My favorite compliment ever received for "hanging with an 'Arab' kid"

In contrast to the disturbing Jocasta compliment I also got one of my favorite ever compliments this weekend, if only because of its surreality. It’s definitely my favorite compliment since moving back to Alabama in any case.

I have a three doors down neighbor who is a character in search of a 1980s Judith Krantz miniseries. I’ll call her ‘Miri’. She’s a very sexy and intelligent well educated Iranian lady of mixed Persian, Arab and Jewish ancestry, in her 40s I would guess but looks younger. She’s the object of one of my rare hetero crushes and we have one of those casual friendships where we’ll run into each other while I’m walking my dog and end up talking for two and a half hours, then go three months without seeing each other.

She reminds me of a darker skinned Cher in some ways. Her family came to the U.S. when the Ayatollah took over, she converted to Christianity soon after, she speaks English in a beautiful but very clear accent (easier to understand than a lot of native Bamans) and several other languages as well, and she’s currently a semi-agnostic very liberal divorced mother of three. The youngest is about 12 years old and he’s doing a poster for his literature class based on a book about some martyr who was hanged for his beliefs (I’m not familiar with it).

So last night she knocked on my door and said “Hi, my son needs to know how to tie a noose and you seemed the logical choice.” (This is similar to the compliment but not quite it.) He wanted to paste a miniature noose to form the I in the book’s title and evidently came up with the idea independently.

I responded with the usual way I respond when swarthy foreigners ask me to help their son make an implement of death: “My place is a total mess, let me get some string and I’ll be right out.”

She knew that I could tie a toy noose in part because I’m a librarian (and we find info, of course) but mostly because for some reason one of the times we talked about being the weird kid in school (she for being Iranian and me for- well, I’m not sure why, really) I once told her the story of a 6th grade history project that got me my first ever standing ovation (from the class) and recommendation for counselling (from the teacher, who was not amused) and paternal praise (my father thought it was absolutely hysterical and had me “perform” it for every old woman in the family).

As fate would have it I have some hemp twine left over from my last move which worked better than the white string and though it’s been over 25 years I was able to remember the vaguely mu shaped form and “loop around the pencil” method I used more times than I should admit in my childhood to carry out the verdicts of the courts on various action figures of all sizes. (Supposedly riding a bike is one of those “never leaves you” things as well, but I suppose the fact that I’ve never learned to ride a bike is why I can still remember the difference noose tying.)

After I finished showing her son how to either snap the neck of his sister’s BRATZ action figure or strangle it, dependent upon the severity of the crime and the judge. (The BRATZ figure isn’t part of the poster display, but just a "completion of knowledge’ thing.) Miri insisted that I stay for dinner. It was a traditional Persian dish called “Chicken Enchiladas” and followed by the traditional dessert of decaf mocha and 12 cigarettes while we talked for a while.

Miri’s apartment has exactly the same floor plan as mine though you would never know it as mine is faithfully decorated in Early Modern Katrina and hers is a hodgepodge of world cultures and antiques that would brook no complaints from the favorite concubine of a vizier. Her ancestry as closely as I know it: her father, a (from what I’m guessing extremely) wealthy businessman before the fall of the Shah, was a nominal Muslim (he studied the Koran and even performed the Haj but was privately so secular that he drank and even ate ham when away from Iran on business). Her father’s father was 100% Persian while her father’s mother, whom she describes as a bitter and cruel woman who was strikingly beautiful even in her sixties, was born Jewish but her family was forcibly converted to Islam when she was a girl. After the family fled Iran when she was about seventy she disowned her entire family (husband, children and grandchildren), moved to Israel and resumed her Judaism and they don’t know if she’s living or dead (she would be very old but not “inconceivable that she’s still alive” old) as she refused any contact with her family. (Miri likes to stress that she’s not anti-Semitic, just anti-grandma.) Miri’s mother was mixed Arab and Persian ancestry with she believes an English ancestor over a century ago. Her ex-husband, the father of her children, was a white American from Virginia (and supposedly a descendant of Pocohontas she says, “but he lied about everything else so he could have been an Argentine Nazi for all I know”), so all told her son has about 1 cc more Arab blood than me or most other Alabamians.

So the compliment-

Miri: Thank you so much for doing that. You’re probably the only person in Alabama who would stop what he’s doing and show an Arab boy how to make a noose. It speaks well of you.

The followup conversation:

Me: Well not that it matters, but he’s not Arab.

Miri: True, but to people here Persian and Turkish and converso and Armenian and anything else from between Poland and China means Arab. You wouldn’t believe how many people are trying to get me to accept Jesus Christ within two minutes of learning where I was from. And they used to all assume I was Hispanic because I’m dark and have a not from here accent and even then they’d witness because they thought I was some kind of voodoo Catholic. Very irritating. And the other thing is that when they learn I was born and grew up in Iran, they’ll actually ask me ‘were you scared the first time you saw a television’ or ‘did your father let you wear shoes and underwear’ or ‘can you read’. I can read several languages thank you! When I was younger and before 9-11 when they’d start out thinking I was Hispanic, I’d tell them I was Iranian and then if they thought I grew up in a tent eating Christian babies I’d get irked and tell them ‘Look, I mean no offense but it’s simple historical fact, when your ancestors were painting themselves green and living in caves and worshiping mud totems mine were building ziggurats 70 stories high and writing epic poems and making gold statues, we’re really not a stupid people!”

Me: What do you tell them since 9-11 when they ask if you’re Hispanic or ever seen a TV?

Miri: I tell them, ‘¡ Si, la televisión es la más grande!”

As I was leaving she thanked me again and again reiterated “It’s a good thing to have a neighbor who knows how to tie a noose.”

Me: Well, it’s just luck actually. A noose and a half-Windsor are the only two knots I know how to tie.

Miri: Well, what others do you need to know? Between the two you can take care of most situations that you need in interacting with other people.

Pointless afteward: I recently bought some of the Best of the West action figures I once had (well, duplicates of course) cheaper than expected on e-Bay. I still had the rope. I had an old black sock just like the one Geronimo’s dress was made from when I was a kid (though unfortunately I can’t sew so I couldn’t make sleeves), so I took a little visit down memory lane. The “plop” sound they made hanging from the staircase railing was just as curiously thrilling as I remembered.

They’re still hanging there which means that for some odd reason my apartment complex manager will almost surely have to get in to the apartment while I’m at work today and will leave screaming and I’ll arrive home to find a dark car that always seems to leave at the same time I do for the next few days. But even so, damn if those things weren’t the perfect weight and neck stretchabilty for hangin’- it can’t have been coincidental to the design.

If that lady is one half as good-looking as you suggest she is, Sampiro, I am willing to give serious consideration to marrying her right now, sight unseen!

What a sense of humor!

Uh, Bosda, I take it you’re not that familiar with Sampiro’s postings, are you?

:wink:

D’oh! I read that as Bosda suggesting Sampiro should marry her.

never mind

OK, drop the penny.
:smack:

Please disregard my above post, & note that I am hitting Guinastasia with a wet trout.

<SMACK>

:smiley:

Well, I, for one, am glad to know that there’s a doper I can turn to for all my noose tying needs. Ya know, as I sit here thinking about it, there really isn’t a whole lot more to tying a noose than there is to tying a windsor knot, is there?

Sampiro, I propose you start an “Ask The Guy Who Knows How To Tie A Noose And Has References” thread. :smiley:

Yeah, it just depends on if you’re looking for a neck tie, or a neck tie party! :smiley:

Those Chicken Enchiladas sound very exotic and delightful. :snort:

What a nice story, noose story. And not even any ghosts. Well, apart from the little ghostly hanged dolls, of course. :smiley:

Brilliant! Now there’s a perceptive lady.

It’s suprising how noose-tying comes in handy. I don’t know of any hitch I’d trust more. Personally, though, I had to look it up online while building the set for a production of The Crucible. I’m guessing you didn’t have such a source- where’d you learn? Very few people are willing to teach such skills.

On the contrary, while the adults never divulged the information and I knew several scouts who never mastered a clove hitch, nearly every guy in my Boy Scout troop could make a noose with no trouble (or provocation).

I learned it from an old magazine on my parents’ bookshelves I was browsing through as a kid. It was actually an article on the Nuremberg Trials and how the nooses were deliberately adjusted to kill by asphyxiation rather than “hangman’s fracture” (i.e. snapping the neck above the 4th vertebrate). Death can take half an hour either way, but with the latter the victim goes into shock immediately so there’s relatively little pain. Jodl and Keitel were still gasping and fighting and kicking several minutes after they were dropped, the difference being not the noose so much as where it was positioned and how long (or actually how short) the drop was.

But I digress. The article had a diagram of how to make a noose and I was able to mimic it. I used to be a walking encyclopedia on hanging- it absolutely was an obsession when I was a kid, though I don’t know why. (I should state with complete honesty that I never hanged anything living :cool: ).

In U.S. states where it is still an option for capital punishment it is now required that death by hanging be caused from a snapped spinal column rather than asphyxiation. Over history it depended on variants from the specific sentence of the court (“hanged by the neck until dead” in a death sentence meant by definition strangulation) to the expertise of the hangman (if he didn’t really know what he was doing it could be anywhere from excruciating agony for the condemned to, if they were fat and or he dropped them too far, decapitation).

The hangings at Salem, incidentally, were asphyxiation. (I was in a thoroughly miserable experience production of that recently and I lobbied for the huge set [a busier variant of this one to have visible nooses or at least the silhouettes of in the background, but noooo… .) The hangings of the Lincoln conspirators, though all occurring on the same gallows at the same time (before and after (hooded dead bodies in image warning) were conducted differently; Mary Surratt (who even the judges who condemned her begged for clemency from the president) was given a quick death while Lewis Paine (as you can tell from the angle of his head in the photo) died slow, all due to the way the ropes were positioned.

Can you please tell this woman she’s lost? She walked straight out of my fantasy and she ought to come back.

Here’s another ex-Scout confirming that the same was true in Troop 271 of San Diego.

As usual, a great Sampiro story! Hooray! The before linkie does not work though. Please forgive me this slight, tiny, practically invisible critisism.

Your friend Miri makes quite the point about the knots. I shall have to pass this on.

Another Sampiro story. Excellent.

We await your book. :slight_smile:

Oh, and if Miri’s interested and looking, there’s at least one 42-year-old Canadian man who is also interested and looking.

Oops. Here it is again. I always loved the way they’re so considerably holding the umbrella over Ms. Surratt so that she won’t get hot and miserable as they’re slipping the noose over her canvas hooded head after carrying her up the steps (she couldn’t walk because she was so nervous [there was nothing stoic about her death] and because they’d tied a rope around her dress to hold it down for modesty sake should the wind catch it or her legs spasm- she was an attractive woman {in fact her husband wanted her to be a prostitute and she may have been- he was an abusive terror and an alcoholic}).

I no longer think she was as innocent as I once did, though I also don’t think she deserved death. I took tons of pictures of her boarding house (now an all you can eat Chinese take out place called WOK N’ ROLL- I don’t mean the location is but the house itself) last time as I was in D.C. including one of me in all my moo-shoo porcine glory in front of the place.

One of the cheesiest things I’ve seen recently on any of the Da Vinci Code/Third Reich Appreciation Channels was a paranormal investigator (i.e. a person who is specially trained in how to get cable channels to put the words ‘paranormal investigator’ under their picture) brought in to the jail cell where Surratt was housed prior to the gallows. The former jail still stands but is now condos and the lady whose apartment includes Surratt’s cell has had nightmares and odd occurrences in the apartment. The P.I. was “given no information” on who lived in the place other than it was a woman and that the place once had jail cells, and yet with her mental powers alone she devised that the woman “died before her time” and “had a pressure in the chest or throat” and “had unfinished business” here on Earth and “felt she was persecuted”. That was just plum eerie- from that description it had to have been either Mary Surratt or any other woman who lived there while it was a jail (regardless of what they died of pressure in the chest or throat is sure to be a system), plus people who die peacefully in bed of old age probably wouldn’t be too likely to haunt a place.

What would have impressed hell out of me would have been if the psychic had said “I’m sensing that this person had her dress tied around her waist for modesty, got carried up a steep flight of stairs, wondered what the hell the guy was thinking holding the umbrella over her when she had a canvas bag over her head that made her sweat like a racehorse and was about to die, and something about how her beautiful living room smells like soy sauce and how she wishes ‘The Others’ there would stop saying ‘honey garlic chicken, free sample’ all day long as it makes it hard to concentrate on Booth’s Booty… does anybody else feel a sudden pain as if the 2nd vertebra is being snapped? Cause this woman does and she’s pissed… and she said tell her son John all is well on the other side, but when he gets there she’s gonna kick his ass from now til the third government check day after the Final Judgment, and she also wants a slurpee.”

Ohh, Sampiro. Ohh.

Can’t think of anything to say so I’ll retire humbly quoting the masters.

A Ballade of Suicide
G.K. Chesterton

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours on the wall
Are drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!”
The strangest whim has seized me. . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

A Monday morning treat!

A new Sampiro post.

Thanks!

I learned the hangman’s noose as a Boy Scout, and I learned later that the number of turns and the length of the drop would be carefully varied according to the condemned’s weight. I got the impression that a snapped neck and a stillness thereafter were preferred to a period of jerking at the end. Gibbot was the gallows, and some sources say that flibbertigibbot referred to the jerking after the drop.

I thought of it as a clever, complicated knot, and I didn’t connect it with (unlawful) lynching. It didn’t occur to me until much later that a hangman’s noose would be an intimidating racial insult. I didn’t think of escaped slaves. I thought of cattle rustlers. It’s an example of my naivite (sp?) at the time.