It was spring, their fourteenth as a married couple, when Amir decided to tell Alison about birds.<\/p>\n
Two hundred years ago, the famous bird artist and ornithologist Alexander William\u2014or was it Wilson?\u2014Amir wasn\u2019t sure, and what did it matter?\u00a0 In any case, the bird artist, probably exhausted and sweaty from a day of hunting birds in the swamp, returned to his hotel room in Wilmington, North Carolina to find his bed linens littered with mahogany chips and one of the world\u2019s last remaining ivory-billed woodpeckers perched on the desecrated bedpost.\u00a0 The bird gave the artist the luminous yellow eye, the bird\u2019s equivalent, as it were, of flipping man the bird.<\/p>\n
What in the world do you feed a campephilus principalis<\/em>\u2014or as the Cubans more poetically put it, a carpintero real<\/em>?\u00a0 The answer, which the bird artist never got right (he offered it wild bird seed, termites, bits of lettuce, and even a live fly), was beetle larvae burrowed into the bark of a dying cypress.\u00a0 For his trouble, the bird artist got his hands pecked bloody, and the ornery ivory-bill died three days later. Despite his wounds, the ornithologist mourned its death, though it was true the bird artist\u2019s job was made that much easier by still life.<\/p>\n After the incident, campephilus principalis<\/em> was considered extinct, despite rumored spottings. \u00a0Then in 1935 a group of Cornell scientists kayaking through the swamps of Arkansas recorded its Kent-Kent, BAM-bam, double-rap pounding bill on hardwood and then a shaky, twelve-second black and white footage of the bird\u2019s arrow-like flight. It was like Lazarus, one or two scientists said\u2014another noted that it was, more accurately, like the phoenix.\u00a0 It was a loud flyer, they agreed, and then in unison, their voices echoing off the hollowed trunks of the tupelos, they exclaimed, \u201cLord God, what a bird!\u201d<\/p>\n Twenty-feet long, scarlet-crested, white-tail feathered, their bird had been a male.\u00a0 Surely, this was one of the last.\u00a0 The ivory-bill was lost to North America after World Was II, and as the century whittled away, 24 million acres of contiguous bayou bottomland became 4.4 sad scattered acres.\u00a0 Love of timber and agriculture = extinct bird. \u00a0Until February 2004, when another young scientist paddled off\u00a0down the coffee-colored White River.\u00a0 Not three feet from the bow of his canoe (he first heard flapping), the scientist saw a 20-foot long UFO, scarlet crested and white tail feathered.\u00a0 The ubiquitous pileated woodpecker, he assumed, since the ivory-bill was extinct.\u00a0 But when the bird perched on a hickory limb, it displayed the tell-tale white saddle of plumage\u2014therefore, not the pileated.\u00a0 Kent-Kent, BAM-bam.\u00a0 He could come to only one conclusion.\u00a0 The scientist lay back in his canoe to retrieve his camera, glancing up for a moment at the canopy of trees, the Spanish moss hanging down from the cypresses like the very beard of\u2014<\/p>\n Lord God, what a bird!<\/p>\n \u201cThey mate for life, these woodpeckers,\u201d Amir said from the overstuffed armchair he\u2019d positioned near the fire in the family room.<\/p>\n As she expected, no hint of accusation, neither in his voice nor on his face.\u00a0 Amir closed his magazine.<\/p>\n \u201cThey share the duties of raising young and need six square miles of flying space per pair.\u201d\u00a0 An engineer, a male, Amir liked facts and measurements, but what had always been surprising to her, what perhaps kept her interested enough not to have called it quits before now, was that he also liked stories.\u00a0 By this time, she knew he often intertwined fact and fiction. Like the time they lived in Paris, when Amir told her about the man from Afghanistan who had died from a painful toe (she\u2019d had one at the time).\u00a0 Was there a man?\u00a0 Was he from Afghanistan?\u00a0 Could a human being die of a pain in the toe?\u00a0 What was true, what false?\u00a0 Their relationship at the start had been partially defined by his limited English and French and her ignorance of Persian.\u00a0 She never learned Persian, though he got quite good at English and French.\u00a0 Still, when they talked even now, there lingered for her a linguistic doubt, as if she were talking to a Cockney or a Basque, and she grew to distrust words as a means of communication.\u00a0 And he seldom told her stories anymore.<\/p>\n \u201cI read an article a few months ago by an Indian writer,\u201d Alison told him, \u201cwho argued we should let the Bengali tiger expire.\u00a0\u00a0 Instead of trying to save it, we should help it die\u2014a kind of euthanasia.\u00a0 No longer king of the forest since there isn\u2019t enough left to warrant a kingdom, the tiger actually longs for extinction, he said.\u00a0\u00a0Its life is meaningless.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDo you believe this?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u00a0 He has a point.\u00a0 Maybe we should just let nature take its course.\u00a0 We\u2019re a part of nature, and if we\u2019ve overpopulated, it\u2019s natural.\u00a0 I, too, would like six miles of flying space.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, and we\u2019re aware of the dangers.\u00a0 Our awareness, our higher consciousness is another aspect of nature.\u00a0 So the naturalists are replanting the swamplands and undamming the rivers in the Arkansas refuge.\u00a0 It\u2019s a tag war between the developers\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA tug-of-war.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, tug, thank you, between the developers and the naturalists.\u00a0 Who will win?\u00a0 Lord God Bird, flying six miles with its mate, or pretty birdhouses in the suburbs?\u201d<\/p>\n Amir opened his magazine, obviously not expecting she had the answer. \u00a0Alison felt herself relegated to some dusty corner of his mind, while the ivory-billed woodpecker darted around in the full glory of his imagination.<\/p>\n At least I, we, have not overpopulated the earth and endangered the habitat of the woodpecker, she reflected.\u00a0 She had never gotten pregnant, and they had let nature take its course, not intervening.\u00a0 It was almost too late now.\u00a0 No, it was too late.\u00a0 For the past four months she\u2019d been having night sweats and an occasional hot flash around mid-morning.\u00a0 Sometimes she awoke in such a fever, she felt it would be a blessing to never again touch or be touched by another human body.<\/p>\n _______________<\/span> It was late April, still damp in the Northeast.\u00a0 Alison was grading end-of-the semester French tests, her spring task for the past fourteen years.\u00a0 Amir looked pale by the firelight in his armchair.\u00a0 He was pale, an Iranian from the North, Aryan blood coursing through his veins\u2014the late Shah renamed Persia Iran <\/em>to reflect the bloodline, a fact that had always disturbed her.\u00a0 His hair was graying now so that one might not even mistake him for an Italian, as some of his coworkers and neighbors had when he had first arrived in Northern Delaware.<\/p>\n Amir, one vowel sound off from Amour<\/em>, which is what she went looking for in Paris in 1987.\u00a0 They met quite by accident in the Jardin des Tuileries, where Alison was nursing her feet after a whirlwind tour of the masterpieces in the Louvre. Even though she was to be in France for a year, a year that turned into four while she wrote and refined her French as a post-doc, at twenty-seven-years-old she already felt the pressure of academic time prodding her feet through museums and nagging at her gonads.<\/p>\n Amir was waiting for a friend.\u00a0 He sat on Alison\u2019s bench, but not too close.<\/p>\n \u201cExcuse me.\u00a0 Do you know where rue de Bac is located?\u201d\u00a0 He stubbed his cigarette out on the ground and blew a plume from the corner of his mouth. \u00a0She admired his jaw.<\/p>\n She didn\u2019t know, but later he confessed she had caught his eye, and, as an unwilling immigrant, asking directions seemed the most logical opening.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re American,\u201d he laughed, as if this fact were a shared joke.\u00a0 \u201cI can tell by your accent.\u00a0 I forget my English because I\u2019m trying to learn French,\u201d he said in pretty good English. At that time, Alison did not grasp the bipolar response America evokes in so many others; Amir taught her that lesson long before it would be forced on so many other Americans. His friend (was there ever a friend?) never showed, so she let herself be led to a caf\u00e9 where he bought her hot chocolate.\u00a0 It was Paris. \u00a0One took risks here.<\/p>\n That evening he invited her to dinner at his apartment, which he shared with his cousin Achilles, a thirteen-year-old boy here in France to avoid being drafted into Iraq\u2019s war with Iran.\u00a0 Amir served her standing up\u2014chicken with pomegranates, rice with apricots, yogurt with cucumbers.\u00a0 He scraped the bottom of the rice pot and laid its crusty contents on her plate.\u00a0 \u201cTadjik,\u201d he smiled. \u201cA Persian delicacy every child in Iran begs for.\u201d\u00a0 She learned to love it too, crave it even.<\/p>\n Paradise is a Persian word.\u00a0 Paris is a magical city, tinged with danger.\u00a0 The years she lived there, a department store and a bookstore next to her apartment were bombed; hostages were taken, released years later. \u00a0She had an Iranian refugee as a boyfriend; back in Delaware, her mother had intensified her Christian fundamentalism.<\/p>\n _______________<\/span> \u201cWould you like anything from the kitchen?\u201d\u00a0 Amir had closed his book and was standing up slowly.<\/p>\n \u201cNo. Thanks.\u201d<\/p>\n He limped around the corner toward the baked organic veggie chips he snacked on most nights instead of potato chips.\u00a0 He would complain to Alison that he could not understand why his middle was still paunchy.\u00a0 She had met him when he was twenty-nine and lean and had no interest in American snack food.<\/p>\n The back door squeaked open. When he returned, his clothes would smell of cigarettes, though it was not the odor of tobacco smoke that offended her.\u00a0 The pains in his legs he blamed on the cigarette burns he had endured in one of Khomeini\u2019s prisons, but Alison knew what he would not admit\u2014the intermittent caudation was caused by the cigarettes. It was a disease that his doctor said would kill him and not kindly, but Amir refused to give them up.\u00a0 She used to smoke, too\u2014heavily.\u00a0 She used to imagine what it would be like to be denied her beloved Gitanes in prison while some sadist or spineless obedient burned her thighs and calves with the tip of his cigarette. It was perfectly understandable, Amir\u2019s refusal to quit.\u00a0 She didn\u2019t nag.<\/p>\n Amir lowered himself into the armchair and grimaced.<\/p>\n The students\u2019 performance on the tests was average at best.\u00a0 Not one student surprised her, and Alison longed for a surprise.\u00a0 She\u2019d stayed home this past spring break preparing creative lesson plans and having her kitchen redecorated with granite countertops, an Italian tile backsplash, and marble flooring. Last week she\u2019d had her and Amir\u2019s bedroom repainted with a faux finish and spent vacation money on a whirlpool bathtub, all to distract herself.\u00a0 To a degree it had worked, but now the summer loomed large in its emptiness.\u00a0 New window treatments and perhaps even new windows could take up some time, but she knew that would soon bore her.\u00a0 She had tenure at the university and her recent book on the French surrealists, a book few would read, had been well received by those few.\u00a0 No need to write another for a while.<\/p>\n Her lover, who\u2019d critiqued the book, even writing a paragraph here and there, was gone.\u00a0 For five spring breaks in a row except this past one, they had led a gaggle of French and philosophy majors to Paris, where they let them explore museums and sights on their own, meeting them only occasionally for a short lecture. The lavish redecorating was a poor substitute for the extravagant things she and Paul did with their bodies in the Hotel Pas de Calais. \u00a0In the morning, hot chocolate, two croissants, one butter, one chocolate, a bath, a leisurely walk to lesser sights.\u00a0 The long evenings in fine restaurants, or visiting her Parisian friends who in their liberality did not question or judge her for her obvious affair.\u00a0 Paris was not new to Paul either.\u00a0 Over a decade ago, he and his wife had honeymooned here.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy did you ever leave Paris,\u201d Paul asked one beautiful morning in a caf\u00e9 on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, his hand on her thigh.<\/p>\n \u201cI flubbed the interview at the American University.\u00a0 Amir and I make more money in the U.S. than we would have ever made here. The life of an expatriate and an exile was too hard, take your pick. \u00a0We sold out.\u00a0 I convinced him to leave. The last week I was in Paris, I wandered the streets, knowing I was leaving the most beautiful city on earth. \u00a0For\u00a0 security.\u201d\u00a0 Alison had never said it before, and for a time, she felt the weight of her confession dull Paul\u2019s touch.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pleasures of mammon and tenure.\u201d\u00a0 Paul had recently gotten tenured. He wore the long hair of boys in the sixties. \u00a0\u201cWas it worth it?\u201d \u00a0In the land of the double entendre, he might have been asking if she were worth it. \u00a0His students loved him, but she knew he wasn\u2019t the type to risk sleeping with any of them.\u00a0 In his own way, he was as careful as Amir.<\/p>\n Only one week out of the year, she and Paul had agreed.\u00a0 Spring break.\u00a0 The anticipatory sexiness of February, the lack of real guilt and commitment, served as intense aphrodisiacs.\u00a0 She knew with their two egos, their sense of competition and old wounds (like her father, he seldom complimented her), they would never have survived as a couple the other fifty-one weeks of the year.<\/p>\n That last March, they had drifted toward Chinatown, the 13th\u00a0arrondissement, where she once had lived with Amir. \u00a0They passed a street corner where Amir had once taken her elbow and steered her away from a sidewalk demonstration put together by a group of Iranian students protesting Khomeini\u2019s executions of his fellow citizens.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy don\u2019t you sign?\u201d she\u2019d asked Amir then, referring to the petition an unveiled Iranian woman had pressed on him.\u00a0 At that time in her life, Alison had a great fondness for petitions, having signed dozens at her former university.\u00a0 She had seldom followed up on them.<\/p>\n \u201cSpies,\u201d he said and pulled her aside.\u00a0 \u201cThey take pictures of these gatherings and send them to Teheran.\u00a0 When I go back\u2014\u201d\u00a0 He trailed off.<\/p>\n She stopped in the middle of the\u00a0street.\u00a0 \u201cYou will never go back.\u00a0 You\u2019ll finish your doctorate here and then work in the United States, which will pay you quite handsomely for your trouble.\u00a0 You will marry me here and become an American citizen.\u201d\u00a0 This was three and a half years into their relationship\u2014a thousand miscommunications, self-assertions, and self-renunciations. She could not bear to lose him, and she could not lose herself to whatever horrors might await her in Iran.\u00a0 Oh, wouldn\u2019t it be nice, too, necessary even, to own a home, have a backyard with a swimming pool for the children?\u00a0 She would be willing to sacrifice her cultural, artistic, and global life for the American children they would have.\u00a0 A place where no one was tortured, at least its law-abiding citizens, where the government, if problematic and embarrassing, was at least stable.<\/p>\n They never determined whether their lack of children was her fault or his.\u00a0 They traveled to the Caribbean or to Hawaii at Christmas Break, New York or Canada in summer, never to Paris.<\/p>\n Several years ago, one of Alison\u2019s colleagues and her husband came to visit Alison and Amir.\u00a0 The colleague, Gretel, taught history, was outspoken, curious, and a little drunk.\u00a0 At the dinner table, she announced, \u201cI read an article\u2014maybe it was story, I don\u2019t know\u2014about an Iranian man who expected his American wife not only to serve him first, but to peel his apples.\u201d\u00a0 She looked at Amir.\u00a0 \u201cBut I see you actually do more in the kitchen than my partner.\u201d \u00a0She nudged her husband, who smiled helplessly. \u00a0\u201cUnless this is all a show.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo show, except my cooking.\u201d Amir laughed and set down on the table, to everyone\u2019s delight, his specialty: Koofteh Tabrizi, meatballs from Tabriz, which Alison had not helped him prepare.<\/p>\n \u201cAlison would only peel for me an apple if she could shoot it off my head first!\u201d Amir said.<\/p>\n Everyone laughed. \u00a0But Alison felt sad that she and life had taught Amir never to expect peeled fruit.\u00a0 He had seemed so strong in those early days, so unique, and though in reality she fought for her power, she sometimes fantasized about his domination of her. The fantasies, the brutality of force made her come, but she never had those fantasies anymore.\u00a0 To have them now would be like dreaming a cat could fly.\u00a0 Surreal.\u00a0 Probably she, like Amir, had been damaged, he by cigarettes and she by something less obvious.\u00a0 Everybody, every living thing, it seemed to her, was losing its particularness. \u00a0English spoken everywhere, blue jeans and cell phones. She foresaw a planet with no living beings but human ones.<\/p>\n Now, Amir, a communist in his youth, had pains in his legs. \u00a0Paul\u2019s wife, Emily, a psychology professor, did not get tenure, and he said he owed it to her to try out the academic climate in California.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe USC will have a similar international program,\u201d Paul whispered to Alison at his farewell party before Christmas Break.<\/p>\n Alison considered the situation.\u00a0 Before Paul left she knew even if they could manage the exigencies of time, that minus the furtive glances in committee, the unexpected passings on stairwells, the elbows brushing at the potluck tables of faculty parties\u2014the prick (yes, she called it that) of anticipation\u2014would subside.\u00a0 To meet him in Paris without this necessary foreplay would seem cheap.\u00a0 Still, he was a friend, and when in the waves of a brutal hot flash she had written on the card for all the campus to see, \u201cYou will be sorely missed,\u201d she was not lying.<\/p>\n At Alison\u2019s urging, she and Amir began to attend the local Unitarian church.\u00a0 Reluctant at first, once there he said he liked the argumentation, and behind it the sense of camaraderie.\u00a0 She did not feel it.\u00a0 Metaphorically, the church reminded her of an old rag rug or a poorly stitched quilt, the materials and colors not harmonized.\u00a0 To use Amir\u2019s recent ornithological discourse, this church was a common pileated woodpecker. This idea of purity was so corrupt, had spawned countless horrors, she knew, but here it was.\u00a0 She wanted one way\u2014not her mother\u2019s, but a golden path that said, \u201cTake me, I am the best.\u201d \u00a0Her mother had believed in \u201conly one way,\u201d as she pointed heavenward and frequently said \u201cThe Lord Jesus Christ\u201d in unison so often that as a child Alison thought this was one word, one she could never pronounce. \u00a0Of course her mother had disapproved of her marriage to Amir, who descended from the wrong group.\u00a0 The wrong group of radicals, Alison added to her mother\u2019s consternation.<\/p>\n Her father, a skeptic Alison thanked God for, also disapproved of Amir at first for reasons that were more supportable: marriage was hard enough.\u00a0 Complicate it with matters of culture, and\u2014<\/p>\n But now that Amir had transformed himself into such an American that even the Patriot Act had hardly fazed him, her parents in their dotage seemed more trusting of him than her. \u00a0This was a bad feeling at any age.<\/p>\n Since Alison had spent all of her vacation money trying to create a form of domestic bliss, running her hand across cool granite instead of the hot planes of Paul\u2019s back, she was surprised when Amir said at the close of the semester that he would like to go to Arkansas to find the ivory-billed woodpecker, the Lord God Bird.\u00a0 His phoenix. \u00a0That bird, too, was extinct.<\/p>\n \u201cArkansas?\u201d Alison said. \u00a0\u201cNot even real Americans want to vacation in Arkansas.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s where they\u2019ve been spotted, at the White River National Refuge.\u00a0 We can rent a Winniebug and\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA Winnebago.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes, and buy a canoe to catch sight of the bird.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI spent all the vacation money on the house.\u201d\u00a0 Amir\u2019s was an absurd idea.\u00a0 He liked New York and the Caribbean.\u00a0 Had he ever even camped outdoors?\u00a0 Why didn\u2019t she know this about him?<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll pay, don\u2019t worry.\u201d<\/p>\n It was not like Amir not to worry about money.\u00a0 She wondered whether he was undergoing, rather belatedly, a mid-life crisis, or having an affair.\u00a0 But on his face, she saw the old Amir, scarred but alive, the forbidden, exotic fruit.<\/p>\n _______________<\/span> Sun-dappled, like everything around them, Alison gazed up into the canopy of cypress and oak. \u00a0She did not believe the ivory billed-woodpecker would visit her or Amir in their canoe on the White River.\u00a0 The surreal was a state of mind, more attuned to 20th<\/sup> century Paris, not a reality of 2007 Arkansas.\u00a0 It was probably extinct, she told herself, and how would she even recognize it?<\/p>\n She let Amir do most of the paddling\u2014not that it was difficult on the slow, syrupy currents. \u00a0The air was vaporous.\u00a0 Every now and then, she scooped up a handful of water and let it roll down her chest or back.<\/p>\n \u201cTree frogs.\u201d Amir nodded toward the chirruping ringlets of Spanish moss.<\/p>\n She lay back on her elbows, studied Amir upside-down, the underside of his chin, a new place for her.\u00a0 Unshaven for two days\u2014so unlike him\u2014two black hairs for every white.\u00a0 His eyes darted from tree to tree, chirp to chirp.<\/p>\n \u201cYellow warblers,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cAnd jays.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnd to think, you didn\u2019t know the word for robin when you first came here.\u201d She smiled up at him.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve taught me a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n She sat up and faced him, careful not to upset the balance of the canoe, and forced him to look at her instead of the birds.<\/p>\n \u201cHave I?\u00a0 What besides a few words?\u201d\u00a0 She wondered if he felt her to be a manifestation of the disappointments of his life.<\/p>\n He shrugged. \u201cHow to be an American?\u201d\u00a0 For a moment he looked as though he might add a word or two.<\/p>\n \u201cIs that why we married?\u201d\u00a0 Years ago, the question had seemed too dangerous to pose.\u00a0 She was his rescuer, she had sometimes thought.\u00a0 It made her feel worthy at first, and then used.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s more complicated than that.\u00a0 Life\u2019s choices are finally a mystery, after all.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDo you ever wish you would have gone back to Iran to live?\u201d\u00a0 He had only returned once, for his mother\u2019s funeral eight years ago.\u00a0 She had not gone with him.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we weren\u2019t together, you mean?\u201d<\/p>\n She looked up into the trees and said nothing.\u00a0 Had he known about her affair?<\/p>\n \u201cThe Persian sky,\u201d he said, \u201cis a most unusual blue.\u00a0 It is the color in the minarets and the Caspian Sea on certain days.\u00a0 Have I ever told you the story of my great uncle and his falcon?\u201d<\/p>\n He told her the story of how Mohammed, a great falconer, received a visit from the shah one day.\u00a0 Showing off his sport before royalty, he grew flustered and forgot to wear his glove.\u00a0 While the bird was perched painfully on his outstretched hand, a member of the shah\u2019s entourage let off a round of ammunition into the Persian sky.\u00a0 Frightened, the falcon dug more deeply into Mohammed\u2019s arm.\u00a0 When it finally hit marrow, Mohammed had shot it.\u00a0 Still, he\u2019d lost his arm.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd is this a true story?\u201d she asked, and he just smiled and returned to looking for the ivory-bill. \u00a0More of the same. This is perhaps a trait of the times, she thought, this worship of reality, this search for the actual, the what-really-happened.\u00a0 Maybe all of it, even love, at least that kind they\u2019d once had, was like this search for the chimerical bird, and she was not sure, as she studied the planes and angles of her mind, that she wanted any more of it.<\/p>\n It was spring, their fourteenth as a married couple, when Amir decided to tell Alison about birds. Two hundred years ago, the famous bird artist and ornithologist Alexander William\u2014or was it Wilson?\u2014Amir wasn\u2019t sure, and what did it matter?\u00a0 In any case, the bird artist, probably exhausted and sweaty from a day of hunting birds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[20],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-mI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1408"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10490,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions\/10490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\n_______________<\/span><\/p>\nPamela Main <\/a><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"