William Roberge will experience is a world that contains many like him, a world where lines of division based on ethnicity, nationality, religion, linguistics, race and even perspective cannot be drawn and used to instigate conflict. The misery of war which has put the humanity in chains for thousands of years and does not allow it to soar where it's imagination goes, although propelled by self-serving economic calculations, it has been with the excuse of ridiculous differences that warmongers have been able to create divisions between us, creating conflict. Religious differences are at the top of the list of these divisions, exemplified merely by the 250 years of the Crusades or the thousand years of misery that has befallen Iran. But in the world that Hudson Reza William Roberge is going to experience, who will be able to draw a line between him and another part of the world? Telling him that “you are this” and “they are that” and you must fight each other to serve our greed. He needs to watch the Darabis back, and the Kurds, Tehran and Russia, France and Normandie, Canada and Washington, DC and New York – for the sake of his name, he needs to watch the interests of all of us. He has a grandfather who believes in religion, but is not starving for holiness. And he has a grandfather like me who does not accept any religion at all , although respects everybody's beliefs . He must then care for the believers and non-believers both. He must care for all of us. He will learn English. He will also learn French and, more importantly to me, he will learn Farsi. In my dreams, he will perhaps pick up a pen and continue my legacy in my mother tongue. He will not be alone in the unique world that he is about to experience for there are many like him scattered around the globe. He will be the physical manifestation of the world that John Lennon envisioned in the 1970’s: a world where the aspects of religion, ethnicity, language, and other divisions that have been the cause of turmoil and misery for humanity are neutralized and the parts that are meant to endure will last. John Lennon, however, is not here to see how his vision for humankind, the vision that he immortalized in his timeless song, is becoming reality. This reality is not that we have all abandoned our ethnic, religious and racist prejudices, but that with each day, the number of us, the you and I who find these imposed prejudices shameful, grows. When John Lennon pictured a dream world called “Imagine”, he said we are not alone. Going one step further, we know from where we stand at this moment, that Hudson Reza William Roberge is also not alone and never will be alone. in the picture that I took of him merely two days after his birth, his smile suddenly beams through his dreams. It is almost like he is sharing my dream and telling me “You have nothing to worry about.”
