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Hazrat Inayat Khan (on suffering)

[1-minute read]

Not long before a Chinese city that most of us had never heard of became Ground Zero for a novel coronavirus – you may have heard of it, and its Greek-lettered children – a small group of Ottawa women decided to raise the level of conversation in their beloved Baha’i community, and beyond it. H.H. and L.O. and some friends began a series of talks they called “Big Ideas: The Baha’i Faith and the Issues of Our Time”, starting with a discussion on climate change and inspired ways to cast light (and a little hope) upon this global crisis.

Now there have been 29 of these presentations, on subjects ranging from education to agriculture, from global governance to personal creativity, from racial justice to marital harmony. I love ‘em. (To be transparent: my bride gave the first one, and several friends have contributed their own. I am proudly and profoundly biased in favour of this project.) A recent BI talk by the intriguingly named Justice St. Rain focussed on human suffering – how we should think about it, and how to respond to it.

Its title – shared with one of his books, which was subtitled “A Spiritual Guide to Growing Through Tests” – was simply Why Me? I wrote a brief summary of the thing; here I will say only that Mr. St. Rain urges us to believe in the basic benevolence of a parent-like Creator, and to seek understanding of the difficulties that life inevitably presents to us. (Simple! But not so easy. Not for me.)

Virtuoso and music scholar, too: The Mysticism of Sound and Music is among his books. (photo from ramdass.org)

Almost as a coda to an hour-long seminar, St. Rain introduced me (and perhaps most of his audience) to a Sufi musician and philosopher, the India-born Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927), and cited the counsel below. It’s gorgeous: simple, persuasive and poetic. I thought you’d want to know.¹

 

 

 

 

“I asked for strength and God gave me difficulties to make me strong.

“I asked for wisdom and God gave me problems to learn to solve.

“I asked for prosperity and God gave me a brain and brawn to work.

“I asked for courage and God gave me dangers to overcome.

“I asked for love and God gave me people to help.

“I asked for favours and God gave me opportunities.

“I received nothing I wanted.

“I received everything I needed.”

 

¹ Wonderful, even in spite of my distaste for its wide popularity and commercialization and careless quotation. When I first looked up this quote, I think I remember finding a source for this. I think it might have been Khan’s Pearls From the Ocean Unseen. Sadly, in typical Quotable Quotes on the InterWebs form, my search for its origins today went everywhere and nowhere. It was quoted on Christian wisdom sites (boy, are THEY going to be surprised to find a Muslim in their heads!), personal coaches’ and bloggers’ pages, all without sourcing and sometimes quoting an “author unknown”. The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist is the closest I could find to a source; she uses the poem but apparently doesn’t attribute it to a specific book of Khan’s, of which there were many.

Pandemic Darkens the World: What Good Is THAT?*

A little more physical distancing needed now, of course: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres fist-bumps African colleagues. (Wish I knew who they were.) I choose to love this image. (photo courtesy UN)

*(4th in the “Silver Linings”series, which began here in my house, and ends here, on Earth.)   [8-minute read]

In some ways, finding the bright side of the Covid-19 crisis is hardest at the international level. It was easiest inside the four walls of my own home, and required successively more vision and awareness as I moved from civic good news to national bright spots to this challenge: does a global perspective offer much in the way of hopefulness? I must say: I can be a gloomy sort of Gus. I lean in to sadness and uncertainty and so many hands (“on the other other hand…”) in my preferred movies and books and songs. (Dar Williams and Her Deep Well of Sadness¹ pretty dependably make me weepy.) Still, my Thinking Cap has a propeller on it, blowing me ever toward possibility and a belief in the eventual triumph of common decency and basic good sense. So.

                   ¹ This is not the name of her band. She mostly flies solo. (And she’s funny, too.) Back to our regularly scheduled post.

I concluded Part 3, which focussed on Canadian candles in the wind and gloom, with some final thoughts on internationalism. We in the North pride ourselves, at least insulated little pockets of us do, on being a UN-friendly, outward-looking nation. We’ve always tended to be a bit more restrained in our flag-waving than the Americans are, though they’ve rubbed off on us uncomfortably (for me, at any rate) in that way as well. Internationalist visionary and global community-builder Shoghi Effendi – no Canuck, though he did marry one – argued powerfully about the negative side of nationalism. No problem, he wrote, with “a sane and intelligent patriotism”, especially to prevent over-centralization and an overbearing global authority, but between the wars he fingered unrestrained nationalism as one of three “false gods” that threatened human progress and peace. (Communism, of the Soviet flavour at least, and racial-superiority doctrines of every stripe were the other two.) Well, please pardon me for getting all amateurishly philosophical on you. But the brightest of the silver linings behind the darkness of a global pandemic touch on the following: the extent to which we think globally, act cooperatively, and generally show signs that we get that we’re all in this together. Guided by Shoghi Effendi and others, I’ve learned to see humanity as having an extended, collective bar mitzvah. Our maturity as a species grows with our understanding that we are truly citizens of a shared and single planet.  

That’s big and heavy. Never fear. I’ll start with the low-hanging fruit, the most obvious signs of goodness in a bad time for humanity.

  • ALL THE WORLD’S OTHER PROBLEMS HAVE MAGICALLY GONE AWAY! When was the last time you heard about nuclear proliferation, terrorism, hunger, poverty in the Global South, or tensions between North and South Korea, or, like, the Middle East, huh? Am I right or am I — (Oh. Right. That stuff’s all out there even if the news doesn’t have room for it anymore. And is that a silver lining in itself? Not really.)²
                   ² So ends the comedy part of the show! Thanks, you’re a beautiful crowd!

Well, that’s not exactly a silver lining. Let me start over.

  • THE PLANETARY ECO-CATASTROPHE IS OVER! HAS BEEN SLOWED DOWN. A LITTLE BIT. FOR NOW.  Is it just me, or am I breathing better? It’s hard to see it clearly in a small, non-industrial city like Ottawa, but Los Angeles smog is vastly reduced. The canals of Venice haven’t been this clean in forever. Industrialized Chinese cities oppressed by a heavy blanket of thickened air – with a level of particulate air pollution we can barely imagine in the West – are breathing easier and seeing farther than they have in many years. Even scientists studying these changes don’t necessarily want to celebrate – Look, everybody! Pandemics are good for global health! is not a sane position to take, for anybody – but we shouldn’t be afraid to point out that industrial slowdowns aren’t ALL bad. This doesn’t mean that the climate crisis has been brought under control, far otherwise, but it does give us some not-so-subtle hints: first, that “back to normal” clearly isn’t what we should, in the largest sense, be hoping for; second, especially for the environmental nihilists, these improvements remind us that big changes are possible, even when they’re forced on us. Even being compelled to do the humane and right things isn’t all bad!

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Reading With Phyllis in Ottawa

[8-minute read]

The more we read, the bigger the “To Read” pile grows. It’s mysterilicious.

We’ve missed her, but we carry on. This past March, her friends marked a first anniversary, grieved with her husband and family and, oh yes, be very sure of this, a sweet ripe bunch of them felt grateful for her life as they read and reflected on another fine book they’d likely never have heard of without her. And then they did it again in April.

I write here in remembrance of Phyllis Perrakis, a woman I knew only a little, though I felt lucky all the same. It is also a brief history of a book club, full of women, of course, plus one token oddball. (That would be Yours Truly.) I will also offer notes on the BIHE, an educational institution based on courage, justice and belief, but these seeming sidetracks all lead us back to Phyllis, a quiet, unassuming professor of literature. You would not have found her Very Professorial, if that adjective strikes notes for you of bombast or intellectual arrogance, but she surely glowed when she was sharing thoughts about a book she loved. BOOKS. Only now, far too late to learn more from her, do I find out that she was an internationally recognized scholar on the work of the Nobel Prize-winner for literature, Doris Lessing. But to better understand how we came to be Reading With Phyllis In Ottawa, first we need a side trip to Iran…

Once upon an early 21st century time, there was a book. It was written by Azar Nafisi, an Iranian professor of literature who had fallen exquisitely in love with American writers: Twain, Baldwin, McCullers, and the Russian-born Nabokov. It may not surprise you that Nafisi’s prospects for professional advancement in her homeland, after its Islamic Revolution, were bleak, and she has since moved to the United States. But before she did that, she found a clandestine way to share her literary enthusiasms with young women, the ones that she could never engage with publicly in studying “decadent” Western texts. Her book Reading Lolita in Tehran spoke of tense arrivals, a relieved doffing of the hijab upon entry into Nafisi’s home, but above all the rich delights of forbidden conversations among trusted friends about officially banned books, Lolita among them. Nafisi’s account was brilliant and popular and I highly recommend it, but that’s just the beginning.

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A Letter I Never Sent (To a Friend I Can’t Remember)

[4-minute read]

Have you ever stumbled across a letter you wrote (or an essay, or a birthday card) that for some reason didn’t get where it was supposed to? I was looking through my ‘Drafts’ folder in Gmail for something that should’ve been there, and wasn’t. Then I wondered why I had so many drafts; mostly, I use that folder to keep copies of pieces as templates I might use again, such as letters accompanying a writing submission or the kind of email response I make repeatedly.

Dalian is a coastal city of over 6 million, nestled on and among hills. Like all Chinese cities, it is constantly changing. There is already much we wouldn’t recognize.

I don’t know what happened to the text below, or why it was still in Drafts. It looks like it might have been intended as a friends’n’family newsletter, and maybe it did form a part of something like that. Or maybe I plumb forgot to finish an email to whoever-it-was, but in any case, the piece moved me. It effortlessly flung me ten years backward. We were in China, my wife and 9-year-old son and me, approaching our first Christmas of what turned out to be five straight Decembers in the northeastern city of Dalian. We were adventuring, and escaping workplace frustrations, and trying to be of some use to the fledgling Baha’i community there, and learning our ever-loving heads off. Lately, as we approach the fifth anniversary of our permanent return to Canada, we have been reminiscing and brooding about the friends we left behind, many of whom we have little or no contact with anymore. I had left teaching high school (and an earlier stint writing in the Canadian government), while Diana was on sabbatical from environmental policy work. Our son Sam turns 19 soon, still speaks Mandarin well, and his coming of age and future vision push us all back to remembrance and wonder at that epic phase in our family life. What follows is how I looked at our first few months of life in Liaoning Province:

Though we are distressingly mortal, and have known the truth of the culture shock that often hits even the best-intentioned after the “honeymoon” period ends, we are well and prospering. China is an astonishing place. In practical terms, there are frustrations, but it is really not too difficult from the physical point of view. But it is a dazzlingly opaque culture to we foreigners, we moles, blind to even the most obvious of things. (To a friend, in front of our complex of apartment buildings: Kai, we need to find a photocopy place. Do you know where we could find one? Superb, resourceful, devoted Chinese friend: How about the one right there, across the street? Ah, yes. The big yellow sign with red characters. That one.)

Though my job is a job, it has the benefits that other teachers told me would be here: deeply serious and enthusiastic and appreciative students, and a general cultural framework in which education matters (sometimes even too much) and teachers are honoured (almost whether they deserve it or not). I am a week and a half from finishing my first semester as a teacher of conversational English and Western culture to Masters and Doctoral students, and I can say with certainty that I have learned more than the grand majority of my 408 (but who’s counting?) students…

Diana, though sometimes missing her professional and voluntary environmental work, has filled her days with the practicalities of making life work here, and with making friends and sundry human connections. She is so good at it. (For example, our good friend Anna visited again this week at our home, and her stories are greatly appreciated!) Diana is the centre of our shared life of service, and we have made many (most of them university students, as we live within walking distance of three universities) wonderful friends here, many of whom share our love of learning about matters of spirit and an ever-advancing civilization. When school resumes, she will be pioneering two courses in Environment and Business at one of the neighbouring schools (not mine) as well as teaching some conversational English to undergrads. And life will get a little busier, but our essential purpose will not change.

Sam, we sometimes think, has the hardest job of us all, as we have placed him in a local Chinese public school where he often has felt bored and alone. But he likes being in Dalian, in general, and has made fast and furious friends with an American boy (and his sisters). The first two months were very tough for him, but it gets better and better. Thankfully, he really enjoys the teaching and be-friending activities that so frequently bring new people into our orbit and into our apartment. He happily sings the prayer that begins “O God, guide me” in a Chinese that sounds pretty fluent to my ears, and with the help of “Alice”, another of our dear co-workers and friends, his Chinese speaking (and some writing) is progressing speedily.

Being here is a little like going on a spiritual fast, or some great quest: every day, whether we like it or not, we are vividly aware of our life’s purpose, and more in tune with the needs of the age, as well as we can understand them. And when the fruits arrive, often at the end of a sometimes frustrating or disorienting day, they taste wonderfully sweet and we think, This is the life…

And it was, you know, even if it was occasionally maddening.

Even if, now, I can’t quite remember who Anna was.

Enough? The Baha’i Seven Are Still There**.

**(Lest We Forget)**

The campaign is over now.

There have been several concerted efforts to raise global awareness. One proclaimed the passing of 10,000 hours of unjust, of ridiculously tragic imprisonment of seven Baha’i leaders in Iran. Many fine words were said in numerous dignified contexts, but the “Yaran” – it means “friends” in Farsi – remained in jail. The five-year mark of their astounding 20-year sentences brought another crescendo of polite indignation, but these five years of loss, not only to the persecuted Baha’i minority but to all of Iranian society, moved the Teheran government not a bit.

Will a new logo be needed for nine?

Will a new logo be needed for nine?

In May of 2015, the hashtag #SevenBahaisSevenYears achieved not quite the currency of, say, #BlackLivesMatter (to say nothing of tags for TV shows or celebrity break-ups), but it circled the globe with awareness and a renewed call for justice. Earlier this month, #EnoughIsEnough and #ReleaseBahai7Now had their moments of trendiness as the Yaran’s captivity reached its eight anniversary.

The campaign did its best. More people than before are aware of the human rights situation in Iran, one that puts the Baha’is at the centre of the issue – not that they are the only, or even the largest, group that is oppressed and unjustly incarcerated. In fact, the Baha’i community wishes only to serve the broader population, and is dogged, even when its brightest young people are excluded from university admission, in its pursuit of education for all. Their “crime” is one, plainly and simply, of belief in the teachings of the 19th-century Persian nobleman known as Baha’u’llah, considered a heretic by Shiah Islamic clerics. All the noise about “sedition” and “immorality” and “spying” is nothing but bigoted, ignorant and baseless slander; religious intolerance is the reality.

So here I am. I tweeted and liked. Did my bit, I guess. Maybe so.

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Re-Broadcast the Last: Vahid Tizfahm and His Living Letters

I could be writing, it’s true, about gun violence here and there. (Been there, wrote that, but there’s always more.) I ought to explore the tangled feelings of a frayed and stubborn father and his proud, combative son. (It wouldn’t be the first time.) There are Things to be Said about the two troupes of (mainly) 14-year-old boys that I’m spurring/goading/inspiring/herding toward basketball excellence, so impatiently. (How about now? Can you hear me NOW?! Why aren’t you trying harder?) And how about those Warriors, and the hardwood genius of Stephen Curry? And, like, all those other like sports thingies?

There’s Paris. I’ve barely written a word about the horrors of Paris then (and Beirut, and Bamako (Mali), and Kano (Nigeria), and San Bernardino (USA)…), and nothing of Paris now: governments and leaders defending their privilege (systematically) and twiddling and fiddling (often) while the climate burns, slowly and inexorably. (Heck, you think we have a refugee problem now? How about when Bangladesh or [insert your most precious coastal population centre here] is under water, or drought deepens in California or any other global or local food basket? Say, while I’m on the subject, didn’t Syria have a series of disastrous crop years just before the war?)

I’ll be getting to those. Probablymaybe. Soonerorlater.

But today, as I promised myself and The Usual Lurkers here at JH.com, I’m thinking about the last of the Iranian Seven, prisoners now on the most trumped-up of charges – weird how, suddenly, “trumped-up” accusations have a whole new layer of meaning – for over 90 months. I want you to know about and remember Vahid Tizfahm. You might not have heard of him, or his six brothers- and sisters-in-nobility, but I’ve written about each and I’ve been re-issuing the call. They’re still in jail. Their names are listed below.

There’s one, though, that I want you to read RIGHT NOW (sorry, no need to shout, I guess, not really, but wow) is this updated profile of Vahid Tizfahm, in which I include links to three remarkable — I dare say nearly incredible — letters written by (or partly by) Mr. Tizfahm.

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Re-Distribution 7.5: Behrouz Prays for His Oppressors

I’ve gotten distracted, just like the world has. For a week last May, considerable global attention — at least, within the bubble of those with the willingness (or the freedom) to look up from their routine concerns — was paid to remembrance and advocacy for seven leaders of the Baha’i community of Iran. Wanting to join the movement, I had to get to know Behrouz Tavakkoli, so I wrote about him.

Behrouz is another man who is widely known and loved — and was taken from — among the Iranian Baha’is, one of the seven who were then entering an eighth year of unjust imprisonment in two Iranian jails.  He and his partners in “crime” were the focus for the international #7Bahais7Years campaign, and now that it’s seven-and-a-HALF years, here I go again. I hoped, back then, that my seven personal essays (this was the sixth) could be of some use in the worldwide protest, and maybe they moved somebody besides me, but the seven still grow old in prison. They are sacrificial lions, bravely enduring pariah status in a country that needs their kind more than it knows. So in case you missed, or would like to remember, my May series on the Quietly Magnificent Seven, prisoners of conscience in Iran for 7.5-years-and-counting, here was Issue No. 6…

They made a carpenter out of him. Behrouz Tavakkoli, in most ways, is probably okay with that.

They made a carpenter out of him. Behrouz Tavakkoli, in most ways, is probably okay with that.

I’ve been reading about Behrouz Tavakkoli. (I’ve known some “Persian versions” named Behrouz. They usually had to defer to the impervious pronunciation of Canadian-born friends and accept ‘Bruce’. Too bad, but Iranians have put up with worse. Declaration: I’ve never had a bad experience with a Behrouz.)

My favourite Bruce, singer/songwriter Cockburn, startled those familiar with his gorgeous acoustic guitar-picking and gentle, Christian-flavoured and granola-fed singing. It was the 1980s. As he became more aware of global poverty and the systematic injustice of so-called “first world” nations, songs like “They Call it Democracy” were wildly angry for a peace-loving Canuck. The most shocking one, of course, and likely the one that put him on an American blacklist for a time, was “(If I Had a) Rocket Launcher”. He wanted to “make somebody pay” for the terrible suffering he saw in Central and South American countries, which were ‘collateral damage’ during that ever-more–ridiculous global struggle (allegedly) between communism and democracy. (Remember the Cold War? Is it even over? Where and how is it being fought now? These are uncomfortable questions. Feel free to ignore them; most do.)

I have nothing so dramatic to say; nobody will pay. However, I read Mr. Tavakkoli’s story, and there’s no doubt: that’s anger rising up into my chest.

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Reminder 7.5: You Can’t Kill Jamaloddin Khanjani

This was the third of my quick and furious reactions to the ongoing imprisonment of seven innocent Baha’is in Iran. May of this year marked the end of their seventh year in captivity. As I wrote back then, “I’d never heard of Mr. Khanjani until recently, but today he’s my hero.” He and his six partners in the most benevolent, world-minded sort of “crime” you could imagine were the focus for the international #7Bahais7Years campaign, which was a noble thing but not yet bearing fruit. Now, it’s 7.5 years. Counting…

Here’s one heroic and underreported story of the Quietly Magnificent Seven, prisoners of conscience in Iran.

The Unbreakable Mr. K.

The Unbreakable Mr. K.

Mr. Khanjani is 81.

His given name means something like “God’s beauty”.

He was arrested on May 14, 2008, along with five of the Quietly Magnificent Seven. In 2011, his wife of over fifty years, mother of his four children, died. He was not permitted to attend her funeral.

He is held in Gohardasht Prison. (The place even sounds harsh to a Western ear. Tehran’s Evin Prison is more infamous, but Gohardasht is brutally harsh as well.) He lives.

While his story will echo for a long age among Baha’is – among all who pay attention to grace under pressure, to indomitability under the worst circumstances – surely his days are numbered, yet when I read a brief biography, the man does seem to be pretty much unbreakable.

Listen: after the 1979 Revolution, Iran’s Baha’is were still under the leadership of their annually elected National Spiritual Assembly, nine women and men who never asked to be leaders, never campaigned, but were chosen from among the mass of Iran’s largest religious minority to care for and administer the community. It wasn’t long before their death sentences were handed down, the crime being heresy (or espionage, or immorality, or sedition, or any number of euphemisms for cut the head off the snake and the body will follow). All nine were executed.

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Re-Iteration 7.5: “Criminality”, Iran Style

Six months ago, I started writing personal reactions to the lives and imprisonment of seven leaders of the Baha’i community of Iran. Their institutions had already been dissolved (subsequent to their elected members being routinely executed in the aftermath of the “Islamic” revolution), their young people barred from university, and their lives and businesses disrupted or destroyed. The month of May marked the seventh year in captivity for these seven citizens, on charges ranging from the incredible to the ludicrous.

Now it’s 7 years and a half. (The Islamic Republic of Iran appears to have been unmoved by my blogging last spring, but they haven’t heard the last from me yet.) Yesterday, I began re-posting my earlier profiles, beginning with a little-known Iranian woman named Mahvash Sabet. The international media campaign, tagged #7Bahais7Years, brought considerable attention but no release of the innocent. So here I am, six months later, because they are still in prison.

The second profile was on another remarkable woman, Fariba Kamalabadi. My sarcasm got the best of me; I titled it “Biography of a Criminal”. I plead outrage. Please click here to read about the inspiring courage and conviction of Ms. Kamalabadi.

Vahid: Peerless Insight From Inside

Vahid is Vahid Tizfahm, yet another widely known and cherished community servant taken from among the Iranian Baha’is. He and his partners in “crime” are the focus for the international #7Bahais7Years campaign, and here we go again. Danny and Pej asked their buddy, me, to contribute to the social media protests, and I’m hoping these personal essays are of some use in the necessary worldwide conversation. Vahid Tizfahm and his six colleagues are sacrificial lions, bravely enduring pariah status in a country that needs their kind more than it knows. Here is the last instalment of my series on the Quietly Magnificent Seven, prisoners of conscience in Iran for seven years, and counting…

Ever had an optometrist for a hero? I have, now. Vahid Tizfahm is a lion.

Ever had an optometrist for a hero? I have, now. Vahid Tizfahm is a lion.

At 42, Mr. Tizfahm is the same age as his father was when he was executed for being a Baha’i. Three bullets, no lawyer, no charge that we would recognize as remotely judicial. Vahid, the son who is now the similarly arrested father, is quite the youngest of the Yaran, the “friends”, the group of seven Baha’is that worked to guide and encourage the members of their persecuted community. As has become the disgusting norm in Iranian society, it goes without saying — so I’ll SAY it, again — that he did not go to university; as a member of “this detestable sect”, he wasn’t allowed to. He was able to train as an optometrist, and alongside this business he was a youth leader, taught children’s classes and was appointed to generally inspire, encourage, and promote learning among Baha’is. He studied under and supported the BIHE, the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education, an underground university that trains excluded Baha’i students in living rooms and by email. He did these things, of course, until he and the other Yaran were arrested, for “crimes” such as these, a little more than seven years ago.

***

Vahid is the Persian form of an Arabic word that means “unique”, “peerless”. Vahid. One of the greatest figures of the violently visionary and just plain violent early years of the Baha’i movement, in 19th-century Persia, was given this lofty title. And now we have another singular man, quietly, hardily, heartily bearing societal rejection and punishment in the name of principle, in the pursuit of justice.

The Tizfahm family. Not sure whether this is a prison visit, or just prior to his arrest.

The Tizfahm family. Not sure whether this is a prison visit, or just prior to his arrest.

Vahid Tizfahm’s son was in grade 3 when they came for him, about the same age his daddy had been when his own father was taken. The family had just moved to Tehran, and my thinly educated guess is that they had done so in order for Mr. Tizfahm to more easily work together with his Baha’i leadership colleagues. (You know, relocation to pursue sacrificial voluntarism, that old story.) The lad is now a sophomore in high school. I have a son about that age, who probably gets more contact with his Dad than he’d like. But what about young Mr. Tizfahm?

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