HE MEMORIES are just as real nearly 40
years later. Real enough to bring tears. Pat
can’t think about those frantic and uncertain
years during and after the violent overthrow
of the 2,500-year-old monarchy begun by
Cyrus the Great and Darius — the steep
descent from the family’s palatial residence in Tehran to a flat in
London to a house in
Fayetteville; the threat
of being deported; of
not knowing how to
take care of her chil-dren;
countless sleep-less
nights in fear that
Fred had been executed
— without spilling a
few tears.
“I have friends
who say this is a good
book,” she says. “But
every time I started
to write my memo-ries
I cried so much
I couldn’t continue. I
was so worried about
the financial. But the
most important thing
was I did not have any
news from Fred. That
was very, very difficult
for me.”
The Nasseris have
an enduring love, one
forged over 56 years.
“Can you imagine?”
says Shawn, their
youngest son. “My dad
is 80, my mom is 80.
They’ve been married
over 50 years. How
impressive is that? We
always have lunch on
Thursdays. Port City
Chop House. They
were telling each other,
‘You’re lucky to have me because no one else would put up with
you.’”
Ironically, the two natives of Iran met in France when they were
both students. Pat, then Parvaneh, looks back at their courtship and
early years and laughs.
“We were still students when we got married,” she says. “I was
from the north of Iran, he was from the south. Our culture was so
different. In the north the women are very authoritarian. They decide
everything. But in the south, they think the man always gives the
orders. So at first when we married, we had a lot of conflict because
Pat and Fred Nasseri after his graduation from law school at the University of
Toulouse in France, in July 1961.
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of that. He under-stood
when he saw my
mother. Oh my good-ness.
She’s like a gen-eral.
Then he started to
calm down a little bit.”
The banter comes
easily these days. Fred
and Pat will celebrate
Valentine’s Day secure
in their love, and in
each other. But it
wasn’t always easy.
There was a time in
the late 1970s when
they wondered if they
would ever see each
other again.
The bloody revolt,
the ouster of the Shah
and reversal of his life’s
work occurred almost
four decades ago. The
royal and diplomatic
blunders that led to
the fall of the pro-
American Mohammad
Reza Shah Pahlavi,
the rise of his mor-tal
enemy Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini,
the actions or inactions
of American president
Jimmy Carter, and the
events of the Teheran
hostage crisis remain
the subject of contin-ued
debate and analysis
today even as many thousand Iranians again protest in the streets.
For Fred and Pat, the memory of the Iranian Revolution and the
demise of the Imperial Family is as fresh as if it happened yesterday.
T