I already was having a bad day. So returning to my Albany home after work, I wasn’t prepared to find a hundred flies circling inside like jets in a holding pattern. I have a thing about houseflies. Spiders don’t bug me. Daddy longlegs don’t bug me. But flies, for whatever reason, drive me nuts. I have no idea how they got in, but seeing so many in my home was like a horror flick come to life.
I grabbed a swatter and started mowing ’em down. The body count had gotten fairly high when I took aim at one on the kitchen window. Maybe it was the adrenaline, maybe the wafer-thin pane, but I struck too hard and smashed the glass.
This was starting to get comical.
Exasperated, I grabbed the Yellow Pages and dialed the first 24-hour window repair service I saw advertised. In accented English, the workman said he’d be right over. Within an hour there was a knock, and there stood Ali, all 6-foot-2 of him, decked out in tank top and black beret. He was one of those big men who appear to have been smelted of iron.
I usually bristle when repairmen come into the house. They make a mess, they scare the cats and no matter how nice they are, they’re only there because something broke, so I’m rarely in a good mood when they show up.
Which partly explains my reaction when Ali casually said to me while measuring the window, “So, you hear the news about Israel and Lebanon?”
In an instant, my inborn anti-Semitism antenna was fully deployed. Who is this guy? Does he know I’m Jewish? Maybe he spotted the mezuzah on the door. Is he friend or foe?
These questions passed through my head at light speed before I answered, “Yes, the war … it’s terrible.”
In a torrent of invective, Ali started blasting Hezbollah and the mullahs of Iran. “They are crazy. They cut your head off,” he said, making a sawing motion across his neck.
Turned out, Ali was an Iranian expatriate, a convert to Buddhism and a Judeophile of the first order. Or so he said. I still had my antenna up.
He told me many Iranians love Jews. He told me Jews took him in when he fled to this country after the Khomeni revolution. He told me Arabs — but not all Muslims — want to kill Jews.
I noticed he hadn’t gotten around to fixing my window, so I politely absented myself to walk the dog. When I got back, he had more on his mind.
“You are Jew?,” he asked me, his face inches from mine. I figured he already knew, so I told him I was Jewish. But even at this point I thought, “How much should I reveal to a 6-foot Iranian holding a giant piece of glass?”
After telling me about the beauty of his country and its people, Ali told me something shocking.
“You want to solve the problem?” he asked. “You drop bombs on Iran. Maybe you kill 25,000, maybe 50,000. Better that now than 50 million in 10 years when they have nuclear.”
Ali saw my deer-in-the-headlights look of horror. “You are nice American,” he said. “But this is what you have to do. Maybe U.S. Maybe Israel. After the bombs, there would be coup in Iran.”
This guy, I thought, was one tough Buddhist.
It took him 45 minutes to fix the window, but Ali stayed for hours. We chatted about our kids. He told me how much he misses Tehran, especially in the cool of sunset. I gave him a book of Rumi poems. He kissed me on both cheeks, called me “brother,” and left.
My encounter with Ali shook me, mostly because it showed me how isolated I am. For all my supposed worldliness, I spend all my time with Jews and baby boomers. My people.
It’s a closed circle out of which I look on the wide world around me. From within that circle I pass my judgments and make my pronouncements.
But Ali was that rare, friendly emissary from the outside who hopped the circle. Thanks to a little broken glass, he changed the way I see the world, if only a little bit.
By the way, Ali did a beautiful repair job. It was as if nothing had shattered. Now, about those flies …
Dan Pine</b can be reached at [email protected].