My Aunt is a Long Lost Iranian Princess...

My mother's youngest sister is five feet (and one half inch, she adds) tall--much much shorter than the other women in our family. For instance, I am 5'3'' (and a half). Also, she has tiny little feet and deep green eyes. The rest of us are brown eyed girls.

Sure these differences may seem small and easily explained, especially with a basic working knowledge of genetics and recessive tendencies. But when my aunt was just a little girl, my mother convinced her--based on what she considered to be damning evidence--that my aunt was the long lost daughter of the Shah of Iran, switched at birth with my grandparents' baby boy.

Far-fetched? A little--but my aunt Susie was born in Tehran during the heydey of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's rule of Iran. My mother was five years old at the time and had to climb out the window to get the attention of someone living in the compound who had a car and could take my grandmother to the hospital. The family (which also included my mother's middle sister, Judy) spent three years there while my grandfather served in the navy.

Susie was granted duel Iranian citizenship at birth--a fact that made her a foreigner according to my 8 year old mother and means that she could never return to the country for fear of detention.

Neither Susie nor her sisters remember very much from their stay on the other side of the world. Many of my grandmother's memories are steeped in a sense of being desperately isolated and always afraid. It was a difficult unstable time in America. It was a difficult unstable time in the world.

Not much has changed, really.

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech at Columbia University this week, I couldn't help but think of Susie, who will never see the land of her birth, and of three little faces that stare out at me from my favorite photograph of their childhood. When will we live in a world where we are not so afraid of each other? When will we live in a world where difference is finally tolerated? And borders are not so defined?

I think when we do, it could be ruled by an Iranian princess who happens to live in Dallas, Texas.