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Showing posts from July, 2013

From My Inverted Universe

As a child, I suffered from chronic tonsillitis.   I remember getting a penicillin shot almost every other week.   This was back in the early sixties in Iran where disposable needles weren’t available yet.   I remember climbing the stairs to the top floor of the pharmacy where a man in a white coat would take out a giant metal injector and place it in a steel container with boiling water to sterilize it.   He would then approach me, who was being restrained by a mother or a father and probably screaming my head off.   Next thing I remember I am walking up the stairs of my house rubbing my sore behind.   When I think of this memory, I also think of books.   Books were my incentive for enduring these painful experiences.   Every time I had to get a shot, my mother would buy me a book!   By age five when I finally had my tonsils removed, I had amassed quite a library.   In second grade when I came down with a severe case of the measles, my one request was a copy of a chil