Well, that’s enough about ants, or whatever it is I was writing about. And anyway, we can be glad they’re not cockroaches. Yet I remember my father’s uncles and aunts using the term cockroach endearingly, with a smile that also signified ample affection for the nephew they’d known from birth and watched grow up on their sister and brother-in-law’s Depression-era farm — the sister and brother-in-law being my father’s parents: […]
A child’s doll has died — such an innocent, heartbreaking image, easy to accept within the context of a dream, as is the doll’s resurrection. While it’s faithfully recorded from my own experience, the passage reads like fiction; perhaps that is why, if a child in the neighborhood told me her doll had died, I would believe her, and offer whatever sympathy and help she needed, even if that help […]
Upon returning to the short piece Dream Baby, I am pleased to see how recounting a simple dream, which was pleasant enough itself, leads to a passage of memory, which then transforms itself into a kind of poetic, universal love story. While I am the hairy old uncle and grandfather, I also embody the uncles and grandfather of my childhood, their whiskery familiarity and smell. In a sense, the dream […]
My eldest brother has been gone a year and a half; our mother, ten years; our father, twenty-eight; our father’s mother and father, thirty-three; our mother’s father, sixty-nine; her mother, forty-two. Friends, family friends, relatives, loyal canine companions — the list is long. Teachers, schoolmates, barbers, insurance men, mechanics, storekeepers, fruit packers, janitors, farm help; doctors, dentists, accountants, farmers from the old neighborhood; grocery checkers, retired men in overalls, librarians, […]
Was I awake, or asleep? Was I there, or somewhere else? Banish the word or and the answer is clear: there need be no answer. That, in its own simple, strange way, is the story of my life. My grandfather, emerging from the sycamore shade on the south end of his house, barefoot and carrying a shotgun in one hand and the bloody remains of a robin in the other, […]
When I was six, shortly before Halloween, our family doctor, who lived down the road from us and around the corner, stopped by our house and told my parents in his usual blunt way, “Well, your boy has leukemia.” He’d made this grim determination upon viewing the results of blood tests I’d been given after a strange rash had broken out on my arms. I spent the next ten days […]
Cloudy and calm, with an occasional glimpse of the moon. All through the neighborhood, the robins were silent this morning. While I was growing up, there was one telephone in the house. It was in the kitchen. When we went somewhere, to stay for a week in the mountains, for instance, no one could call us. And while we were away, the only clock we had was my father’s dollar […]
I go on reading things in Emerson’s journal he thought would never see print. And yet here they are, more than a century and a half later, and so here is Emerson. Almost word for word, I remember many things said by my grandparents. And so here they are. Friends, parents, relatives, animals, places, here they are, to be forgotten and remembered for however long. And here we are. Glaciers. […]
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 […]
Yesterday afternoon I cleared the driveway of snow with one of the old manure shovels my father and grandfather used on the farm during the Great Depression and after the Second World War, and which we continued to use in later years, and which now reside, along with several other tools from that earlier time, in an old barrel in the little shed behind the house. While I was out, […]
William Michaelian 