horses and buggy thinking part 2 /draft 1

Horse and buggy thinking part 2/draft 1

fiction
edward w pritchard

see part 1 horse and buggy thinking posted below for reference

part 2
start

Only once has someone threatened to kill me; as I now answer my cell phone it's him, Hassad calling. That was forty years ago. Hassad is calling from Paris, France; only once before did I speak to someone outside of America, I was fishing in the Canadian woods and my ex-wife called me to tell me my son had quit his job suddenly.

Hassad saw the story I wrote about the Amish girl not being properly educated. It is similar to what is happening in parts of the Islamic world and Hassad  wanted to ask me about my opinion.

I met Hassad through Rex my Peurto Rican room mate in college. Rex and his Peurto Rican friends had an apartment for ten years together at the College where I went and  Rex was graduating and the apartment was being offered me for a much under market rent by default for the term of the remaining lease. Rex was ten years older than me and more than anything he hated to see me sit around the apartment on weekends when I wasn't working. I had just missed getting married to my high school sweetheart and I didn't want to chance it again for a while. I wanted to read, study, think and learn. Rex was in a foreign students club and I went with old Rex and about ten foreign students of all nationalities to a local bar one Friday night. I met Hassad when he placed a blond sorority girl on my lap. A month later I gave Hassad a ride home from the student center in a bad rain storm and met his sister, Afareen. The sister and Hassad were from Iran, came from a very wealthy family, and his sister spoke ten or eleven languages and like Hassad and most Iranian people was very beautiful, in fact, I think the handsomest people in the world. Later that week the sister, Afareen , and her friend from Sudan stopped at the hotel where I worked and Afareen gave me a very expensive small box of chocolate.

About a month after that Afareen was at my apartment. We were alone, it was Saturday night about  10pm. Afareen had been here before. There was a knock at the door. It was Hassad, three men were with him, all looked Iranian or like that to me. Hassad was here to take Afareen home. It was a dangerous situation because Hassad was determined and I had a simmering temper that was difficult to detect if I was cornered. Afareen left and I never saw her again. Hassad threatened to kill me if I ever contacted Afareen again. Two days later Afareen's friend from college, the very tall very black girl  from Sudan walked into one of my history classes and told me before the bell that Afareen was back in Iran to study and that she was engaged to marry in a few months. I never heard from or saw Afareen again until today talking to Hassad. Hassad told me Afareen had passed away in 1988, and that she had two children.

Hassad told me that it was very likely that I had a grand daughter living in Pakistan and she was being denied schooling because of the fact that she was a girl in a fundamentalist Moslem country. As an additional piece of information, the young girl who was twelve was named Aara and was very intelligent. Hassad said that he was calling me because the only way to help his sister's grand daughter was through the assistance and influence of the US military. If I was the girl's blood grand father it was possible that using his contacts, Hassad could help his relative.
end part 2

end part 2

fiction
edward w Pritchard

part 1
horse and buggy thinking

My wife and I had been married a long time so I was surprised when she confided in me about a problem she was having. In fact she was crying one evening in our kitchen when I came home from work and told me about a patient of hers Sarah Miller who would have to quit school soon after graduating from the eighth grade.

My wife was a psychologist and although I sometimes forgot such things she had been raised as a Mennonite in her youth. That's how my wife came to counsel a young Amish girl named Sarah Miller, who as was customary with the Amish here in Central Ohio where we lived, would stop her formal schooling at age 13 after graduating from the eighth grade. Following graduation from eighth grade the young girl would complete her education at home with her Mother learning to cook, clean, wash clothes, and eventually raise children as a good Amish member of the Community.

Sarah Miller's teacher who was a Mennonite had taken the drastic step of bringing the girl to see my wife because the teacher felt it would be a debasement of human dignity to not further educate Sarah who had an IQ of approximately 175. The girl's parents who were old school Amish had not been consulted about their daughter's teacher taking Sarah to see a psychologist because the teacher knew from working with the Amish that as a rule there were no exceptions in their minds to their policy of not educating students beyond eighth grade if the youth in question was to be a member of the traditional Amish community.

The teacher knew she was probably violating the law by bringing Sarah Miller to see my wife, Dr. Robinson without the parents permission but the teacher felt she must do something drastic to help the girl.

My wife ask me as a lawyer to look into the Ohio case law on not completely or properly educating gifted students, and to advise her on if she should see the young girl for a second time a week from tomorrow at the next scheduled appointment. My wife also confided in me something she had never told me in our twenty years of marriage that she had faced a similar predicament  herself at age 14 and she had been having trouble the last few days in reliving an incident and decision she herself had made as a teenage girl.

end part 1