William Michaelian

Poems, Notes, and Drawings

Tag Archive for ‘My Grandmother’

Pie Crust

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, […]

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Poor George

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 […]

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Tenderness

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. […]

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Kirk’s Nose (and other stories)

A few words about my recently departed brother — a short, incomplete remembrance, if you will: Kirk was born November 22, 1946, on our parents’ third anniversary. He was named Kourken Haig, after our father’s mother’s youngest brother, Kourken, and after our father’s older brother, Haig, who was killed in the Second World War. Kirk didn’t begin talking until he was four — then, suddenly, he started in with what […]

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Under Our Hats

I found an ancient pair of worn out jeans and cut them off a little above the knee. I’m wearing them now. I wore them early this morning while working barefoot in the garden and watering our assorted plantings and pots. Dirt, water, sun — childhood. We bought half a crate of strawberries yesterday. They’re called “Ruby June.” For whatever lucky reason, I’ve had more close-up meetings with birds. As […]

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The Great Questions

Was I sand then? That’s what my father asked when he was a child listening to family stories that took place before he was born. The ritual began when his mother first told him, You were sand then. In time, he no longer needed to ask. He simply said, I was sand then. Born in 1923. Sand again.   The Great Questions The great questions, and as many stars or […]

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Piano Man

The printed certificate with ornamental border shows that I was born in 1956, on the twentieth day of the month of May, in the small town of Dinuba, in the county of Tulare, in the central part of the San Joaquin Valley of California, southeast of the much larger town of Fresno. The third of three sons, I was named William on the third day after my glorious Sunday afternoon […]

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The Long Way to Goose Lake

The long way to Goose Lake on a bright frosty morning, birds in the sun over a field of stubble. Or is it your grandfather’s face? Yes, it is, he has returned. No, he hasn’t, he never departed. Yes, you are in his lap and you feel his warmth. And the birds are his thoughts, they are everything he remembers, they are songs of old times never quite ended, only […]

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Seesaw

Living Dramatists

After visiting the massive black walnut tree in the park by the river, we continued half a mile along the trail to murky and muddy Goose Lake, which is swollen now, to the point that we didn’t need to go see it, it came to see us. Despite its name, we have yet to see a goose there. But there were a great many ducks, gliding across the surface and […]

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