Our hair thickened and curled as we welcomed the salty mist rolling off the sea and whipped past the roadside signs of hidden villas. Some, where we’d stayed over the years, we had named after our friends’ moms, such as Nancy Sara and Sally Sara.Two of the first words I loved in Farsi were Ziba Kenar (beautiful shore), a ramshackle resort where my family had stayed in 1964. A lifetime later, we still laugh hysterically today at the memory of donkey rides along the shore, watching each other jerk up and down on the uncontrollable little beasts, staring in shock when they stopped to splash peepee into the sand.
In later years we played nocturnal war games with flashlights and walkie-talkies on the beach front, gleefully vexing the local gendarmes who mistook us for Soviet spies. As teenagers we rode motorcycles beside galloping herds of wild horses. At night we cranked the speakers of our Range Rovers and lay amidst the dunes, staring at the stars to a soundscape of Hendrix and Led Zeppelin.