When my dad was a four-year-old boy

When my dad was a four-year-old boy, before he was shipped off to Ely to fend for himself and eke his way to manhood through the strange foreign rainy panacea of English teeth and solitude and headmaster and rugby drills... further back, before all that: when he still lived with his mom and dad in the Anglo-Iranian oil oasis of Abadan by the Persian Gulf, on one particularly hot summer's day his father, my grandfather, asked him if he wanted to come with him for a drive to a nearby town.

After a long time of sitting quietly in the 1959 Benz beside his father, my dad asked him: "Baba, does God exist?" My grandfather, without looking away from the road ahead, answered quickly "But of course..."

Perhaps another thirty seconds or more passed in silence on that bumpy road as my boy-father tried to reconcile this confirmation in his head. Finally, having taken notice and acknowledging his son's sensitivity of perception with a subtle smile, my grandfather completed his clause:

"God? Of course God exists Khosrow-jan. Man created him."