Today is the birthday of my father’s little sister, Marian. It is also the anniversary of my grandfather’s death in 1990 and the day the ancient orthodox Armenian Church observes Christmas — except in Jerusalem, where the Brotherhood at the Monastery of St. James follows an older calendar and Christmas falls on a later date. In the dimly lit, incense-laden sanctuary of St. James itself, there is a nook where […]
My sixty-fifth birthday. As much as I love the instrument, I do not play the mandolin. But I can still sing in the key of the place I am in. May 20, 2021 . [ 1109 ]
Adults, intent on fences, wishing their backyards were bigger. Children, on swings and trampolines, as light and free as birds. May 16, 2021 . All of Us I climb the corner pine, my cousin ahead on the branch above. It’s our birthday month. Higher and higher. Needles and bark. When we come down, we’re sixty-five. Some say age. I say luck. We run a race. We hide. We throw clods. […]
A peal of thunder so loud and so near, the windows rattle and the house shakes. Or, to put it more succinctly, a skyquake. To happen upon a spring while walking through meadow and wood, and to find strawberries bubbling up from the ground. Or, to put it more succinctly, a mindquake. Suddenly awakening upon the completion of one’s sixty-third trip around the sun, to the voice and touch of […]
Surely you can imagine the street, the stones, the carriages, the table, the coffee, and the coming revolution. Or maybe you’re just thinking about an old friend, because today is his birthday. You remember sitting near the curb, beneath a tree, and how your cup somehow became full of tiny spring spiders, but not his. And then, the last time you were to meet, you waited alone, not knowing […]
My mother grew sweet alyssum in the bed by the porch. That is my childhood. There is more, of course. Her birthday on the Fourth. And the force that transformed us. Mind gone, her body a torch. Mine gone, to alyssum. And a smile that could be a rainbow, or door. A limb to sing from? A wind chime? A breeze? An arch? [ 18 ]
Or the time after the war my father walked the horse and plow several miles to the north side of town and another farm to do a job for two dollars — that plow there behind the house, surrounded by next year’s bluebells, if you can imagine them — or him, smiling at his good fortune and at the vineyard beyond — less one brother. Or just the other day, […]
William Michaelian 