Christmas Eve, 1957

The yellow light of the kitchen is steady and calm. The window holds back the black night, the wreath in the middle of the window, its white light illuminating the red cellophane, something new. I imagine someone outside in the night seeing the wreath in the window feeling less scared. Mom is not singing or speaking. She is moving behind me, putting things away. The floor squeaks. Dad’s at work. The quiet is a comfort. I move my hand, toward the light of the wreath but it is hot. Bedtime Mom says, tomorrow is Christmas.

Sad Christmas, 1989

He sat in the big chair in the living room on Christmas Day waiting for someone to ask what was on his mind. I offered him more mezza or something to drink. No, thank you he said. I sat down in a folding chair and waited.

“There is no such thing as Armenians,” he said.

“The house is full of them today.”

“And where were you born?”

“Well, but…”

“There is no country called Armenia. We are all something else.”

“Armenia…”

“Even if we have a tremendous scientist from Armenia who saves the world, he is from the Soviet Union.”

“But…”

“Therefore, we don’t exist.”

The Parade

Dad wore sweaters under his sweaters. When he was a kid he marched in the parade commemorating the end of World War I and didn’t wear a sweater, he said. In Worcester, Mass, it was bitter cold and he followed the parade for miles. He got a chill and a fever and almost died. His mother stayed up with him praying for three days and three nights, putting cold rags on his face. Finally the fever broke. He never told me about the influenza epidemic that killed a thousand in Worcester and the millions throughout the country that winter.

Armenia, Armenia

Flight

You just have to give yourself over to the idea of 16 hours in a plane. I didn’t even try to sell myself on the idea that the destination was worth the ride. Human beings just aren’t designed for that kind of travel. I surrendered myself to the airport and standing in lines and sitting in small spaces and going to the bathroom in even smaller spaces. I knew I had to not think about it, and I also knew that I couldn’t not think about it, not for the full 16 hours.

My plan was to lop off 7 hours by knocking myself out. I figured I would wait until we were four hours into our journey; that would leave five on the other side of my Ambien induced nap.

I ate the meal that was alleged to be spicy. It was ok. I read a little of the New Yorkers I brought. That strategy worked well the last time we went to Chicago, but not as well for this trip. I listened to some music on my ancient iPod– some Santana and then some Dylan. But I was restless. So I took the pill a little ahead of schedule, and as it turned out I only slept four hours, and most of the time I wasn’t even sure I was asleep. But I did dream, so I must have been asleep at some point.

I dreamed I was standing on Alameda Street, not far from NBC Studios, in my hometown. Everything was brighter and clearer, the way we are inclined to picture our past. The sun was almost white, and the sky was closer and more open. I started walking home, right up Catalina Street. “I’m back,” I thought to myself. I was way, way in the past, maybe 50 years back. There was Mom and Dad in the kitchen. My sister was ensconced in her room, and my brother was out somewhere.

“Tell us about it,” Dad said.

“About what?”

“Maybe he hasn’t gone yet,” Mom said.

“Where?”

“You didn’t go? Aren’t you going?” Dad said, with that edge in his voice that was often there.

I thought I had arrived, but I needed to go.

Then Grace was nudging me. Then the hum of the engines and shaking of the plane, as if it were trying to wake me.

“What is it?”

“Turbulence, you have to put your belt on,” Grace said gently.

“Where…”

“There, right there. Well, you’re probably sitting on it.”

“No, I….”

“Your seat belt, please sir,” the flight attendant said.

She seemed to be very tall; she was going to stand over me, smiling until she heard the click of my seat belt. “Yes, of course. Ah, here it is.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

Between the throwback uniform and the way she was all dolled up with lots of makeup perfectly applied and one little curl in front of her ear, I was left with a kind of wave of nostalgia, as if it were 1964 somehow. I was able to forget I was crammed in a plane 10 across and 40 rows deep, with recycled air and processed food, in a gigantic tin coffin flying over the Arctic Ocean at 400 miles per hour. The presence of the flight attendant gave me some peace of mind, but only for a moment.

Now I was awake and had over 8 hours to go. I looked through the movie choices and I was a little surprised to see “American Sniper” offered on a UAE airline, and I was shocked to see a 13 year old boy watching, especially since he was seated next to his mother who was wearing a niqab, the full robe and head dress that left nothing but her eyes exposed. The boy appeared to be fully engaged in the movie.

I picked “Die Hard” because I had seen parts of it so many times on a lazy Saturday afternoon, that I knew I would be able to watch it without concentrating much at all. I was able to try to guess the stories of the other passengers, check what they were watching, check the snail-like progress of the plane on the big screen in front of the business class section, while we bumped along, feeling hypnotized by the monotonous, low frequency rumble of the turbines, which made me think about a Doors songs with the lyrics “listen to the engines hum/people out to have some fun,” and all the while watching “Die Hard.”

Grace was asleep. She didn’t take Ambien; she took Benadryl and she slept better than I did. Her snores were different than the usual ones though. These were sounding like little question marks full of contentment. I was happy for her. We were going to have a great time in Armenia, but we just had to get through this part.

I looked for more movies and sampled a few but there was nothing that held my interest. I finally selected “Bob’s Burgers,” the animated TV comedy series. I had seen an episode or two and found it to be devoid of humor or anything remotely interesting, but I thought I would still give it another try. Maybe it was one of those things where you had to watch more than a couple of episodes. As it turned out I watched one of the episodes I had already seen, and it was just as boring as it was the time before. I must have nodded off for a while because the next thing I heard was that we were about to land in Abu Dhabi. And for that nap I would like to thank the creators of “Bob’s Burgers.”

As for the trip from Abu Dhabi to Yerevan, Armenia, I don’t remember it. It took three hours and my mind was numb. The airport in Abu Dhabi had very bright, white lighting everywhere and also huge, high end, designer clothing stores. I didn’t know if it was day or night, or what day it was or whether what I was seeing was real or not. I just kept walking when someone said, “This way,” and sat down when it was ok to sit down. The buckets where we dumped our shoes, belts and all the other stuff were white instead of grey, which I imagined was the color of the boxes I’d used in the U.S. airports. I thought about it for quite some time in the sitting in the airport in Abu Dhabi, waiting to fly to Armenia. The only other thing I remember is the Muslim men getting their own line to stand in. All their lines were shorter. I was wondering if it was because they couldn’t stand in the same line with the women, or maybe the women and the non-Muslims. I think someone in our group said something to that effect. But then if they were traveling with their wives, they had to wait for them anyway. I didn’t think of that at the time; mostly I was thinking about not knowing what time of day it was and why one country used white boxes and the other used grey. I could be wrong about that though, I could be wrong about it all because it was an unknown hour and day. We had spent 24 hours—including the very pleasant getting to know you ride from Fresno to LA we got with Larry and his wife Diane— trying to get to Armenia, and we were in that state of mind where everything’s ridiculous and raw, and we weren’t even in Armenia yet.

There is one moment I actually like when traveling by plane. Some people don’t like it, in fact they dread the moment when the wheels of the plane hit the ground. It’s a miracle: damn 800,000 lb plane was in the air cruising at 400 mph and next thing you know—bang!—it’s on the ground and we’re all ok. It’s a great feeling. And it was even greater when we touched down in Armenia.

“Here we are,” I said to Grace. “Armenia,” she answered.

There is nothing in any airport that can tell you anything about the city or locale where you landed. I could technically claim that Grace and I have been to Dallas, Texas, but we were only in the airport so it’s not true. Every airport is at least 10 miles from the actual city that claims it and sometimes it is not even in the city. But we did feel something in the airport in Armenia. The first was that it was a modern complex; we really had no idea what to expect but we were favorably impressed. But more important was the feeling that this was Armenian. There were flags everywhere—proof that we existed, that we had our own country. Seeing the flag and the signage in Armenian and Armenian people speaking Armenian in that familiar rollercoaster rhythm. We have a place.

“Look, the flags.”

“Yeah,” Grace said.

My eyes started to tear up. For most of my life Armenia was invisible, something we all carried in our hearts and minds. Now we were there and it had an airport and the flag on display everywhere in the airport. It was no other flag, no other place in the entire world; it was Armenia and only Armenia. Something invisible became tangible, visible, real. We saw in the airport that also bowled us over. “1915: 2 million dead — 2015: 10 million live.” We in diaspora were included in that number; I suddenly felt connected in ways I never felt before. Sleep In the first week we slept three and a half hours one night and rejoiced because the night before we had slept two hours. Armenia is a wonderful place, a wonderful experience, filled with people we feel we already know, not just by their looks—although every matronly woman looks like a great aunt or someone’s grandma—but by their character, their soul. Armenia had been a place we in diaspora invented, and the country was only ourselves, what we did, the things our grandparents told us, and how we treated each other, how we stood together and looked out at the rest of the world. But now Grace and I are actually in this place and there are street signs with y-a-n and license plates with the Armenian flag.

We have a place, I can’t get over it, and it’s real and we’re in it, we’re part of it and it’s part of us, even awake at 3am, having taken a series of 20 minute naps and finally giving up, the morning completes the picture, the morning is the missing jigsaw puzzle piece buried under the couch cushion along with crumbs and loose change. We lived all our lives without the missing piece, wondering about it unconsciously, and now the piece is in our hand and we put it in the open space and pat it down with satisfaction.

We are in that place and there’s art in it and art museums and escalators, and people bring their families and stand on the escalator with their darling little children who hold their balloons that they’re parents bought them and it’s like they’re part of a poem and it’s wonderful.

Of course we were awake at three o’clock in the morning. Why wouldn’t we? We opened the window and Yerevan was alive. Grace played tavloo (backgammon) on her iPad, and I listened to music. Music sounds better in Armenia. I listened to “Summer Days” by Bob Dylan. I listened to it three or four times. I heard three guitars playing that I had never heard before. It was like a perfect song—instrumentation, lyrics, phrasing, everything—and I fell asleep for a little while and daylight was creeping in; the street light that illuminated our room was out. Maybe I was and was not awake when I had a conversation with Armenia.

“Motherland, are you still there?”

“Yes, dghas. I’m still here.”

“Are you real?”

“Of course.”

“Always?”

“Yes, always.”

“Oh Armenia, Armenia. I feel like I found something I didn’t know I was looking for.”

I knew it was true because as great it was listening to “Summer Days” in the Best Western in Yerevan in the middle of the night, it was not as great as walking around the square at 10:30 that night, the men, standing with their chests out and their chins up, holding their cigarettes perpendicular to the night sky, like an exclamation point to their bravado, seem to be saying, “You’re just the world, that’s all.” And the women dressed for a fashion shoot while carrying the weight of everything that needs to be considered all in a one second glance. The whole place alive, energized, packed with people moving, talking, eating, drinking, laughing, shouting, having a Saturday night out with friends and family, and that is to say everyone there, all of us, thousands of us, alive and free, fellow countrymen and countrywomen in our country, and all the while music pouring out of a PA system, and “Somewhere My Love,” playing for all of Yerevan rolling down streets, alleys, intersections, bouncing off buildings and statues, rustling branches on trees, while the fountains keep time and the golden light from the street lamps bless us all. Yeah, that was better than “Summer Days,” or any Dylan song at any moment. Oh, and we had ice cream, too.

 

Fruit

“There is more fruit on the trees than there are leaves,” Grace said one morning.

Apricot trees were everywhere and they were full as they could be. I could imagine hearing Dad say—with awe-inspired joy—“The branches are gonna break!” and I could imagine my father-in-law saying, “I don’t believe! Umpossible!” There seems to be just as many fruit trees in Armenia as there are shade trees. Very Armenian: If you’re going to have trees, they should give fruit. Everywhere—in the city and out in the country, public and private property, highlands and lowlands—you would find fruit trees. Roadside stands were likewise everywhere, sometimes just a person sitting on a stool with a huge bag or bucket of apricots, sometimes they sat without a stool, and the selling was competitive; they sat side by side by side, sometimes, shouting that their apricots were better than anyone’s apricots. And apricots were offered in many different forms . Apricot leather, chocolate covered apricots, dried apricots, apricot jam, apricot vodka, but mostly fresh, delicious apricots. Their color was yellow on the outside and a very faint orange on the inside and appeared not ripe yet. Most of them had blemishes and looked like they would have considered culls in the United States. But they were ripe and very sweet and tasted was unlike any apricot I’ve ever eaten. I understood why Dad considered apricots “God’s candy.”

This fertile and rocky land we visited is the origin for the apricot tree, so far back in time in it was before the Armenians were called Armenians.

The wood from the apricot tree is said to be the wood used for our earliest musical instruments, including the oud, the Armenian equivalent of a We stood at one of many roadside fruit stands; the vendors thought we were funny and silly to take pictures of their product and location, but one elderly woman said in Armenian, “Take my picture!” and I took her picture standing proudly closely next to Grace. There was an instant kinship that you could see in the picture. The woman was delighted, proud and looked completely at ease and at peace standing next to someone from the other side of the world whom she had just met 8 seconds earlier. She laughed, we laughed, all the vendors were laughing. We took more pictures. They laughed more, knowing maybe no picture could capture the smell of fruit, dirt, age, history, the struggling breeze, the intense sun or the wonder and humor of the moment.

Our hotel room became filled with fresh fruit, including, “tute,” mulberries, and there was always at least one relative in every Armenian-American family that had a mulberry tree. For the Chavoors it was Dad’s cousin, Maljan.

“Here,” Dad said to me when I was maybe in 1st grade, “open your hand.”

“What is it?”

“Just open your hand! It’s good!”

It was good, too. While there is no particular flavor to mulberries, it is nevertheless, like a straight shot of pure sugar. After that I when we visited I would always hope we somehow ended up in the backyard nabbing some mulberries and gobbling them down. Even if we went to visit them in the middle of winter, I was hoping to go outside, thinking maybe there would be a mulberry left on the tree that no one saw. And now 55 years later I was at the source, because maybe Mal’s father had a tree in the old country and then Mal grew one in his own home, but who can say how far back that tradition went? No matter how far it went, it was somewhere in Central Asia. There was a lot of that during our visit; things came from somewhere, and now we were there.

Our hotel room bore the fragrance of all the fresh fruit we purchased. We had more than we could ever eat—apricots, mulberries, cherries—all laid out across the dresser, the night stands, and jammed in the tiny fridge. We couldn’t not buy the fruit. We ate it every time we saw it. We brought it on the van and shared it with our wonderful group. When we moved on to the next hotel, we left the fruit there for the maid. The fruit that was picked just a short time before we bought it was as important as the ancient, sacred artifacts we saw all over the country. I felt as though everyone who ate the fresh fruit was blessed in some way. It was a cultural sacrament.

Dream

There were warnings on the Ambien instructions: may cause disturbing dreams. But I needed to sleep, so while I was a little scared of having disturbing dreams, I took the medicine as prescribed. It was something beyond sleeping. Effective, but it felt like my very existence was put on pause, and then I woke up. That was more disturbing than any dream I had and in fact the only dream I had was not disturbing in the least. A little odd maybe, and everything was brighter and clearer than my usual dreams.

I had entered an essay contest at Roosevelt High School. I knew I had written something good, that the students there would cry when they heard it, and that I would cry while I was reading it to them. I was in the stately but comforting and familiar auditorium and the narrator of the dream asked me a question.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“Because I’m retired and don’t have my own room anymore.”

“Yes, and will you read the essay to all the students?”

“Yes, I will.”

“Only if you win the contest.”

“That’s fine. I don’t have a problem with that.”

“You do have a problem, though?”

“Well, I’m in Armenia. Shouldn’t I be dreaming about that?”

“Win the contest.”

“The essay is good.”

I could see everything in detail in the auditorium. I stood on the stage and looked at the different spots I used to bring my classes to sit. The very front and center, or the balcony, or the middle on the right hand side, and at the end at the back near the exit for prompt departure.

I was sure I would win the contest. Not because everyone would cry upon hearing it, but for the merit of it, the heart and quality and truth in it. Afterwards, I would tell the students that the story was their story, because they lived it and the award belonged to them and that it would go in the display case not with my name on it but with “c/o” and whatever year it was. I wasn’t sure where I was, whether I was in the present, the past or the future. But it would have their year on it.

I didn’t win. I came in 2nd to a very young teacher. But there was no 2nd place; you either won or you were out. I started to cry for the wrong reason. I saw a student who was upset not so much at the outcome but  disappointed at how I responded. He moved away from me, shaking his head. I tried to catch up with him and tell him he was right, that I had responded poorly and that the other teacher deserved to win and that anyway my story had merit on its own without a contest or award, and story writing was what was important, the act of telling your story and speaking the truth from your heart and preserving moments of truth forever because it got written down, those were the real rewards, not having someone say your story is better than someone else’s. And that didn’t mean that the young teacher’s story didn’t deserve to win, it did. But all the stories entered had merit and all the stories not entered had merit and every story ever written or told across all time and all around the world had purpose and value.

I wanted to tell him all this and more, and I felt obliged to tell him, to tell as many as I could, but a teacher only sees his students for a short while, a very short while, then they are gone for the rest of their lives. And a teacher is in the classroom for only a short time and then you’re out, doing something, going back to Armenia, trying to sleep and dreaming about school.

 I needed to sleep so that I would not miss one step of my journey through Armenia. We walked several hours a day and it is a land of 10 million stair steps, on mountains, and Grace and I climbed at least half of them. We needed the energy and for energy you need sleep. Our surroundings inspired us but inspiration may not have been enough without proper rest.

We also were eating much more than normal. It was like eating an extra special Sunday dinner twice a day for 14 consecutive days. And there was that day where we ate lunch three times, and then had a big dinner. We needed to walk up and down stairs 4 hours a day to burn off the increased calorie intake. I was hoping to break even but I haven’t yet stood on a scale to see how that worked out.

I don’t regret taking the Ambien though. It was an unusual dream and it was bright, clear and detailed, but not disturbing.

The Boy

We went to the Genocide Museum. We had seen pictures before; every Armenian-American has seen pictures of emaciated children and stacks of skulls. We were overwhelmed anyway. Village by village, the dates, locations, losses. And the pictures, some we had seen, others we hadn’t, but life-sized images and then some.

I stared at one particular picture of a group of Armenian children who had survived and were living in an orphanage. I looked into their eyes and saw what you would expect to see—fear, pain, sorrow, confusion, grief, and brokenness.

There was a boy in that picture though, around 10 years old, who looked at me and would not look away. He knew he was looking into the future. We looked at each other for a long time. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t feel myself breathing. His clothes were threadbare; his body was malnourished. His head was disproportionally oversized and he pushed it forward and looked directly into the center of the lens, through time and space. He was outraged, and he wanted to say, “I am here. The Turks didn’t kill me. What happened won’t destroy my spirit.” I remained still and let him speak.

The catastrophe in his life had awakened his will to fight. He had nothing. He was broke, alone, his hometown was destroyed, his family was dead. All he had was his will. And when someone pointed a camera at him, he knew what message he wanted to send.

“I’m not scared, I’m not broken. I will find a way and I will share it with all the rest. I am angry but the anger will drive me, give me the power.”

That boy was how the Armenian people survived the genocide, then the earthquake, then a struggling economy. Sheer, relentless will to keep going, to keep the goal right in front. Not just to survive but to restore, well everything, and thrive. End with something better than before.  

This manchild, this orphan, this fellow Armenian was frozen in time but I stood listening to him from his eyes to mine and from my eyes to my heart. We are a people of strength, will, and determination. Anything God allows to happen, anything the devil tortures us with, any act of man or nature, we will come back stronger and more determined. I was going to say “simple as that” but it’s not simple. Well, it is and it isn’t. Also, can something good come out of something evil? You could make a case for it. We live out narratives that have been passed down from generation to generation. We are survivors. We have the will to keep going. We have passed the message to stay alert and find the path forward.

Work

The floorboard had been torn out. There were no window frames or doors. It was a house though, a bigger good-sized house than many others we had seen, with a tremendous view of open fields and mountains at a distance. Everything was wide open like a painting from the early American West. A breeze blew the weeds this way and that. The view was like living in a painting. As for the house, there would be work. 

A bathroom that would replace the outhouse, and there would be a much bigger kitchen than the one they were using. They had chickens and pigs and a vegetable garden. A long dirt road led to their house. We—the group we traveled to Armenia with—were going to help this family refurbish the house. There were seven of us, and there were five pairs of gloves, six buckets, one wheelbarrow, and no ramp at the threshold of the doorway. Our task was to fill the rooms with a foot and a half layer of dirt and then a layer of rocks on top of that so that they could pour cement floors in the rooms. It would take all three days of work that had been blocked out on the trip.

There is a kind of beauty and peace in simple, physical, repetitive tasks. There’s the rhythm of it, and the muscle pain and perspiration, and that feeling that what once seemed like it would take an interminable amount of time eventually becomes a measureable amount. Your mind turns off and the body takes over. When your body starts to complain then your mind, which has been enjoying this role reversal, becomes the drill instructor to the body, “Shut up and keep moving!” It’s a wonderful thing.

We formed a bucket brigade and divided ourselves up by the tasks required: bucket filler; bucket passer, bucket dumper. We filled three rooms with a one-foot layer of dirt and then a layer of rocks in three days, a bucket at a time. Ok, they did build a ramp on the second day so we put the wheelbarrow to use along with the buckets after that but it was still an arduous, sweaty, demanding task. And our crew was cut by three the second day when the women in our group opted to go shopping. Then on the third day, Larry, 75 years young, said he’d done as much as he could do.

I have to say, Larry is a hero to me. He is the co-Capitan of our trip and he was knowledgeable and had many stories for us that had equal portions of insight and humor. He has been coming to Armenia serving God and the Armenian people for 9 years. For two days he worked like a 30 year old. I love his devotion, his level of commitment, his approach to things. It was a privilege to work with him.

The third day there was three of us: Josh, a bright young man in his 20’s; Ara, the pastor (Badveli) of the Pilgrim Armenian Church. The mayor of the town came by though and took Badveli for a long drive; it might have been social, or business, or it might have been that the mayor felt it was ahmot (shameful) to have a badveli working like a regular person.

The result was there were two of us on that third day, along with the husband who would live in the house and his friend. We were slugging away at it, and I kept thinking we were working like donkeys, which was ok. I survived heart surgery and the doctor told me I could do anything because my body would tell me when to back off. So I was in there working away unlike anytime in the last year and a half, and it felt great. I brought two pair of blue jeans and some old t-shirts just for the work part and it awesome to see the jeans so full of dust, dirt, and perspiration.

I thought I was going at a good clip until the wife joined us. I tried to match her pace but I was twice her age. It was a humbling experience to think that I was blazing away and then someone much younger jumped in and outpaced us all and then left to bring us our snack for a break time. We had apricots, ice cream, and Armenian coffee. Then she was the pace setter again and I was starting to really feel it and was thinking about quitting, but fortunately she left again, this time to go make lunch.

Her son, an adorable four year old with a toy pickup truck was filling his truck and bringing to the window. He worked intently and with great joy. Thank God  I was able to keep pace with the lad.

Lunch was memorable. There was lavash, the homemade bread, and salad featuring vine-ripe tomatoes and cucumbers. We had cheese that was probably home made. And I’m getting all the lunches mixed up but I believe we had some kind of boiled meat, I think it was lamb. Everything was delicious.

The hospitality, the generosity, the abundance of food crowded on to the table—if you’re going to be known as a people with certain traits, well, these are pretty good ones to have. Wherever we were for a meal, it always looked and felt very similar—an overflow of food and the hosts making sure your plate and your glass were never, never empty. We had wine, we had vodka, and there was this sweet sugary fruit nectar. I drank them all.

It was the vodka though that kicked me into an alternate reality with one sip, boom! I was somewhere else and had only drunk half the shot. I had two shots and felt like Major Tom, floating in space. I tried to think of the words to that song but I couldn’t. I just had a sense of peace and after I stop floating, a kind of permanence. 

It was one of those three days that we had hosh for lunch. I thought Badveli said hash and thought we were about to be served corned beef, which I do not like and as far as I know isn’t Armenian. I was a little confused so I turned to Badveli Ara.

“Hash?”

“Hosh.”

“What is it?” I spied a large bowl with unidentifiable objects in it.

“It’s offal.”

“Uh-fell?” I said, thinking it was an Armenian word.

“It’s great. I love, love, love it,” he said, waving his hands in the air like a choir director.

I wasn’t convinced that something that sounded like the English word “awful” could be great.

“Yeah, but, I mean, what is it exactly?”

“It’s where they don’t waste any part of the animal.”

I looked at the bowl. There was a greyish tint to parts of it, while other parts had a darker, maroon like hue. There were other shades of dark involved as well, and I could see strands of onions and a generous dousing of spices.

“You mean, like…”

“Heart, lungs, kidneys…”

“Ok.”

“Delicious!”

When the bowl came to me, I passed it directly to Badveli Ara. I figured if I stayed with the lavash, salad, cheese, and vodka, things would be fine. We ate and drank and had fellowship despite the language barrier. I wasn’t sure if the hosts notice that I passed on the hosh.

After lunch we went back to work and we went at it steadily but not as manic as before. We quit early, having reached our goal. Helping others directly was a good feeling. I might have mentioned this already but my dad used to say the gospel is a direct action. I also may or may not have already mentioned that even though Dad was born in the United States and passed almost 20 years ago, I felt his presence often while we were in Armenia.

 

Mother Church

The Apostolic Church of Armenia is the Armenian equivalent of the Vatican. Armenians from all over the world make a pilgrimage there. The seven of us went there as well. Etchmiadzin was established in 301, is believed to be the oldest cathedral in the world, was built on the site of a pagan temple and has been renovated a dozen times in the last 1700 years and is said to be Armenia’s strongest tourist attraction.

We are a people of faith. Once we made up our minds. we would not let go, and throughout history there were heavy prices to pay for remaining faithful. I did not know much about Etchmiadzin until I visited the place. We were Protestants, after all. I take that back; I’m sure there are protestant Armenians who knew the history of the Armenian Church. But not in our family; it was just not something that came up. I knew that there were two groups, the Apostolics and the Protestants, but I generally thought we were one people. They were just more like Catholics and we were, well, protestants.

I thought everything with the two groups  was cool until one day, 40 years ago, I went to buy gas. I pulled into an Arco station in Burbank and when I went to pay, the manager was Armenian. Whenever we find each other it is usually cause for a 30 second celebration of the fact. We have identifiable features, I guess, mostly concerning the nose, and the eyes as well. Also, hand gesturing and a certain outlook on the world. And the clincher in this case was  his name on his shirt,  was Armenian but I wasn’t going to say anything. As soon as he saw me though, he said the opening phrase of the ritual.

“You Armenian?”

“Yes, I am.” “Yeah, I thought so.”

“Yeah.”

“You eh-speak Armenian?”

“No. Voch. Chem hahs genar. I don’t understand it.”

“Why not?”

“My great-grandparents came here in 1897. My grandma was 7 years old.”

He was disappointed but we talked a little more. He asked me what church I attended. I was quite proud of my church and I told him the name.

“Pees polkagon!”

I knew from the look on his face that he did not like protestants.

I had never encountered such disdain before.

“We’re all Armenian, aren’t we?”

“You polkagon,” he said, “you left deh Mother Church. You not Armenian.”

I was deeply hurt and felt hurt for a long time.

But standing on the grounds of Etchmiadzin and then standing inside the cathedral on Sunday, listening to the choir sing sacred sharagons, looking at the faces of the devout, who ignored those who entered only out of curiosity and as tourists, I was moved emotionally and spiritually.

We are protestant Armenians—in my family my great-great grandfather changed his affiliation in the mid 1800’s—but we are Armenians and we are connected to all the history, good and bad, of our people. In our tradition we don’t make inanimate things sacred and neither do we elevate our Badvelies, who they call Der Hyer,  to half a step closer to God just by their title. But we could use the heightened sense of reverence that followers of the Apostolic way have.

Whenever I was at a cathedral or monastery—and there were quiet a few of them— the notion of being on sacred ground kept coming to my head. I usually don’t think that way. When Grace entered the church her head was covered, and when we left we walked out backwards, as we had seen other do.

“It’s a building,” Grace remarked later

. She didn’t mean any harm by it. That’s just how we look at things.

“Yeah,” I said, “the music was beautiful though.”

“True.”

“And the architecture is astounding. And the paintings, and the detail. And even the way the grounds are laid out. The symmetry.”

“Very beautiful.”

“I understand what you are saying though.”

“It’s just…”

I do understand what Grace was saying. I guess I am carrying two opposite points of view around in my head, and it certainly isn’t the first time I’ve done that, and Grace was only taking the position that “the flag is not the nation” as S.I. Hiyakawa said, and the cathedral is a tribute to God, but not the experience or existence of God. I believe, though, that our visit there that day helped me to understand the man at the Arco gas station all those years ago. Not that he wasn’t rude, but I have a better understanding of how deeply rooted our culture is to our faith and for him faith and culture were likewise rooted in Etchmiadzin.

Fish

Some people don’t eat fish, either because of the tiny bones that can add a mild kind of terror while dining, or because fish are fishy. I was that guy. But Grace and I were in San Francisco one weekend 35 years ago and we were with another couple and we went to a famous fish restaurant and, I think we were with our friends, Cathy and Craig, and Cathy said, “Come on Jack, you’re in a restaurant famous for fish, you’re not going to order beef, are you? You wouldn’t order chicken chow mien in a steakhouse, would you?” This made tremendous sense to me and so I decided I was in. Not knowing one fish from another, I consulted with Grace and picked red snapper, or maybe it was orange roughy, and dinner was a success. So for a long time I ordered one of those two, for decades in fact, if I ordered fish anyway, the choice was one of two. Then I tried salmon and now wild salmon is my favorite meal.

In Armenia though, I was thinking mostly about lamb and chicken. There was plenty of it and it was superb. They barbecued most of the time and they used wood, not charcoal, just like Dad used to do.

We had heard that in Armenia there was a lot of pork and potatoes for their meals, which was true. But they also had other kinds of meat, including a meal that featured something that tasted like barbecued chicken but didn’t come in the shape of chicken. It was almost like a kind of flattened  shaped ball. We wondered if it was dove or rabbit but they said it was chicken so I’m taking their word.

As for the potatoes, they were smooth and tasty. At one meal sliced and fried potatoes were served at the beginning and near the end, and after that they brought French fries. There was no rice pilaf. Imagine that, my fellow Armenian-Americans. We’ve been in America for 100 years, eating pilaf, because we’re holding on to our Armenian-ness and yet all the while in Armenia, Armenians eat potatoes.

I didn’t see any choreg (a slightly sweet bread), either. No choreg? But in any case, this section is about fish, the best fish I have ever eaten. You can’t get fish fresher than at Cherkezi Dzor in Gyurmi; the fish were raised there. It’s a fish farm but not like we think of farmed fish here with antibiotic-fed fish packed into crowded tanks. Their set-up was a series of ponds in a natural setting. You can, as we did, walk past all the fishponds before you get to the restaurant. I even saw some customers picking out the fish they wanted for dinner.

I didn’t know anything about sturgeon. It didn’t sound like an appealing name for a fish. Sturgeon sounded like a fish that Eastern block tribes would eat, and only when all the other options were not available. I don’t know how stuff like that gets in my head, but it was there, and so here I am reporting it. But I was in a fish place, a famous one at that and I had decided that I would eat everything while I was in Armenia, well, except hosh and pizza with basturma (very spicy, dried, thinly slice beef) on it. I picked a big piece of sturgeon from the plate and it was so good I had to fight off the urge to immediately get another piece of it even while I still had some on my plate.

I already have said it was the best fish I have ever eaten and I have been trying to think of what I would liken it to. Well, you know that song “Iko,Iko” that Dr. John did? It is one of my favorite songs of all time. It is alive, it inspires; it is something that’s wonderful and amazing. It’s so good that I am sad when it gets close to the end. How could such a wonderful feeling end? And Dr. John himself doesn’t even end the song; he segues to the next one. That’s how it was with the meal of barbecued sturgeon. I was trying to think of a way to that it wouldn’t end.

I had eaten two pieces of the wonderful, miraculous sturgeon and there wasn’t any more left, so I considered all the other delicious offerings, including a very good local beer and the spirited, friendly service we had there. Our group at dinner was amiable, and had the joy of life; we had all successfully dodged life’s challenges, stress-makers and near heart-breakers, at least for the night. The wind was blowing and it was cold when the sun set and there was a long, dusty, bumpy ride home ahead of us; it was ok though; we had share a wonderful, unforgettable moment together.

 

Gyurmi Girl

Grace and I were walking slow down the streets of Gyurmi, a city that still has reminders of the horrible earthquake that took place in December, 1988, when thousands of buildings, including school buildings full of children, collapsed, and 60,000 people died. I remember it because it made the national news at the time and all of a sudden non-Armenian people knew Armenia. It was a shock, a sudden conk on the head to Armenian-Americans that Armenia existed. A reminder that the place was real, and that things go horribly wrong for no reason at all.

It was a revisiting of suffering, as if that’s what our legacy was again. And again the why of it arose. The stories then and to this day that were circulated concerned themselves with poor building standards, or poor materials or even skimming of rebar. That’s right, skimming of rebar. I don’t even want to talk about it. Some of the aftermath is still on display, including an apartment  where half of the building was rubble not unlike the pictures of post-World War II Europe; there is also a cemetery of the victims that seems to go on for miles.

As we walked past the destroyed buildings, we weren’t thinking about building standards or poor materials. We felt the loss and pain and the frustration for what must be the slowest recovery and restoration imaginable: over a quarter of a century and hollowed out or flattened buildings still there. In fact in one apartment complex we passed, we had heard that people were taking shelter in the parts that weren’t completely leveled.

We didn’t know what to do, so we took pictures. Grace had the big camera, and I had the blue Sureshot camera. That’s when a little girl approached us. She surprised us when she spoke English.

“Hallo.”

“Hello,” Grace said, stooping a little to get closer.

The girl was six or seven and on her own.

“Inch bes es? Parev!” I said, anxious to display my Armenian, limited though it may be.

She ignored me. I felt hurt but then remembered I “spoke” Western Armenian while she spoke Eastern Armenian. Grace said that they understand Western but she could only understand 10% of the Eastern.

I was rolling that formula around in my head the entire time we were there. It didn’t make any sense. I would think that both dialects would understand the same per cent of the other speaker. In any case she was speaking English to us, which for the most part was the exception and not the rule. On the other hand she should have understood me, so I guess my pronunciation wasn’t good, or simply that she was more interested in hearing and speaking English.

“Are you havink good time?” she said, folding her arms as if she were about to conduct a lengthy interview.

“Yes, we are. Thank you,” Grace said.

“We’re having a wonderful time. We’re happy to be here,” I said.

“You are from Ameriga?”

The look on her face indicated she already knew the answer.

“Yes, we are. Your English is very good,” Grace said, with a smile so big and so full of delight I thought for a second that she was about to pick the child up and ask her if she wanted an ice cream cone.

“Tenk you,” the girl said. But her face remained steady, as if to say she was acquiring English, but it was no big deal.

I was trying to remember how to say “good for you” in Armenian. I don’t know why I wanted to speak Armenian to her; I had decided before we got to Armenia that I wouldn’t even try to speak it.

 “You’re welcome,” I said.

“How did you know we are from America?” Grace asked.

“You are taking picture,” she answered.

“Yes, we are,” I said.

“OK, bye-bye,” she said and walked away with her head up as if there were no barriers between her and a better town, province and country. I believe her, and I am sorry I didn’t take a picture of her.

 

Travelers

We were rolling in the van, the white 1997 Mercedes 15 passenger van with the air conditioning that didn’t seem to work efficiently and wasn’t always used by the driver when he could have. Sometimes it was because we were going uphill and he probably wanted to reduce engine stress. But sometimes he just didn’t deem it necessary. Badveli Ara told us that convincing him to turn the air on at all took him around five years worth of visits, and he finally relented but sparingly and randomly.

Thinking,“Come on, man, crank the air! It’s hot outside,” made me feel like some overindulged American, so I never said anything. We were on the other side of the world, visiting ancestral land, having an experience of a lifetime. How could I whine about air conditioning?

We were bumping along an open road with fields in the foreground and mountains in the background. There were seven of us, eight with Ardo, the driver. We had been somewhere and seen something. The cathedrals and monasteries and monuments were beginning to look the same in the architecture and use of space and symmetry. This didn’t bother me, though. I wanted to see all of it and hear all about it and feel things I couldn’t  anywhere else, even if I couldn’t remember all the names and the locations and history. I would stand in awe and wonder in the moment.

And  there are the pictures we took. I would have the pictures and sort them out somehow. It’s like this. If you took a toothbrush and dabbed it in some paint and then dragged your thumb across the brush over a map of Armenia, you’d see a zillion dots on that map. Let those represent all the cathedrals, monasteries, khachkars and all the other tributes to the Christian faith. I tell you, I stood where St. Gregory’s first church was built—there was only a circle of block-shaped stones left and ten million gnats, I mean I was breathing gnats—but I bridged 1700 years and said, “Here I am where you were,” and that moment stirred my soul.

But this wasn’t that day, this was another day. This was the day we went somewhere else and saw something else. It might have been the day we were in the parking lot of a famous place and I was approached by a man holding doves and I was told that the idea was you could release the doves and get a blessing. I told him no, but he said I could just hold them. I was curious to hold doves, although I have no idea why. Maybe it has something to do with my Uncle Paul, who had pigeons and a pigeon pen and I was remembering him holding them and talking to them. Maybe I had found another connection from Armenia to America and family who had brought Old Country ways with them. Or maybe I just wanted to hold a living bird because I don’t think I had done it before.

The man signaled for me to release the bird and I did and it took off, and while I was watching it, he handed me another one and and made the same gesture with his hand. That one took off behind us and when I turned around I couldn’t see it anymore. The entire moment was a matter of four or five seconds. I smiled at the man and he asked for money. I didn’t feel blessed and I didn’t speak enough Armenian to say that we hadn’t contracted to do this, verbally or otherwise, but I gave him the money, something like ten dollars, American. He was a fellow traveler walking through this world, doing what he thought he should do.

On the way back from seeing what we saw, which was something sacred and historical, I saw him smoking cigarettes with his friends, who were, just for own amusement and to make the time pass, twisting a garter snake one of them had captured. When he saw me though, he grabbed the pigeons out of their cage and rushed toward me. I nodded my head and took them and tossed them up to the blue sky. He was holding the snake, pinched at its neck, while the snake writhed calmly and made itself look like a wristwatch.

The man held out the other hand to indicate it was time for me to pay. I said, “No,” loud and clear and walked away. I was figuring five dollars was a fairer price than ten. I was after all, just another traveler walking through this world, doing what I thought I should do.

I think that was also the same that day Larry bought a huge, almost extra large pizza-sized katah, which is an Armenian pastry. It was beautiful and shiny and golden. Larry passed it back to us and we broke, shared and ate the most delicious, freshest, sweet but not too sweet katah ever made. We were not just comforted, we were blessed and inspired. Our ancestors sure knew how to make the most of butter, sugar, and flour.

Food is part of who we are. It may be increased in its value after the genocide, but my guess is that it was always an important part. Food, and how we prepare it and share it, is timeless and a celebration of being. Maybe I should have given the pigeon man some katah.

Assyrians

Out in the outskirts of everything, the road goes on forever and can jar you, can make your entire body ache, and can put you in a different state of mind.

The ride is endless, and the heat can be stultifying. After an hour’s worth of it I began to drift back to another time, of sitting in church, the tiny little chapel in North Hollywood, Dad in his bowtie, fanning himself with the bulletin, Mom dressed up pretty, my brother holding his forehead as if someone had hit him or he was about to hit someone, my sister looking at the little old ladies in the front row who would cry at the end when we sang the Hyer Mer, the Lord’s Prayer. It was the Armenian sermon though, that’s when the narrative part of my mind came to life. I didn’t speak Armenian, the seat was hard, no talking allowed, and my mind drifted anywhere it wanted. It wasn’t magical stuff, it was like stories and thoughts.

And now, 55 years later I was still doing it; the drone of the van and the heat and the road heading nowhere or so it seemed, everyone too tired to chat—all of it was the same as sitting through a sermon in a language I didn’t understand, so my mind floated and bounced like the first version of computer games, I think it was called Pong, and I saw myself at Marie Calendar’s in the early 80’s looking at it, not knowing it was the future of things.

Somewhere along that wandering I came upon the question.

“Badveli?”

“Yes?”

“Are there any Assyrian towns here?”

There has been no country called Assyria for the last 1300 years. But for that same period of time the people of Assyria have continued to identify themselves as such, wherever they were, including Armenia.

“I’m sure there are.”

“Wow! Could we visit one?”

“Well…”

“I mean, is there one nearby?”

My family, on both sides, were Armenian speaking Assyrians living in Turkey. It sounds complicated, but it isn’t. Assyrians and Armenians have been hanging out together, marrying each other, trading one language for the other or one surname for the other for 2500 years. Every Armenian I’ve ever met has said, “Oh yes, of course,” when I say “Yes Ahsori yem,” (I’m Assyrian). Armenians and Assyrians are kindred spirits, soul twins.

“I bet there is an Assyrian town nearby. Sure why wouldn’t there be? Let me ask Ardo.”

So he had a conversation with Ardo, our driver, and Ardo became very animated and there was much arm-waving and he pointed off to his left, nodding his head.

“Well?”

“Yeah, he said there is one not far from here.”

“Let’s go.”

“We’ll go tomorrow.”

I confess that I thought the answer was no; that the next day we would have too many things to do. Badveli had planned nearly every minute, so how would there be time for an unscheduled addition? But there was.

We went in the middle of a busy day to a town that made me think of Parlier, California, a tiny farming town just south of Fresno. There were a few streets with craggy, crumbling, stone and mortar houses with tin roofs, and mostly empty fields. So, the Parlier comparison is unfair because in Parlier there are grapevines and more recently build houses. But I had the feeling of something worn down, a little tired, burdened by something almost overwhelming. Ardo pulled up to the Assyrian Social Hall.

“This better be good!” Badveli said.

“It will,” I replied.

He went in ahead of us to explain our presence and then came out and signaled us to come in. I marveled at his skills to just walk in to someone’s life on a regular day, to say, “Hello, we’re from America and we’d like to visit for a while.”

The president of the Assyrian social club greeted us warmly as we walked into his office. He shook hands with each of us; he even bowed slightly from the shoulders. A woman came in and we greeted her. She likewise treated us as though we were much anticipated guests. The president said something to her and she left in a hurry. Badveli Ara was pointed at me and speaking in a bright, excited tone. I assumed he was saying that I was of Assyrian descent. I began to explain myself, while Badveli translated.

“My father’s family were Assyrians. They lived in Kharpert.”

The president nodded enthusiastically, so I continued.

“They came to the United States over 100 years ago.”

He seemed puzzled, so I changed the subject.

“I am proud to be Assyrian and we are all happy to be here.”

That seemed to please him quite a lot and he nodded and shook my hand again. Grace suggested I have my picture taken with the man. We stood proudly by the Assyrian flag, which was in the corner on a stand and a pole. We held it up the corner so there would be no doubt about what flag it was. The blue and red stripes are the Tigris and Euphrates river, the cradle of civilization, said to be the locale of the Garden of Eden. The flag was designed and officially sanctioned in 1971, but the people and land it represents are from the beginning of time.

When the photo-op was over, the women who hurried off walked in grandly with a tray of Armenian coffee and pastries. We drank our surge and socialized. Then we were invited to see their lavash (cracker bread) oven. We went outside and around the corner and we were each given a giant, fresh baked lavash. They  were very animated and  wanted to show us the Assyrian church.

We walked 3 blocks through the town and the church, when we got there, looked, strong with its dark red bricks and hard angles.

“He’s says the church was originally built in the 1850’s, but was destroyed,” Badveli said.

“Wow,” I said, thinking maybe there was a better word, or maybe there wasn’t.

“The wow is they decided to rebuild it in 1980.”

“Yeah?”

“But they were sure that the Soviet Union would be against it.”

“Hah.”

“So, they would gather at night.”

“Night?”

“You know, like undercover. Each person would contribute.”

“Money?”

“More like tools, materials or doing the work. All at night.”

Brick by brick. Bags of cement. Lumber. Labor. Putting in hours after work. Giving up free time and sleep. And then there’s the risk-taking. When Jonah wrote, “The people of Nineveh believed God,” I wonder if he ever imagined it would still be true 2700 years later.

It was quite a day. The president of the social club invited us to his house for dinner. On the spot. Half a dozen strangers roll up to his place and he says “Come to my house for dinner.” 

Rachel

The apple with a bite in it was sitting on a paper napkin, on the end table. And there was Mom, sitting on the couch with one hand holding Reader’s Digest while the other searched for the apple. I was annoyed with her choice.

It was after all, 1967 and the time for Reader’s Digest had, in my 13-year-old mind, passed. I knew she was smarter and that further annoyed me. I decided to read it, to see what stale ideas she was putting in her head.

When she finished the apple she left the magazine on the end table.

A car is a one-ton steel and glass missile, hurtling along at 50 miles an hour. Young people should think of the car they’re driving as such.

I was annoyed again. The magazine I was supposed to dislike contained something that made my brain tingle. It might have been a mistake; I might not have read what Mom read. But then what were the odds that I picked up the magazine just to that page, paragraph, and line. I believed it was true though. At 13 what you believe to be true, is.

Despite the thrill of imagining being possessed of a destructive and frightening force that could smash things and cause adults to gasp, the sentence also reached me with notions of responsibility.

 

Rachel’s spirit was always out ahead of her. Anyone who met her could sense that spirit, that positivity emanating from her. Rachel hoped all things; believed you were good and had good things to say or report. She kept her face—compact and round, an Armenian cherub—never sideways, but always turned full toward the person to whom she was speaking. Her eyes didn’t just contain light, they were light itself. There was an energy, a life force, an aura. When it was said that you had to become a child to enter the Kingdom of heaven, this is the child God had in mind.

The eyes.

The smile.

The tone of her voice.

Her very being.

It was always there from the first time I met her. She was five years old, the youngest of five, three sisters and a brother. I was 15, so there was football, and there was standing around with my peers. But there was always time to talk to Rachel.

 

There are 27,000 car accidents a day in the U.S. according to the National Safety Councils report from 2010. That would be a over a thousand an hour and 9,855,o00 a year.

One of them was when Mom was a teenager and drove a car for the first time and was in Reedley out in the middle of nowhere but hit a telephone pole. No traffic, her brother would say for the next 70 years, but she found a pole.

Another when my sister was going through the treacherous Five Points intersection in the Studebaker station wagon in North Hollywood and got hit by a car coming through on Lankershim, or Vineland. Mom broke her knee. My sister didn’t drive for six years.

Still another was when I was driving the Ford Torino on Cahuenga in a hurry to get out of Burbank and into Hollywood. The car jumped into the oncoming lane. On my left was a drop off to the Hollywood Freeway; straight in front was a ’71 Cadillac El Dorado. This can’t happen. I was sure that would be my last thought. He was an old guy with a goatee and a white coat. No, he said after we both said we were all right, this isn’t my wife, she’s my girlfriend. He was insulted. She was all right, either way.

Then on Maple and Kings Canyon in Fresno, with my five year old in the car, a man in a Nova blew through a red light, hit me, spinning the Camry into the other lane. There was only enough time to realize there was nothing to do other than hold on to the steering wheel. There is only a few seconds. Kat didn’t cry or cry out. I tried to engage her later. She said she didn’t want to talk about it.

 

 

When the phone call came we were watching TV. When the phone call came it was after 11. When the phone call came, Rachel’s brother Albert was with us. He pushed the button. He was connected to his brother-in-law.

When the call came it was only a week after all the siblings, their parents and aunt and uncle and cousins and their spouses and children and children’s children and my wife Grace and I, friends of the family, were all gathered together. On Saturday and Sunday, too. Saturday was a potluck.

Rachel’s daughter, Annika, 10 years old.

“Hello,” she said, figuring I was connected to the tribe in some good way.

“I heard you and Uncle Albert were playing catch.”

“Yeah.”

“And you stopped a softball with your forehead!”

“Yeah, I did.”

“That’s a good thing though.”

“It is?”

“You didn’t show any fear. That’s really good.”

“Huh.”

She was looking at me, hoping to catch up with her cousins, rather than this goofy old man, friend of Uncle Albert. She was polite though. She waited, pushing an errant strand of hair behind her ear.

“Good to see you. All grown up.”

“Yeah.”

I sipped my ice water and she took that as a cue to go.

 

On my Acura The blue line sitting at the bottom of the dashboard was Benign but with a certain presence. Somehow more than decorative. Maybe that was what I looked at that day. Sometimes the line appeared to light up.

What did it mean, to have a blue line that I usually didn’t notice but sometimes did and sometimes it seemed lit up while other times not at all? Red lights were bad; was a blue light on because things were good?

But I changed the radio station, that’s what really happened; it wasn’t the light on the dashboard, not at all. Everybody changes the radio station. Every day. All day and into the night. According to an NTHSA survey conducted in 2002, 66% of those surveyed change the radio station regularly while driving. The number’s probably higher than that. There is no such thing as multi-tasking. When we do two things, our brain switches back and forth continuously.

Westbound on McKinley at 3:30 in the afternoon, I was going to visit Nicholas, friend of the family, who, driving late at night, struck a pole and would be in rehab for months upon months. But he was alive and the will to get his life back was strong in him.

I was going there to the rehab hospital in West Fresno, out there by 99, dead plants surrounding a building in disrepair, its hallways cluttered with people in wheelchairs facing this way and that, like chess pieces dropped from their box to the floor.

Afternoon traffic on McKinley slowed everything down. Annoyed about being late and maybe annoyed about sports talk radio, I looked down to change the station. The only thought that came to my head was, “No.”

But I hit the white Hyundai who hit the red Nissan. Everybody was all right. My bones ached for two weeks and I complained like a 12 year old who couldn’t get seconds on dessert. But that was nothing. None of it. Even Nicholas gets to goof around on Facebook now. Not Rachel or her daughter though.

 

 

The call came to her brother Albert while he was over visiting Grace and me. It was after 11 at night. We heard him say, “No. No. No.” But it wasn’t anguished; it was as though someone was asking what he wanted on his pizza. Or maybe we will ourselves not to hear things properly. Maybe we all went into shock. Rachel and her daughter died in a car accident. Oh Albert, we said. That’s awful, we said. We can’t believe it, we said. There was no phrase to frame the situation. So overwhelmed there was no time to conjure courage, to feel fear or horror.

No comfort.

No reflection.

No movement or gesture.

No appropriate inquiry.

The horrible reality sat down in the living room with us. We were silent.

 

 

San Jose Mercury News August 21, 2015 An Alameda woman and her 10-year-old daughter have been identified as among the three victims of a fatal traffic accident Saturday afternoon in Tuolumne County. Rachel Shahinian, 50, and her daughter, Annika Zinsley, a student at Otis Elementary School, were traveling east on State Route 120 about 4:05 p.m. when their 2007 Toyota Rav 4 was struck head-on by a 1997 Honda CRV traveling westbound. Modesto resident Shelia Weeks, 59, the driver of the Honda, also died in the collision near Tulloch Dam Road. While the Honda came to a rest in the middle of the road after the collision, Shahinian’s Toyota ended up on the right shoulder engulfed in flames, causing a brush fire that burned about 120 acres, according to the California Highway Patrol. It was not immediately known whether drugs or alcohol was a factor in the collision. A graduate of Pepperdine University, Shahinian was a senior scientist at Roche Molecular Systems, a Pleasanton-based company that develops and supplies medical diagnostic products and technologies. Shahinian performed in the past two productions of “The Nutcracker” by the Alameda Civic Ballet as Mother Ginger and as a Party Lady, according to Abra Rudisill, its artistic director. Shahinian’s daughter, Annika, also performed in the same productions as a Gingersnap and as a Russian.

“Why did it take the police so long to notify us?” Rachel’s mom had wondered.

We would not answer her. It was likely they couldn’t get near either car. Maybe their CDL’s and license plates were incinerated. All of us tried not to think about so many things.

We tried not to think about how the Honda came to be in the wrong lane. We tried not to think about the horror of the last five minutes

From laughter and singing to

The slamming of the brakes

Screaming of the tires

Screaming of mother and daughter

Smashing of metal

Burst of glass and air bags

Breath and life going out, out, out.

The impact, the rolling of her car, gasoline dripping on the muffler, the flames racing back to the gas tank, the explosion and the fire jumping to the field. We tried not to think about any of it.

But it was in our heart, our gut, our mind, our soul. Everywhere but on our lips.

 

Rachel, the woman with the notes of lovely song in her speaking voice, the woman with the cherubic face that did not age, who would greet you with a smile and a touch before she spoke, who battled through her own struggles but wouldn’t make them yours, who loved her daughter and the father of her child, who knew that the spirit of God was in a song, that freedom was in a dance and that the best parts of life are found in open, loving, laughter.

 

Gone in an instant.

 

My mom, my sister, my daughter and I in all our respective car crashes, we were all lucky. We are all lucky. A ton or two tons of metal flying at 60 miles an hour, 253 million cars and 210 million drivers on the road in the US, and somebody’s going to make a mistake. Over 32,000 of us die a year in car accidents. The longer we’ve been driving, it must follow that the odds of something going wrong increase. Every car we encounter on a trip, long or short, we enter into a relationship with the other drivers. This is what we deal with and don’t think about. We have moments where we’re not doing anything more than holding on to the steering wheel.

1969 Imprint

Rachel, five years old, in pinafore dress and a white long sleeve blouse, black shoes and white socks, skipping and laughing, like she came into the world complete and whole, madly in love with the sky, the sun and every person she encounters. It’s Sunday morning; we’re at church but haven’t gone in yet. I’m wearing black pants, black kiwi-buffed, ill-fitting shoes, and a purple polo shirt without a penguin on it. I’m sitting on the bench in front of the social hall. The sun stands well above the church tower. She laughs and runs to me, sits in my lap and we tell stories and make up our own jokes. Church starts. We’re still outside playing tag.

Angst in the Highlands

We’re going to Armenia for two weeks and I don’t know how I feel about it. Grace says she doesn’t have time to think about how she feels about it. I am having some angst about it. That’s a feeling, I guess, but it may be from not knowing how I feel about a 14 hour flight to what may or not be one of those life transforming experiences. I think Grace may be better off. I’ve been having trouble sleeping and can’t seem to relax or get into any kind of regular pattern.
“There is no such thing as Armenian.” That’s what Zareh, Grace’s cousin, told me once in the 80’s. I was shocked at the time. I mean, we were all cut off from Armenia, and had been since 1920. So I could see a fellow diaspora Armenian saying there’s no such a place, but to say there is no such person, well, I didn’t get it. We could still be a people without a country.We knew what it was like to be Armenian. The food, the music, the dance, the weddings, the expressions, hand gestures, personality types, the ambition, the compulsions, the faith-keeping, the humor, the bitterness and rage underneath it all. And the language. Speaking the language is a key demarcation. In fact it came to me just this morning, one of the major preoccupations of the diaspora Armenians is figuring out how Armenian we are, and speaking the language is worth a lot of authenticity points. I don’t speak it and my parents made the choice to speak only English to my siblings and me. Both sides of my family had already been in the U.S. for over 50 years by the time we came along and it was the 1950’s when being American meant not having a hyphenated assignation. I was ok with not speaking Armenian. I felt more American most of the time anyway. But somewhere in my 20’s one of my very best friends said to me, “You don’t speak Armenian; you’re not Armenian,” and that hurt me. I knew about 100 words at the time, but of course that doesn’t amount to much.
So that’s just what we do: measure the Armenianess in each other. Who’s more Armenian than who? Who knows Armenian history? Armenian politics? Who has an Armenian doctor? Attorney? CPA? Plummer? Mechanic? Which church do you go to? Who married Armenian? Who thinks about who their kids married? (All my parents wanted was for us to pick decent, kind, civil, spiritual, intelligent life partners. And that’s all Grace and I wanted. Everything has worked out quite well.)
But to Zareh’s point: There’s no such thing as Armenian. What he meant at the time was if there is no Armenia, there is no Armenian. At the time, if a scientist from Armenia cured cancer, the Soviet Union would get the credit. Same principle applied in any country. I started to argue with him on that point, but then I thought of Yuri Vardanyan, an Olympic weight lifter who won the gold in the 1980 Summer Olympics, for the Soviet Union. For all the last name searching we all do at the end of movies or in the newspaper or donors list at hospitals , they were all from another country.
In fact my friend Karl, who passed away some years ago, used to say there is no pure Armenian; we haven’t been on our own for over a hundred years. We are Armenians from France or Canada or Greece or Syria, or Lebanon or Turkey or Brazil. And Soviet Armenians are in a system contrary to their nature. Therefore, there are no pure Armenians. But on the other hand, since 1990 there has been an independent place called Armenia. Does that fix everything for them and for my identity? If that doesn’t fix things what will, and how could I have suffered a loss I did not feel or experience directly?
My friend Ed said he felt something extraordinary when he first saw Mt. Ararat, something more than awe. And Ed is not inclined to make hyperbolic kinds of remarks. But what did he feel? Will I feel something? When I’m in Armenia and see cabbies, hotel clerks, pedestrians, bicyclists, old men, women, children, babies all looking, smiling, laughing, and gesturing something like myself and my relatives or Grace and her relatives, will that make something inside my heart come alive? Will they call me brother? Or am I an “odar” (non-Armenian) to them? Will it be something akin to meeting my biological country after being raised by my adoptive country? My adoptive country gave me songs to sing, stories to hear, ideas to ponder and eyes to see the world. Is there anything in me that’s Armenian? Is there a cultural DNA? I guess that’s what I might be able to determine when we go there. Like that song, “If I thought it would do any good, I’d stand on the spot where Moses stood.” Or in our case we’ll stand in the spot where St. Vardan stood.
What is it to be Armenian or American or Armenian-American? How does it mean something? Why does it mean something? Should it mean something? Aren’t we better off without these words, these imaginings? Still though, I’d say there’s something to the journey we’re about to take; it completes the story. My great grandparents left Armenia (or what once was Armenia) at the end of the 19th century. It was a place they had been happy with for multiple generations and may not have left if not for the threat of genocide. Now, 120 years later I’m coming back, just for a visit, a luxury; we didn’t just survive, we did well, and our numbers grew. Maybe Turkey is where I should go. Look at me, Turkey; you didn’t destroy our tribes. Nah, I’m not into it that way.
“Back to the Starting Point! The Kickoff….” So Bob Dylan declares on the liner notes of his 1974 Planet Waves album. He was restarted his career by going back to and revisiting original sources of inspiration. That’s what I want—a revival, rebirth, reconnection of sorts—and that’s what I’m afraid may not happen. Still though I think it will be good. I believe what most Armenians likewise believe, that we really do live up to our positive stereotypes—amiable, funny, fun loving, witty, energetic, and generous—and that those characteristic originated in Mother Armenia. There will be food, drink, laughter, beautiful vistas that generate some familiar feeling. But at the same time, there are reports from those who have been there that the earthquake and bad economics and governmental corruption have damaged the spirit of our people and that there is depression, drinking, red light districts—things which are completely human but somehow we in diaspora never imagined possible. Like anyone who’s told about their “real” mother, we idealized her, I guess, but now it’s one of those “warts and all,” situations. I can do that. What will it take, though? Maybe the last lines of those liner notes from Bob Dylan will be of some assistance. “From there, it was straight up – a Little
jolt of Mexico, and some good LUCK, a
Little power over the Grave, some
more brandy & the teeth of
a Lion & a compass.” Oh, and apricots. I hope it’s still apricot season when we get there. That’s one of our common bonds. Dad had two apricot trees, and two trees full of ripe apricots is heaven’s best perfume. Yes, Dad called fresh apricots God’s candy. Ok, it’s a mixed metaphor but too bad. It’s both those things, it’s more than both of those things, and when I eat an apricot in from Armenia, in Armenia, out in a field full of apricot trees, something will be returned to me. “There’s a word for it”, David Byrne once said, and “that word does not exist in any language.” That song just came to me. I had some trouble remembering the lyrics, and I thought it was Blood, Sweat and Tears, or Traffic, and I didn’t know melody or the title. Only the meter was bouncing in my head, and my mind kept telling me it was important to remember because it would end the essay. But now I know the title, “Give me Back My Name.” That’s it, then. We’ll go to Armenia for the apricots, and everything else.

The Last Lesson

Sometimes I would take my son, Greg, with me. “Watch and remember,” I’d say. Maybe it was a smart thing to say; maybe it was foolish or even cruel. It came into my head, wanting to come out and it seemed right at the time. I think I had the right kind of kid who could hear the words and grasp the situation. I didn’t say it in a harsh way and neither did I say it too matter of factly. I considered it balanced in tone and benevolent in intent. My dad was dying in a convalescent hospital. Hadn’t Greg heard something about the “Circle of Life” in “Lion King”? And wasn’t this it? My dad was dying and we all are dying, and if we’re all dying then I was dying and chances were I would be close to death and in need of visiting by my children. We crossed the small parking lot and I opened the door for him, thinking about the time four years earlier when my mom died. Each of my three children looked at the passing of Grandma Frances in a different way.
Kat, who was 9 at the time, was sad and quiet and after a hug she announced that she didn’t want to talk about it, not, I concluded, because she was devoid of feelings but because she was overwhelmed by them.
Kelsey, who was close to five, had many theological questions.
“Is Grandma Frances in heaven?”
“Yes, baby, she is.”
“Are there angels there?”
“Yes, there are.”
“Is she with Jesus?”
“Yes.”
“Can she see us?”
“I think she can, Kelsey.”
“Is she ok?”
“Yes. She’s not sick anymore.”
“I miss her.”
“We’ll all miss her. But we will see her again one day.”
She hugged me for a long time and then went to her room.
Greg, who was coming up on 6, had many medical questions.
“How did Grandma die?”
“Well, her heart stopped.”
“Then what happened?”
“The blood stopped circulating.”
“What happened after that?”
“Well, Greg, her brain shut down.” I had reached the limits of my scientific-sounding knowledge.
“Why do people die?”
“Everybody dies, son.”
“Why did Grandma die?”
“Because she, because…well, she was old. We all get old.”
Six months later Greg and I passed each other in the hall. He looked at me with an odd look on his face.
“Dad, are you old?”
“Yes son, I sure am.” I thought I was being honest; I was only 40 but I was comparatively old. The result was a surprising explosion of tears. How was I to know the boy could take my statement that getting old and death are connected and hold on to it for half a year? I had to convince him that I was old but not the same kind of old that causes concern for imminent death.
Now, four years later, Greg and I we were walking down the hall looking for Dad’s room. We had already talked about his leaky valve that was not sufficiently sending blood where it needed to go.
“He repeats things, son.”
“How come?”
“There’s not enough blood getting to his brain so his memory doesn’t work right.” His face told me he was working the notion over.
Dad was sitting in a chair in front of the TV but he was looking in the direction of the window.
“Hi Dad.”
“Oh yay.” He waved his arms in the air slowly.
“Hi Grandpa.”
“And Gregory too?”
“Yep.”
“Where’s Grace?”
“She didn’t make it this time.”
“Oh. That’s ok.”
“What’s up Dad? What’s on?”
“Ballgame. A nurse put it on, I guess. But I was looking at that tree. They’re trimming it but they cut too much. Butchered it”
“Yeah?” I looked at the tree in question while Greg walked to the window.
“Look at it. They killed it.”
“It’ll be ok though.”
“Maybe,” he said with resignation.
“Hey! Mr. Greg’s here, too?”
“Yeah.” I looked at Greg. He had a bemused look.
“You like root beer?”
“Yeah,” Greg answered.
“Take my wallet,” he said to me, “and go down the hall to the soda machine. Where’s Grace?”
“She didn’t make it this time.”
“Oh. Too bad. Next time.”
“Yeah. Well, I’m going to go get the root beer.”
“There’s a machine right down the hall. Take my wallet.”
“It’s ok, Dad. I’ll get it.”
I found the machine but it was out of order. I debated whether to go find a 7-11 for some root beer. I didn’t want to come back empty handed. One of Dad’s maxims was to never visit someone empty-handed and Dad not being in his house, not plopped in his oversized easy chair, made me suddenly feel like a guest paying a visit.
“There you are!”
“Hey, Dad. The machine’s out of order.”
“What machine?”
“How are you Dad?”
“Gregory boy’s here.”
“Yep.”
“Where’s Grace?”
“She didn’t make it this time, Dad.”
“Oh. She’s home with Kathleen and Kelsey.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s ok. Next time.”
“Yeah.”
“You guys want some root beer?”
“No, we’re good.”
“Hey by the way, when am I getting out of here?”
“Well, I’m not sure.”
He wasn’t going home, but he wasn’t going to stop trying.
“Yeah, I just need to know when. I have to check on the tomatoes.”
“Oh I remember, Dad. You can go home when you don’t need the catheter.”
I hated lying to him.
“This damn thing? Oh, ok.”
It was like that, and each time I came it was worse. He was dying in slow motion, the opposite of visiting someone’s newborn baby at three or four week intervals where change and growth was more noticeable compared to those who were with the baby everyday. I started making my visits without Greg.
“So Dad,” I said after we had breakfast in the dining hall one day, “how are you doing?”
“Ok. No complaints. Sometimes I draw when I can’t sleep.”
“Draw?”
“Yeah, draw. You know.”
He pantomimed drawing something.
“What do you draw?”
“Lines.”
“Lines?”
“Yeah. Parallel lines.”
“Hmm. Then what?”
“Perpendicular lines.”
“Yeah? What do you do with that?”
“Then I have a calendar.”
“A calendar?”
“So I can make plans.”
“Like what?”
“Next year’s garden.”
He was still pretty much Dad at that point but by my next visit he was struggling to move and speak, although he still had the will to stay connected to the world and his perspective of it.
“There,” he said pointing at the dresser.
“The picture?”
“No,” he said still pointing.
“Your harmonica?”
He nodded and gestured for me to bring it to him, then gestured again to come closer.
“Go get the boss,” he whispered.
“The boss?”
“Supervisor,” he said still able to put annoyance in his tone.
“But…”
“Go.”
So I found myself in the dingy, pungent, orange lit hallway of a slightly below-par convalescent hospital, looking for a supervisor for reasons that were not clear. I walked from one end to the other without seeing anyone except for a few stray unstable, patients in their wheelchairs, one of which was facing the wall reciting something in a foreign language.
I went to the front desk and no one was there, so I went back to Dad and told him that the supervisor wasn’t available but he just pointed at the door. Out in the hallway again I spotted a janitor and decided he would have to do.
“Excuse me, but could you help me? Could you come visit my dad for a minute?”
“No English,” he replied with a shy, apologetic smile.
“Esto es el quarto de mi parde,” I said hoping for the best, “my dad’s room?”
“Ya, si.”
“Le gusta usted musica? You like music?”
“Si,” he answered looking confused.
“Mi padre tambien. Ven con ami. Come on, my dad wants to play some music.” I don’t know why but he followed me. I wasn’t sure if my high school Spanish helped him understand or made him more confused.
“ Como se llama?” I asked him when we got to dad’s room.
“Roberto.”
“Roberto, me llamo Jack, y mi padre es Frank.”
“Buenas noches. Buenas noches, Senor Frunk.”
“Dad, this is Roberto. He’s the supervisor,” I said, and Dad waved me closer to his bed.
“Don’t just stand there,” he whispered, “ask him if he wants some root beer.” My sister had taken to leaving a supply on his dresser.
“Roberto,” I said, feeling like a UN interpreter, “le gusta usted root beer?”
“No, gracias, no,” he murmured, head down. He was blushing.
Dad took the harmonica out of the box and held it up with his left hand.
“I will play a song from your homeland,” he said.
“Musica de Mexico,” I said.
“Gracias,” Roberto said, bowing slightly.
Dad put the harmonica to his mouth with his left hand and kept time with his right. I wasn’t sure if he had the wind to play but soon enough the sounds began to assemble themselves into a melody. I had trouble at first figuring out what he was playing; he didn’t know any Mexican tunes as far as I knew. It was something familiar but not to Roberto. I raced through my mental catalog of popular tunes and eventually it hit me. He was playing “O Solo Mio.” Well, I thought, at least he’s in the Latin language family. Roberto stood with his mouth opened slightly, head forward and nodding offbeat with uncertainty but still trying to find either the groove or the connection. Dad played on for several minutes, as if we were singing and knew all the verses. When he was done I applauded while Roberto relaxed and smiled, realizing at last that our intentions were good. Dad extended both arms and bowed his head slowly.
“Thank you,” he said. “That was for you.” Then he looked at me and pointed to the root beer. I pulled a can from its plastic ring.
“Por favor,” I said, holding it out. Roberto accepted it and put it in his pocket, turning toward the door.
“Gracias. I work now,” he said softly and went out.
Dad never played catch with me and never took me camping. But he did entertain the “supervisor” of the convalescent hospital. Having witnessed him use what was left of his breath to play the harmonica and offer root beer, I was quite happy and proud to be his son.
A few weeks later I came to visit again. He seemed tired and while his will to be in the world was still present it did not have the same luster. He was a man making preparations. He had one last lesson for his younger son. He didn’t greet me when I walked in the room; he looked at me for a while, as if he were memorizing my features.
“The book,” he said, finally.
“What book?”
“The book,” he said, slowly turning his head in the direction of the dresser.
I looked at the dresser. There was no root beer this time but there was an oversized book, one I had never seen before. I picked it up and glanced at it. It was an illustrated book of Assyrian history. He gestured for me to come closer. He wanted me to go through the book with him. We looked at a picture of men in chariots hunting lions with bows and arrows.
“You,” he said.
“Me?”
“You,” he said again, tapping the picture slowly.
“Oh, yeah. Maybe I should braid my beard like that,” I said playfully.
“No joking,” he said in earnest, signaling me to turn the page. “You.”
“Ok,” I said. He repeated the message for the next 10 pages. Then we came to the winged bull, the Assyrian icon. He pointed to the leg of the bull.
“Strength.”
“Yeah, I know. Strength of a bull.”
“You.” Then he pointed to the wings.
“Swiftness of an eagle.”
“You.” And he pointed to the head.
“Intelligence and wisdom of a man.” I said recalling the dozens of times he had described it to me.
“You.”
We continued through the rest of the book, pausing for his monosyllabic directive each time.
“I get it, Dad,” I said, closing the book.
“Don’t forget it,” he said, his bent index finger quivering at me.
“Ok, Dad.”
The day before Dad died I was on a bus rolling down Highway 99, looking at the sunset. When people say “God spoke to my heart”, I admit thinking You heard what you wanted God to say. But sitting on that bus looking at the sun go down on the grapevines on the long boring highway that Dad call romantic, God spoke to my heart and said that Dad was going home that day.I didn’t want that but that’s what God spoke to my heart. I was on my way to coach a football game, trying to get my head in the football place before we arrived at the stadium, but it was nearly impossible. I remembered the advice he had given me a month earlier to tell the team which seemed quite content to live well below its potential.

“Think of your best moment, the best play you ever did,” he had said, “and then challenge yourself to do that again except a little bit better. And each time give yourself the same challenge. Tell them that!”

I thought maybe when I got off the bus and on the field I would tell them Dad’s message, but on the field with my hat and shirt and whistle and 3 x 5 reminders under the lights, surrounded by 30 9th grade kids in their away game uniforms, I was still thinking about the sunset and what God said when He spoke to my heart.

“Let’s go get’em,” was all I could tell the kids. I don’t remember how they did, whether we won or lost and what it was like on the bus ride home. I know that late that night Dad slipped away, moved over to the other side, but not without leaving behind a legacy of root beer, music and an understanding of our ethnic heritage.

“We find our place on the path,” the song from the Lion King goes, “unwinding in the circle, the circle of life.” I just hope that I can pass on all that I understand and believe to be true and of God to my own children so that the circle can stay intact.

11 to 7 at 7-11

“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Klzq3zpayeY

 

June 1975

I’m not sure what they thought, but I suppose Mom and Dad were so happy to see me not sitting around playing records all day that they were thrilled to see that I had a job, even if it was the graveyard shift at 7-11 in North Hollywood. So I taped tin foil on my bedroom window to keep the sunlight out, and I would come home at 7:15, have breakfast with Dad, and then go to bed, sleeping until 2 in the afternoon. I was the 11 to 7 man at 7-11.

I took a lie detector test to get that minimum wage job. I answered honestly which I worried about because there were questions along the lines of have you ever shoplifted, to which I answered yes owing to my brief career during which Thrifty’s, Sav-On’s, and 7-11 in Burbank had all suffered losses at my hand. But they hired me, the manager saying only that I didn’t attempt to lie during the test and that according to my answers over all, I was, “less inclined” to rob the place blind. I always came to work on time, I never complained when my replacement showed up 15 minutes late, I never neglected the graveyard shift chores– which included restocking the walk-in, sweeping and mopping, and shaking out the entry mats– my till was always right, and it took me two weeks to get through a pack of cigarettes so I guess they didn’t mind that I sometimes didn’t pay for them. All borrowed magazines were returned to their proper rack without wrinkles or smudges.

Because I possessed these minimal virtues, Jimmy, the skinny, stressed-out, zit-faced twenty–something manager loved me. He loved me so much he had me work the first 12 days in a row, telling me that he couldn’t find anyone to take my shift, but he was working on it, and if he gave me two days off the store would have to close and they would lose money. I hadn’t heard about overtime, but when someone finally suggested that I should be getting time and a half after my 40^th hour in the week, I spoke to Jimmy. Besides, I was getting a little stir-crazy. I was seeing colors floating in front of me. I walked into the store the afternoon of the 13^th day and stood—somewhat zombieish—before him.

“I need some time off.”

“I need you to keep working. I can’t find anyone to take your shift.”

“Well, you’re going to have to; I can’t do this too much longer.”

“Do you want us to lose money? I’ll have to close the store.”

“No, I don’t want you to lose money. I want a day off.”

“I would hate to lose you.”

“Me, too.” I was too tired to care.

            I started to walk out the door and take myself directly to the beach as a reward when he said I could take that day and the next day off, but he hoped he didn’t have to close the store and lose money. Little did he know that I had been raised by two guilt experts and his attempts were so feeble they didn’t even register.

            “That’s great. Thanks,” I called out with my back to him, “I’ll be back here in two days.” I didn’t even know what day it was, but the floating colors started to diminish a little. I couldn’t resist cruising past the place that night to see if it was closed. There behind the counter stood Jimmy, working my shift.

            With my first paycheck I bought a mattress. My mattress was a quarter of a century old and whenever I suggested we buy a new one, Mom would say, “Ask Dad,” and Dad would give his trademark response, which he used for nearly every request, “What for?”

“Dad, that mattress is so worn out. The middle of it is all caved in. It’s like sleeping in a hotdog bun.”

“You broke it!”

“I didn’t break it. It wore out. Things do wear out, you know.”

“Don’t talk back! You jumped on it and it broke.”

And so it went. Any consequences I suffered from a worn out mattress, which included back pains and vertigo after climbing out of bed, were mine for allegedly jumping on the bed and breaking it. Buying that mattress was nearly an act of rebellion. I drove to Sears, picked one out in my price range, tossed it in the station wagon, came home, threw the old one out in the patio and put the new one in my room. No one said a thing, and I slept well that night. I was 21, after all.

            I returned to work feeling triumphant, but Jimmy no longer considered me his most reliable worker. He arrived near the end of my shift looking to pick a fight.

“What the fuck is this shit?” he shouted, taking a swing at a display of soup cans, stacked pyramid-style. “This is not some God-damn ghetto store! Who did this?”

I had no reason to fear him. For one I didn’t stack the cans and for another he wouldn’t fire me because I kept a straight till. No leaks.   I was curious about how soup cans could designate a certain kind of store. I also pondered how Jimmy felt so strongly that a “ghetto store” was so vastly inferior to a 7-11 store in North Hollywood, being the land of pimps and porno kings.

            “Dunno” I muttered, lighting a cigarette to look indifferent, “It was there when I got here.”

            “We don’t do things that way here. South Central liquor store, maybe, not here.”

            “Cool.” I turned up the radio and Paul McCartney advised me to “Listen to what the Man Said.” There was no chance of that happening.

            “Rows. Straight rows. This ain’t a circus. I’ve worked retail before. Damn!’’ He rearranged the cans hastily, before someone came in there, either confused about whether he had entered a 7-11 or a South Central liquor store, or—worst of all scenarios– wondering what the matter was with the manager.

            The next night two of North Hollywood’s finest rolled in. I naively thought they were there to “Protect and to Serve.” There were there for their own amusement.

            “You the new guy, huh?”

            “Yeah, I …”

            “They didn’t tell you about the last guy in here? I guess that makes sense.”

            “What do you mean?”

            One stayed near the register, while the other walked back to the refrigerated drinks, his leather holster squeaking. He wasn’t looking for a soda; he turned and looked at his partner.

            “What about the last guy” I asked again, curious but doubtful.

            “He got to about here, I’d say,” the cop by the fridge pointed to the last of the doors. “Was trying to run out the back, probably.”

            “Damn what a mess that was. Blood everywhere,” the cop by the register said, leaning closer to my face, “All that damn manager said was the mess he had to clean up.”

            “Wow. He never told me.” I played along. This had to be some kind of game. They were bored.

            “Well, if you ever feel like there’s gonna be trouble just prop the front door open. We come by this way every night. If we see your door open we’ll come in. It’ll be like a signal.” For the next couple of nights I propped the door open, just to see what would happen. Nothing did.

The most difficult part of the graveyard shift was from 2, when the bars closed, until just before 5 in the morning. When daylight arrived and the mailman came in for his cup of coffee, the worst of it was over.

Just before 2 one night, four or five drunks from the bar next door rushed in to buy beer. In California there can be no sales of alcohol after two a.m. so they would leave the bar just before the last call and stack six packs on my counter.

            “Sorry. I’m not selling this.”

            “Wuddya mean? It’s not 2 yet.”

            “No, but it looks like you’ve had enough.”

            “Aw come on, be cool.”

            “Sorry, man.”

            “It’s not like we’re even drunk or anything.”

            “Maybe not but I’m not selling it. I’m getting ready to lock up the beer anyway.”

            “Whatever. But hey I gotta pee. Can I use the bathroom?”

            “No.”

            “I gotta take a piss, ok? Come on. I know you got one back there.”

            “Employees only, sorry.”

            “What I gotta do? Piss on myself?”

            “No, you wouldn’t do that.”

            “Ok, I’ll piss on the floor.”

            “I don’t think so.”

            “I’m goin’ round back and piss on the wall then. What will your boss think about that?’

            “Don’t know.”

His entourage convinced him to leave, and they walked out. A minute later he came back.

            “I pissed on your fuckin wall. You know that? I pissed on it!”

            “That’s nice.”

            “Go on around back. Wanna see it? It’s there.   I pissed on your wall ‘cause you wouldn’t let me use the bathroom.”

            “That’s right.”

            “I pissed on the wall.”

            “Have a good night.”

His friends came back for him and with much clamor they squeezed into a Firebird and took off.

On the graveyard shift it was always better to be busy than to have nothing to do. When there was nothing I would smoke, which became intolerable after the second cigarette. One time I went to the walk-in and drank a quart of beer, just for the hell of it, or more likely because some song reminded me of some girl I wanted to forget. Or remember. Well, it was better when there were customers. From the time the drunks left until the mailman came for his coffee, you never knew what would happen or what kind of character would show up.

One time a woman around my age came in and we started talking music. She kept calling the Jackson Browne album “Too Late for the Sky” when it was in fact, “Late for the Sky.” It may have been 3 in the morning but if you wanted to talk music with me, you had to have your titles right. She made up for it though when we talked about Dylan’s latest, “Blood on the Tracks.” For that one she said claimed that she, “Cried all the way through side two.”

Another time an elderly woman in curlers showed up around three with a shopping cart, purloined from a grocery store and was maneuvering it up and down the narrow and short aisles of the store where she picked out $30 worth of miscellany, which included an 8 ounce bottle of Coke. When I told her that the 12-ounce can was actually cheaper than the 8-ounce bottle she answered, “It’s ok, I want this one. I don’t want 12 ounces, I want 8.” I don’t know what I could have been thinking, trying to help someone save money when she was shopping in a 7-11.

Then there was the man in his bathrobe and beachwalkers who came in and after wandering around for a while came to the counter, smiled and started to open his bathrobe, asking me if I wanted to play. My simple no must have been convincing because he left in a huff.

The craziest though was a guy who came in one night and chatted for a while, then told me that he had a genius of a plan.

“What’s that?’

“Well, we could make a lot of money.”

“Lotta money, huh?”

“Yeah, it’d be easy.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, I mean, you’re sitting here in the middle of the night making 3 bucks an hour. That ain’t makin’ it.”

Yeah.”

“Guys at the top, they don’t care. They’re making theirs. They’re just using you. They don’t care what happens to you, they’ll just get someone else.”

“Suppose so.”

I didn’t like where this was heading but I was curious.

“They got insurance, anything happens. Even if the place gets robbed. Somebody takes the money outta the register, insurance covers it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So like the plan is like you open the register and we split the money. Then I take off and you call the cops and tell them it was a black guy in a Buick, like an Electra or something, that went west down Magnolia, but I’ll go east. See? They can’t catch us.” He was a white guy driving a Nova.

“I don’t think so.”

“But it’s perfect. You get some money, I get some, and the insurance puts the money back. Everybody’s happy. No one gets busted. I’ll even hit you on the head with something, but not too hard to knock you out or anything, just like to leave a bump on your head. Then you can say you were out cold for a half hour and they’ll think I got a half hour head start.”

“I don’t think so, man.” I started reaching for the bat we kept under the counter.

“It’s not like stealing or anything. Everybody makes out ok.”

“Nah, I’m not in to it.” The poor schmoe was talking to the wrong guy. For all the ranting and raving the manager did, his policy on robberies was to give away the store, money, product, anything the guy wanted, help the guy out the door. He was a loyal company man but he didn’t see any reason for any of us to lay down our lives for the place. I was grateful for that; a few years later I worked in a liquor store on Victory Blvd where my partner told me a horrifying story about how he told a gun with a shotgun to fuck off rather than open the till. I wondered how that manager would have dealt with this guy.

“All right, man, you had your chance. I’m just going to have to go find a guy in a different store. Me and that guy will have some money but you won’t.”

“Oh well, that’s how it goes I guess.” I watched him drive away. I even tried to see his license plate but it was too dark.

It was a relief when a woman I named Mary came in at 4:45 as she always did. I appreciated a little consistency. First there was Mary, then the mailman, then in a little while the shift was over and the night with its attendant weirdness disappeared it the daylight. Mary was a raggedy old woman who wore an oversized green sweater that had lots of mileage on it. She was an alkie who could not come in at 5:01 for her alcohol; she’d come in at 4:45, shuffle over to the refrigerator door and stand directly in front of it for 15 minutes until I took the cross bar out of the door handles. We never spoke; she never even made eye contact with me. She looked at her imprisoned purchase like a dog looks at a treat. She would wait until I put the cross bar away and walked to the register before she would open the door and get her prize. She paid in quarters, dimes and nickels. Where she came in humble and shaky, she would leave proud and assured. It was heart wrenching, but at least her plan did not involve konking me on the head.

Early one morning an angry mom brought her 9-year-old son to me and wanted me to tell him tales of prison and bad things prisoners do to new prisoners so the kid would never steal again. Instead of taking the fear route, I tried for something I considered more practical. I spoke to him in a calm voice and told him that he was lucky to have a mom who cared enough about him to make him bring back the toy he had stolen, and that it might have been easy to steal, but that it was still wrong, and that being good meant that you did good even when it was easy to do bad, and I wound it all up by saying that it wasn’t that big a deal, but it might lead to other, bigger, ventures that would get him in a lot of trouble. The kid was cool with my speech. I could see that he was a first timer and he was embarrassed and his soul was still speaking to him about these things. It was Mom who wasn’t pleased. She kept pressing me to tell him about prison and evil prisoners, but I would not do it. I just told him not to steal anymore. Mom left more annoyed with me than she was with her son. As they left, she was launching into the prison speech herself. I had just finished reading “The Prince” and was out to disprove Machiavelli’s notion that fear was better than love.    

I eventually quit 7-11 when it began to interfere with my social life. I was a middle class kid who could afford the luxury of quitting a convenience store if it became an inconvenience.

Later that year I heard that the North Hollywood 7-11 got robbed the day after I left. No one was hurt. I considered it divine providence that I left at the right time. I did wonder though whether the clerk had a bump on his head and whether the perpetrator was a black guy going westbound on Magnolia in a Buick Electra.

Mom’s Reproach

May 1978

 

It arrived in my head early one morning two weeks before I graduated from CSU Northridge: You must mark this passage by consuming large amounts of alcohol. It just plopped in there like a letter arriving through a door slot. My mistake was I kept on engaging the idea, under the guise of rejecting it. Graduating from college was a good thing, something I was quite proud of, something some of my high school teachers and even some of my college instructors didn’t think I would do, something that surely stood on its own, why would I pollute the moment by getting drunk? That would be, as Dad often said, mixing a positive with a negative.

He had told me many times how during the Prohibition his cousin got hold of some illegal booze when they had gone dancing one Saturday night. Dancing for Dad was its own intoxicant but his cousin kept taking pulls on his hip flask. When they headed for his cousin’s brand new car to go home late that night he suddenly felt ill and threw up all over the fresh, clean interior. “Is this what alcohol does?” Dad asked himself rhetorically, and then he took the flask and threw it as far as he could, vowing to never drink alcohol.

I was very familiar with that story and I believed flinging that flask was a noble gesture and I knew for certain that Dad was true to his pledge. I knew Dad’s other conclusion was that if by being drunk one gave up control over his body, if one could not dance, sing or speak as well with it, then no one should ever indulge; there was no need for it, it served no useful purpose.

Dad often held forth on what was logical long before Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, but rather than finish his thought by raising an eyebrow and announcing, “Highly illogical,” Dad’s signature line was, “What for? What is he trying to prove?” I knew all that stuff. I knew the Bible verse, Ephesians 5:18 “Do not be drunk with wine for that is dissipation; instead be filled with the spirit.” But I was still enticed by the notion of marking the occasion of my graduation with inebriation. It was as though I was scripting it.
I had done it once over a girl, well, that was my excuse; now I would have to do it for celebratory purposes. Then everything would balance out and I wouldn’t have to do it again. Don’t ask me where all this bullshit came from; I was 24 going on 19. It would be a celebration, and as such it called for buddies in a bar, hollering and otherwise whooping it up. I called Tom Hazerian up that night.

“Hey, man.”
“Hey.”

Something in his voice was off.

“What’s wrong?”
“Someone died in emergency today.” 
“Bummer.”
“Yeah, man. We had a code blue. I ran down there and two doctors were arguing over what procedure to take.”
“What?”
“Yeah, man. Swear to God. Patient was turning blue but these two ego maniacs decided to have a pissing contest.”
“Did you say anything?”
“Yeah, two or three times. But if you’re not a doc, you’re invisible.”
“That goes on a lot?”
“More than you think.”
“How can you stand working there, or that line of work?”
“You have to block it out. People die, that’s just how it is. But every so often it hits you hard. Like this one. I mean, she comes in choking on something. Could’ve lived, but the people who’re supposed to be helping her are messed up, or otherwise known as human, you know? If you mess up in a regular place, somebody gets yelled at for not turning in a report on time; but here somebody can die. But then you have the next patient and the one after that, so you have to block it out and keep going, man.”
“Wow. So, like, you probably don’t want to go out tonight, huh? I mean, I’m graduating in a few weeks.”
“Actually, that’s sounds good. I just got a kind of promotion as a matter of fact. Time to celebrate. Call John, let’s go to Chadney’s.”
“I don’t have that kind of bread, man.”
Chadney’s, to me, was a steakhouse for old people. I don’t know why he liked it so much. Who needs a guy putting pepper on your salad? Not to mention a bunch of old geezers thinking they’re cool, dressed up and drinking martinis. Besides, I only had two tens to my name and I hadn’t been to a record shop in a while. It was that season in life where I had either a girlfriend or a job but never both at the same time. At the time I was dating Grace, who lived 3 hours away and I had no job. Mom was funding my social life at the time.
“All right, man. Let’s go to El Torito’s. Don’t worry about the money, we’re gonna have a good time.”

John Tokorian was available and he made the trek from Woodland Hills, picked up Tom in Studio City and then I climbed in the back of his VW and we made our willy-nilly way down Catalina Street. We parked across the street, near a shoe repair shop where Dad used to go. My mind wandered through flashbacks of the sweet smelling shoeshine polish and the whirring of motors to Dad explaining how there is no sense in buying new shoes when the old ones could be repaired for one tenth of the price, and thinking about his pragmatism reminded me of his why drink philosophy. Why would I willingly surrender control of my body and mind? What was my purpose? The neon hammer above the shoe shop blinked and hummed its verdict while we crossed the street.
I had already eaten—Mom’s curious rendition of tacos—but Tom ordered up some greasy quesadillas and a few other appetizers, and well, I didn’t want to be rude, so I had my share. We had two or three beers and we were pretty much done. Then Tom had a new idea.
“We’re going to Jason’s.”
“What?”
“Yeah, that’s right, Chavoor. Jason’s. I’m gonna drink your sorry butt under the table.” Tom weighed about 110 pounds. His frame was so small that one time when we were playing a little one on one basketball he got by me so I picked him up and spun him around like a baton.
“No, man, you don’t want to try that.” Then John tried to save our souls.
“Hey guys, we’re good. We’re cool. Let’s split.” Jason’s was a bar with a house band two doors down. We settled up our bill without a final decision on Jason’s.
“Ah come on, John. What’re you, Mother Teresa?” Tom liked stirring things up. We liked to play and we never took ourselves too seriously.
“Well, I guess it’d be ok.”
We strolled over to Jason’s found a table in the middle of the place and Tom ordered up tequilas all around. I wasn’t a big fan of tequila but I went along with it, whatever it was. One round later and John announced he was dropping out since he was driving. Another round later the band took a break but before they did they announced that there was now a special on tequila, two shots for one. I remember thinking of it as a merry coincidence. We drank and drank until I started wondering what the expression “drink you under the table” actually meant. Does one end up sitting under the table? Does it mean that the loser has passed out? I had no idea but every time Tom said it, I slammed another shot, and every time that we did that John would slap his head in despair and say, “Hey, you guys, take it easy.” But John was no longer in the picture, and Tom and I resumed our under the table game.
“You little pencil neck geek!” I hollered. “No, forget the neck part, you’re just all pencil! I ought to spin you around like a baton again!”
“Hey, Chavoor, you forgot something! You lost that game!”
Things got louder and louder. When things get like that common things seem interesting. I suddenly had it in my head to go over to the next table and ask two girls there for a cigarette. I lumbered over there and then John was grabbing my arm pulling me back, apologizing.
“Nah, I didn’t come over here to start anything. Not bothering you. Just wanna smoke, ‘s all.” They seemed startled or maybe scared, but one of them took out a cigarette and handed it to me. She kept her cigarettes in a white clutch. I thought what a pain it was to have one; it would be like keeping your wallet in your hand all the time. I did like the fact that it was white for some reason, and also for some reason I thought that she chose white because she was blonde. I must have been standing there for a while thinking all these things because John pulled me back to our table before I could thank her. I looked at Tom and he was laughing so hard he was about to fall out of his chair.
“You think you’re cool. Talkin to two blondes!”
“Yeah, well, I am cool and I didn’t even talk to them!”
“You know what, man? You’re right! You’re cool. That’s how you got that Kool cigarette.” We both laughed like it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said.
The band resumed playing and I was a little concerned that I couldn’t tell what they were playing. The sounds were coming out but they seemed to be fighting each other and then dying before they could make any sense. I decided maybe if I went to the bathroom I would feel better and the music would arrive in my head in an organized fashion. Tom said the bathroom was straight back and to the left. I sat a while reclaiming the words straight, back and left, and then headed off in the general direction.
I was holding on to the sink, trying to recognize the stranger staring back at me in the mirror. Why was the floor rolling like that? Why didn’t I feel better after peeing? How was I going to find our table on the way back? I tried to wash my face but the water landed on the mirror and my shirt as well as my face.
When I got back the tab had come. There were a couple of sixes on it. I couldn’t believe anyone could run up a tab of that amount. All I had was a ten and some ones. It sobered me a little. I did not like sticking Tom with the tab. Most of it was between the two of us. My share should have been thirty bucks at least. I emptied my wallet saying, “It’s all I got, man. Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it, man.” Tom was the youngest but he was the first among us to have a serious full time job. I felt bad anyway. I promised to treat him next time. He looked straight at me and said that it had been worth every penny.
“I can’t believe you guys,” John was saying as we crossed Riverside to go back to the car, “this is too much.” The Creedence song, “Ramble Tamble” played in my head. “Garbage on the sidewalk, highways in your backyard, PO-lice on the corner… mooove! Down the road I go! Ramble tamble!” And down the road we went, all crammed in the VW with gas fumes rolling our stomachs like a cup of dice in a Yahtzee game. Everything was funny all the way home—street signals, the sound of the turn indicator, why that girl smoked Kools instead of Marlboroughs.
We got to my house and we all stumbled toward the house. I turned a little too soon though and walked right into the evergreen tree that always stood at attention guarding the front door. I tried to right myself but became deeper entangled in it.
“Look at you, Chavoor, you look like you’re stuck in a gigantic green womb!” We all laughed and they pulled me out, brushed me off and then pushed me in the direction of the door.
Once inside I made it to the bathroom, I stared in the mirror, this time seeing someone who more resembled me than that recently orphaned looking creature in the restroom at Jason’s. I was humming the George Thorogood song from the year before which featured the lyric, “You know when your mouth be getting’ dry, you pretty high.” But in fact, my mouth wasn’t dry at all, my mouth was very watery. I even rinsed to get rid of that watery feeling. George Thorogood was still with me, “That’s funny. I know! Everybody funny, now you funny.”

I went to my room and did not feel anywhere close to normal. I thought maybe if I put on pajamas that would help, but it didn’t. I went back to the bathroom to put my clothes in the hamper but when I got there I had forgotten why I was there. Back I went to my room. I got into bed and I opened the window just in case I told myself, but I wasn’t even sure what I meant by it. I got under the covers and realized I hadn’t turned off the lights. I sat up to get out of bed when my entire digestive system turned into a gallon of chutney, and I suddenly realized what I had meant by just in case.

I puked not once but four times, not a little but a lot each time, and most of the time when a person pukes he feels better afterwards; not this time. The gallon of chutney was on the move, changing every body part to a gelatinous mess. I was grateful for the window but I was afraid to move toward the shower or anywhere for fear of triggering an encore performance. Right about that time I heard the hall light click on.

There stood Mom in the doorway with a surprisingly indifferent look on her face. She stared at me for a beat, maybe trying to figure out what to say. There was puke in my disheveled hair and on the window ledge to which I was hung on so that I wouldn’t tumble over sideways.

“I guess I don’t have to say anything,” she said, and she turned and left before I could even agree with her.

It was her greatest moment of parenting that I can remember, anyway.

The consequences continued the next morning. I was the living butt of Dad’s favorite joke about a drunk who comes out of a bar, gets knocked down by a German Sheppard and then run over by a VW. He then tells the ambulance driver, “The dog wasn’t so bad, it was that damn tin-can tied to his tail!” My mouth was dry all day, and my head felt like a 50 pound bag of sand. That Bible verse was right; the more spirits I put in my body, the more the Spirit dissipated. Dad was right, too; I had not just seen what alcohol can do, I had lived it. I wanted a hip flask to fling. I had relinquished control of my body and mind and I saw that it was not a good thing. The only consolation was I did not throw up in John’s car.

I’m not saying I am as smart as my dad; I still enjoy a drink every now and then and I did get drunk on subsequent occasions but not more than you can count on one hand. It’s not the mistakes we make; it’s how we respond to them.

 Life is uneven, so a college instructor once told me. She went on to add that 80% is about the best we can hope for. That could be because after all, “We see dimly now what we will see face to face later.” It’s in Corinthians. You could look it up. Mostly though there are just some of us who have to learn a truth by experiencing the denial of it. “Life’s a long song,” Ian Anderson once sang, so sometimes it takes a long time to get things right, and the Bible verse that did not come to me that weekend is in Proverbs, “Wine is a mocker; beer is a brawler,” and, well, you’re better off just believing it.

Ultimately though, Mom was right; she didn’t have to say anything because she had already instilled it. You know how musicians sometimes say, “It’s not the notes you hit, it’s the notes you don’t hit”? That’s what Mom did. She didn’t waste any notes. An eight-word reproach was enough said. Today I thank her from here to heaven for her love and wisdom. To all the loving and wise moms out there, Blessings on you All. Happy Mother’s Day.

The Contents of his Wallet

May 2015

I was on my morning walk. I came up Liberty to the canal. I saw a car parked in the shade with a man—asleep, unconscious or dead—inside. The contents of his wallet were strewn  on the ground behind his car. At first I thought no, I shouldn’t pick them up, but then I thought it would be better for me to find his driver’s license or credit card and return them to him. He was seated on the driver’s side. His head was tipped all the way back, his mouth was open and his eyes were closed. I thought he was dead, but I must have not really believed it because I did not feel and dread or fear or pity. His eyes were closed. Wouldn’t they be open if he were dead? I looked at him for a while; trying to observe him breathing but there was nothing observable.

His window was open and I was tempted to poke him on the shoulder and say, “Hey, man. You ok?” But I couldn’t decide whether to say man, bud, brother or dude, and I couldn’t decide what to say after that. Also if I had gathered the contents of his wallet and was holding them in my hand, would he thank me or think somehow that I had robbed him and was posing as the next guy to arrive on the scene.

His dog, a very young mostly Chihuahua, awoke in the back seat, stretched, and came to his window which was also open. He made a sound like a question mark and looked at me. “Hey, little mangy mutt.” I call some dogs mangy mutt. Anyone who read “Death of a Salesman” a couple of hundred times would have a certain number of the lines in the play floating near the surface. The dog made a low growling.

“Don’t worry. He’s just. I think he’s sleeping one off. Pretty sure.”

Hearing that, the dog went back to his spot in the back seat and curled up and assumed the resting position. I wasn’t convinced that it was a Wednesday gone bad with too much alcohol, but I didn’t want the dog to worry.

The car was parked on DeWitt Avenue, just opposite the canal. I’ve seen people park there before. I don’t know why they park there; it’s shady but you can’t see the water. He was asleep anyway. Maybe he threw out everything in his wallet. Why though? Was he in trouble? Had he lost his job? Was he committing suicide? Wouldn’t his eyes be open?

I went to gather his stuff but I ended up looking at a few things and then putting them back on the ground. One was an ID card for his place of employment in a hospital. Another identified him as a member of the military. Another was one of those discount cards for a variety of retail stores. No driver’s license or credit cards. Maybe someone had already taken them. Was I picking through a crime scene, leaving my thumb prints on his stuff? I got spooked and resumed my walk to the bank and then to Jamba Juice.

Nothing happened at the bank. When the clerk asked if there was anything else he could do and I said my usual, “Sure. Do you know the winning lottery number?” And he said, “Why would I give you the number? If I knew it, I’d keep for myself!” So, inasmuch as no one in the last 10 years has answered that way, I guess that’s something, but it’s a sad something.

At Jamba Juice I was hoping that the red head girl would be working the morning shift. She is bright, cheerful and optimistic. But she wasn’t there. I knew then I would walk back to DeWitt on the return trip.

I couldn’t get “Bad Moon Rising” out of my head. My back was aching and my neck was sore. The tempo of the song synched up with my stride. I tried singing some other song; “Driving” by the Kinks or “Gotta Get up in the Morning” by Harry Nilsson, but “Bad Moon” kept coming back.

Hope you got your things together.

Hope you are quite prepared to die.

Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.

One eye is taken for an eye.

Don’t go around tonight It’s bound to take your life.

There is a bad moon on the rise.

Why would Fogerty put such gloomy lyrics in an up-tempo song? Well, it was 1969 and the optimism of 1967 was going sour. A lot of people had believed if we just stopped thinking one way and thought another, everything would change for the better.

It was one of those lessons a lot of people had to unlearn. Institutions, be they political, religious, or educational, were designed for purposes other than governance of, for and by the people, and for purposes other than enlightenment of the spirit and mind. And those other purposes would be served no matter what.

Everything became a commodity, even people, and maybe it was always that way. These days it seems that the only thing all people agree upon is that things aren’t what they used to be and that things will get worse. The only thing left to do is to, as the saying goes, is to,“Be the good you want to see in the world.”

I know I have unlearned expecting things to turn out for the better if we only elect the right president, have the right religious doctrines or the right educational methodology. We splinter off into our group and talk to each other about what is wrong with the other group and how good our group is. We feel good because we’re behind the right cause and others who aren’t with us are sadly misinformed or unenlightened or are without really knowing it, the source of the problem. All a waste of time.

In the end, my dad was right. Keep everything simple. You don’t need to make God difficult: Be good, do good. Be happy, not mopey. If you want to learn about something, get a book and read about it. Or talk to someone who knows about it. Listen to people with different opinions, how else can you learn? Vote for whomever you want, but remember that they are looking to get elected, re-elected or otherwise are out for bid. When someone has a kitten, get a string and amuse the kitten. When there are little kids, play with them. No need to call them up to the world; they’ll get there in time. Meet them where they are and leave it at that. Grow a garden. Bring some tomatoes to give when you go to someone’s house. Plant some tomatoes for them. Tell jokes. Make paper airplanes. Sing songs. Play music.

Dad didn’t wait for the world to meet his expectations; he made peace with the world where he was and with as many people as he could.

In the meantime though, what do I do about this knocked out guy in the car? Who threw the contents of his wallet out of his car? How would he react if I woke him up? Would he feel embarrassed or annoyed or angry? Would he want to be left alone, even if his situation was bad? I crossed the bridge to his side of the canal. I tried to think of a better song and thought of “Trust Yourself.” There is after all, a Dylan song for every occasion.

Well, you’re on your own, you always were In a land of wolves and thieves Don’t put your hope in ungodly man Or be a slave to what somebody else believes.

That seemed to touch on just about everything I had been thinking about but the fact was I had to think about it, instead of it just floating to the top. Maybe it didn’t count.

I couldn’t see his car and thought he was gone. I was at a bad angle though and as I got close to Lane Avenue I saw his car, a grey, worn out Oldsmobile Alero. The paint was faded, the bumper was drooping, and a hubcap was missing. I stood squarely in front of the driver’s side window. There was the faint smell of roses or something sweet in the breeze between us. His chin was now resting on his chest. I took this to be a sign that he wasn’t dead, seeing how he had moved from an uncomfortable way to be asleep to a slightly better one. I again reviewed the possible greetings one might give a stranger asleep in his car. Hey man. What’s up, man? You all right, man? You ok? None of them sounded right. The impulse to speak got as close as my throat but went no further. The dog looked at me with a “Oh, it’s just you” look shook his head and resumed napping. I stood there for a few seconds, mute and wondering. Then I moved on.

I got to Liberty Street and headed west. I told myself that “Bad Moon Rising” was the wrong song because it was 11:00 in the morning. It lingered for a while and then went away. I got home and saw that I was perspiring. It was a hotter day than I thought.

Late that afternoon  I was with Kat, my older daughter. She had just turned 31 and I have been struggling for topics of conversation, not wanting to sound like “Dad” except for the fact that I am. I told her the story of the man in the car. My dad instincts told me she would be interested.

“What did you do? Did you help him?”

“I wasn’t sure how he’d react.”

“You could have helped him.”

“There was a certain amount of risk attached to it.”

“What did you do when you went back?”

“I checked on him and this time his head was down instead of tipped back.”

“That’s good. He was moving anyway.”

We were tracking the story like we used to. Poking a stick at it to see there was something in there.

“Yeah, I was figuring the same. I figured maybe he was sleeping off a really bad night.”

“Yeah.”

“I couldn’t figure about the stuff on the ground though.”

“Maybe he got mad or frustrated.” “Yeah.”

“Maybe he was just drunk and didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Yeah. So I let him sleep.”

“I’ll drive back and check on him on my way home.”

“That’d be nice.” I thought of Kat stopping by and calling out boldly to the guy and addressing his situation in a much more direct manner than I would have. I haven’t heard from her yet though, so I don’t know what happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUChZtNO4Ro