Hope is the tie rack with feathers

It wasn’t the worst Father’s Day present ever: Children everywhere have given their fathers gifts that are far more troubling. Exhibit A? Anything at all from the Sky Mall catalog. Nothing says love quite like a Hobbit chess set or tan thru swim trunks. But this gift was up there.

I was a 10-year-old Webelo. Webelos, generally, are fifth-graders transitioning from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts. The term is shorthand for “We’ll be loyal scouts,” not the Native American word for “boys who don’t bathe.” That May and June our den was working with little jigsaws, small sheets of plywood, and wooden pegs. One of my friend’s fathers was helping us craft tie racks shaped like ducks for our dads, because Father’s Day was nearing and every dad in the 1970s wanted nothing more in the world than a badly made tie rack shaped like a duck.

I have never been good at crafts or any project that involves a tool with a serrated edge. My friends know this. The other day, I was in my yard trimming dead branches from the bottom of an evergreen with a handsaw, and my next-door neighbor, Judy Brown, walked by and asked, “Do you have a permit to use one of those?” She said that her 81-year-old mother-in-law, Bev Brown, has an electric chainsaw that she loves. That evening when I asked my wife if I should get an electric chainsaw, she burst out laughing and reminded me that I am not Bev Brown.

It’s true.

I should also admit that I was never one of those kids who could ever color between the lines. It wasn’t that I was so creative; it was that I was so inept.

Which brings me back to my duck. I did a spectacularly bad job of cutting it and a worse job of painting it. It looked nothing like a duck. It looked like an amoeba. My duck was, far and away, the worst duck in the den. We’d finished painting our ducks on a Friday afternoon, and the plan was to let them dry overnight in our den leader’s garage and then pick them up on Saturday morning. We would present them to our dads on Sunday.

I had warned my mom as we went to retrieve my duck that it was kind of a train wreck. I was embarrassed by it and, in truth, disgusted with myself. The self-loathing meter was off the charts.

When we arrived, however, the first thing my mother said when she saw my duck was that she liked it and my dad would love it. This wasn’t a mother’s love; my mother always called it exactly as she saw it. Something had happened to my duck overnight and it actually looked pretty good. It was even recognizably a duck. Instantly I understood what had occurred: The night before, my friend’s dad had performed some serious plastic surgery on the amoeba. Meticulously he had shaped a duck’s bill and wings and webbed feet. He had repainted it so that the colors on the feathers didn’t run into the colors on the face. He had given the creature back its eyes.

I was furious. Looking back, it was clear that this father thought he was doing me a favor. It’s possible that what began as a tiny touch-up simply grew into a full fashion makeover. But his work was a ringing indictment of mine.

It would be three years before I would tell my dad that his Father’s Day duck was largely the den leader’s work. I confessed this when we were packing up the house to move from Connecticut to Florida. I said he didn’t really need to bring the duck with him.

But he did. He pointed to my badly painted “Happy Father’s Day” on the front and my nearly illegible signature on the back. “Those were the only parts I cared about,” he said.

Happy Father’s Day.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on June 16, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives in three weeks. You can learn more about it here.)

UVM senior treks back into her Armenian past

Just how small is this world really? Sarah Aghjayan, 21, has been going to the University of Vermont since the autumn of 2010 and will begin her senior year there this September. Our paths have never crossed in Vermont. Yet last month we met seven time zones to the east in a now largely Kurdish section of Turkey.

Sarah and I were two of seven Armenian-American pilgrims on a journey into the geography of our past. I’ve chosen the word geography carefully. Her father, George Aghjayan, was with us and he was quite literally charting our route via GPS and locking in the coordinates. Once upon a time — actually, up until 98 years ago — this part of Turkey was a land of Turks, Kurds, Assyrians and Armenians. In the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915, three out of every four Armenians in the Ottoman Empire — 1.5 million people — were systematically slaughtered and the hallmarks of their culture here all but obliterated. Over the course of one week in May, the seven of us traveled from village to village to see the remains of the monasteries and churches, some massive, and the communities that anchored this part of Historic Armenia.

And among the places we visited was a tiny Kurdish community now called Yazibashi. A century ago, when it was populated with Armenians, it was known as Sakrat. The hamlet is a far cry from the Boston suburbs where Sarah grew up, her family diehard Patriots fans and her father an executive with a software company that specializes in structured finance. But some of her Armenian roots are here. This is where her great-grandfather, Giragos Der Manouelian, was born. All that remains of the Armenian church in Sakrat today is a part of the altar, a stone arch, but this is the very church where Giragos was baptized. The arch towers over a small barn and a single-story cement block home.

“I never knew my great-grandfather,” Sarah told me, “but I’ve heard my dad recount numerous stories of him, so this was a very special experience for me. It’s very emotional for me.”

This was Sarah’s second pilgrimage with her father: “I make these journeys to learn more about my family’s history. It’s not everyday that Armenians get to visit the remote villages of our ancestors and speak with the people who live there now.” Usually, she said, the villagers are gracious. When we were in Sakrat last month, the farmer who owns the land that once was the Armenian church insisted that we stay and share glasses of thick tahn — a yogurt drink — with him.

None of us brought up the reality that much of this land once belonged to Armenians, because that wasn’t why we were there. This was about what Thomas Moore calls the “care of the soul,” not real estate. As we sipped our tahn, George and Sarah wanted to be sure that our translator conveyed to our host how grateful they were that he was preserving the arch. He wasn’t tearing it down, he wasn’t allowing it to sink further into the earth.

That’s one of the things that made the journey so poignant: Most of the time, there is no one or no group looking after these remnants. Moreover, the ruins we saw were often parts of active, thriving communities as recently as 98 years ago. This wasn’t Pompeii. These weren’t medieval castles in Scotland. There may still be people alive today who sat in some of these pews.

Which perhaps explains what Sarah said was her favorite moment on the trip: Our visit to Ktuts Island in Lake Van, and the ancient monastery there that’s now home only to thousands of seagulls. “Armenians have a knack for picking the most beautiful locations for their monasteries and churches, and that one takes the cake,” she said. “The monastery was in decent shape, which made the experience even better; there was no heart-wrenching destruction to it.”

Ruins, according to Moore, “show us that something remains of beauty in a thing when its function has departed.” It’s a part of the reason we’re drawn to them. This was Sarah’s second journey to her ancestral homeland. It’s clear that it won’t be her last.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on June 8, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 9, 2013.)

In a Turkish town that had 10,000 Armenians, now there is only one

A woman I met last month in southeastern Turkey is going to die, probably sometime soon. Asiya’s death will not be covered by any news service, and for all but a few people in her small village of Chunkush, she will not be missed. Even the relatives who love her will probably think to themselves, well, she was 98 years old. Or 99. Or, if she survives until 2015, somewhere in the neighborhood of a century. She will have lived a long life.

When I met Asiya in May, her daughter brought me strong Kurdish tea and fresh strawberries from their yard, and when I return to her village someday and find that she has indeed passed away, I suspect I’m going to weep.

Why cry for a woman I met but once, who lived a long life and who couldn’t understand a word I said? Who spoke only Turkish, a language in which I know how to say only “please” and “thank you”?

Because Asiya is what some people call a hidden Armenian, and she is the last surviving Armenian in Chunkush.

I met her when I was traveling with six Armenian American friends through a part of Turkey that many Armenians (including me) refer to as Historic Armenia. We were in a region that today is largely Kurdish but as recently as 98 years ago was a mixture of Kurds, Turks, Assyrians and Armenians. We were making a pilgrimage to view the ruins of Armenian churches and monasteries, the remnants of a culture obliterated from this corner of the Earth in the Armenian genocide. During the First World War, 1.5 million Armenians were systematically annihilated — three out of every four living in the Ottoman Empire.

On our fifth day, we visited Chunkush, where until 1915 there was a thriving community of 10,000 Armenians. The ruins of the church loom over you. The town was almost entirely Armenian. Over a few nightmarish days that summer, Turkish gendarmes and Kurdish chetes — killing parties — descended on the village and marched almost every Armenian two hours away to a ravine called Dudan, where they shot, bayoneted or simply threw them into a chasm of several hundred feet. One of the gendarmes pulled Asiya’s mother from the line at the edge of the ravine, however, because he thought she was pretty. He decided he’d marry her. And so she was spared — one of the very few Armenians who were saved that summer day in 1915.

My companions and I hadn’t expected to find Asiya when we journeyed to Chunkush. We simply wanted to see the ruins of the church. Most of the villagers acknowledged that once upon a time Armenians had lived in Chunkush, but they were quick to add — whenever we asked what had happened to them — that at some point they had all “moved away.”

The truth was, they were still there, whatever remained of their bones deteriorating at the bottom of the Dudan chasm. We didn’t think there were any living Armenians in the town.

But as we were leaving, a thin fellow in his 60s, with a deeply weathered face and a ball cap, raced up to our van and banged on the door. We had been there an hour, and word had spread that Americans were in town. We had to meet his mother-in-law, he said.

Our Kurdish driver worried that this was the beginning of a nasty international incident: Seven Americans kidnapped or killed. But the fellow was desperate, so we agreed to come meet Asiya. My friend Khatchig Mouradian, editor of the Armenian Weekly in the United States, speaks Turkish and translated.

I have met survivors of the Armenian genocide before, including my grandparents. But meeting Asiya was different. She wasn’t in Washington or Paris or Beirut. She wasn’t a part of the Armenian diaspora, where we usually find the few remaining survivors of the genocide. Here was someone whose mother had been at the edge of the gorge — and who was still living where, more than likely, her grandparents and her father had been executed. Where her ancestral culture had been exterminated.

After the massacre, the town of 10,000 Armenians was reinvented as a town of 10,000 Kurds. Here was someone whose mother had heard the endless gunshots. The crash of the bodies on the rocks. The wails of the children. 

She and her mother had grown up and grown old, aware of who and what they were — Armenian — but forced to conform and remain silent. That was the price of survival in the days after the genocide, and it’s a custom that, in small villages such as Chunkush, endures today. That is, perhaps, the very definition of a hidden Armenian.

Whenever we asked Asiya about being Armenian, she would shake her head ruefully and grow silent. One time her daughter chimed in: “No. We can’t talk about that.”

Whenever we asked what her mother had told her of the chasm, she would look down and murmur: “I was too young. I don’t remember.” Sometimes she would begin a sentence, “My mother said . . .” but then her voice would trail off.

At one of those moments when she paused, I took her hand. It was a reflex, and I had no idea if this was a cultural faux pas. But she wrapped my fingers in hers; her grip was powerful. She looked at me from beneath her headdress with eyes that were at once among the saddest and the strongest I’ve ever seen. I understood instantly why her son-in-law, a very good man, wanted us to meet her: It was because she wanted to meet us. She wanted to meet other Armenians.

Today there are but a handful of living survivors of the Armenian genocide. When the centennial arrives in 2015, there will be fewer still. I hope that Asiya will be with us, because I plan to return to Chunkush that year. No one from the village is going to commemorate the 10,000 who died in that chasm, so it will be up to people like me to make that effort — and, yes, to embrace the Asiyas of the world who were there.

(This essay appeared originally in the Washington Post on June 8, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” goes on sale on July 8.)

It’s summer! Time to buckle up for redcoats and crummy joints!

Back in the day, we here in the Champlain Valley often made the redcoats’ lives hell – the breakfast brawl at Hubbardton notwithstanding. But my parents always had a soft spot in their hearts for one particular redcoat stationed at Fort Ticonderoga in the 1960s.

Okay, he wasn’t a real redcoat. He was, perhaps, a college kid on summer break earning a little money and sweating off a semester’s worth of keg beer beneath his regulation British Army uniform. But here is, more or less, what happened.

My parents had put my older brother and me in the backseat of the station wagon – a blue woodie – and driven four or five hours north from our home in Westchester County. (I should note that my brother and I probably weren’t always in the backseat. We were just as likely to have been hanging out in the cargo area. Seat belts back then were viewed as a serious inconvenience. The last thing anyone wanted was to be buckled into the seat if you smashed into a tanker truck and had to get out fast. Besides, how could my brother and I wrestle in a moving vehicle if we were strapped into our seats?) It was one of those classic summer vacation car trips, where we went north to Lake George and Fort Ticonderoga, and then west to Niagara Falls.

And while I don’t remember much, I remember two moments: The redcoat. And the brothel. More on the brothel in a moment.

I was three and my brother was eight. Based on the photos from the trip that remain, we looked like we were pulled straight from an episode of “Mad Men:” Crew cuts and short pants. We are always posed in front of Revolutionary War era cannons. Among my annoying habits (and, apparently, I had plenty), was that I used to suck my fingers. Not my thumb, which normal, screwed-up three-year-olds depended on, but fingers. I used to suck the ring and middle fingers. Simultaneously. It drove my parents wild, but they seemed incapable of stopping me.

But one summer afternoon, the redcoat accomplished in nine words what my parents had been trying to make happen for months. For years, for all I know. As we were passing the redcoat at Fort Ticonderoga, he said to me in the voice of a drill sergeant, “Soldier! Get those fingers out of your mouth – now!” According to family lore, I was awed. I listened. And I never put my fingers in my mouth again.

The next day we motored on to Niagara Falls. Just before we arrived there, however, the station wagon’s transmission died. The woodie was towed to a garage near Buffalo and we went to the motel across the street from the garage to spend the night. It was – and here I am being kind – a dump. The fellow behind the counter begged my parents not to stay there when he saw they had their children with them. I weighed in with one of those remarks mothers memorialize in baby books: “What a crummy joint.” And, yes, if it wasn’t actually a brothel, it was what we euphemistically call a “hot sheets motel.” My mother made us sleep in our cloths on the bedspreads. (Given what we now know about motel bedspreads, this may in reality have been the far more disgusting solution. The sheets are at least washed.)

I share these two Wonder Bread memories with you because many of you are finalizing your own summer vacation plans. Your car trips to great destinations. Your roadside adventures for July and August.

My advice? Think big. Expect the unexpected. Be flexible.

And, yes, check your transmission.

Now buckle up and take your fingers out of your mouth. It’s already June and those hot sheets motels fill up fast.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 2. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives in five weeks.)

The gods must be crazy after all

HERE’S THE setup: A Coca-Cola bottle falls from a low-flying airplane over an undeveloped corner of Africa. How undeveloped? The local tribesman who finds it — as well as the rest of the villagers — have no idea what it is and presume it’s a gift from the gods. Unfortunately, the empty bottle, with its myriad uses, unleashes almost everyone’s baser instincts.

I am referring to a 1984 movie called “The Gods Must Be Crazy,” a comedy that much of the world loved and I loathed. Seriously. I nearly walked out. I was even a little offended by what I perceived as its Orientalism: Its Western condescension toward a culture that’s less developed.

So, why am I citing a nearly three-decade old movie that I detested? Because I learned last month that the gods indeed might be crazy.

I was traveling with companions through Turkey’s easternmost provinces, a part of the world that is very different from cosmopolitan Istanbul or such popular Turkish tourist destinations as Ephesus and Nemrut. The regions are largely Kurdish, but as recently as 98 years ago they were a mixture of Kurds, Turks, Assyrians, and Armenians. It is a part of Turkey that many Armenians (including me) refer to as Historic Armenia.

While driving from Van to Diyarbakir, we detoured to a small Kurdish village near Bitlis to see the ruins of an old Armenian church. What remains is now a barn. As we were leaving, one of village elders pulled aside my friend, Khatchig Mouradian, who speaks Turkish, and said he had a relic the Armenians had left behind when they’d moved away, and he wanted to know how valuable it was. He was hoping that Khatchig could translate for him the mysterious Armenian writing on the bottom.

Khatchig could indeed read it. But so could I. So could have most any third or fourth grader in any elementary school in Boston — because it wasn’t Armenian. It was English.

The relic was a run-of-the-mill porcelain plate from the 1960s. It was a Currier and Ives sort of print of a horse carriage approaching a post office. The wording on the bottom? “Royal Tudor Ware. Staffordshire, England.” I found this very plate — or one just like it — going for a few dollars on eBay. I think anyone who brought the plate to the “Antiques Roadshow’’ would have been laughed off the set. It wasn’t valuable. It wasn’t a relic. And it sure as heck wasn’t Armenian. Trust me: The Armenian alphabet looks as much like the Latin alphabet as a Picasso looks like a Monet. We’re talking apples and oranges.

But it was clear that the elder and the community members who crowded around Khatchig as he translated the few words on the bottom revered this plate. This was — forgive me — their Coca-Cola bottle. Sure, it wasn’t a gift from the gods, but in the eyes of this village, it was an item of totemic importance that might have serious commercial value.

Now, it would be easy to focus on the reality that there are parts of this globe that can’t distinguish between a piece of mass-produced 1960s porcelain and a relic. But that’s not newsworthy. That’s a bad movie from 1984. Moreover, this village had cars and electricity and at least one dude with rock ‘n’ roll as the ringtone on his cellphone.

Here, however, is what fascinated me — what made this comedy in reality a tragedy. The Armenians of the village didn’t just “move away.” At least most of them didn’t. Most of them, in all likelihood, were among the 1.5 million Armenians systematically annihilated during the Armenian Genocide that began in 1915. Three out of every four Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were killed, sometimes by their own Kurdish or Turkish neighbors.

I have no idea how that plate wound up in that village. For all I know, it fell from a plane like a Coke bottle and managed somehow not to shatter. Obviously it never belonged to the Armenians.

But even if the Kurds had shown us an actual plate from 1915, it would not have been worth dying for. It would not have been worth killing for.

The real value of that Staffordshire dinner plate from the 1960s? A symbol of the ignorance and misunderstanding that can drive a wedge between people who, once upon a time, might have managed to live together in peace.

Chris Bohjalian is the author of 16 books. His new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” comes out on July 9.

This column appeared originally in the Boston Globe  on May 31, 2013.

The medals have finally come home

U.S. Army private Corrado Piccoli was killed in France in the summer of 1944. This is, in most ways, a very old story – 69 years old, to be precise. Moreover, Piccoli was only one of the tens of thousands of Americans killed in battle that season. Posthumously, he was awarded the Purple Heart.

And yet his story is newsworthy now. Why? Because of that medal – and because of the efforts of Georgia, Vermont’s Zachariah Fike, a captain in the Vermont Army National Guard. Piccoli’s Purple Heart was the first of 60 that Fike has rescued from pawnshops, antique stores, and online auctions and returned to the recipients’ families. He is in the process of finding the rightful owners of 180 more.

“People sometimes think it’s a scam and I want money when I first track down a family,” Fike told me over coffee at Muddy Waters on Main Street in Burlington, Vermont. “But it’s the right thing to do. I consider myself a compatriot. As Americans, we owe these people so much.” To find Piccoli’s family demanded serious detective work: A trip to Watertown, New York. and the high school there. Unearthing a 1941 high school yearbook. Finding the soldier’s grave in the cemetery. An Internet search for family members. Finally he was able to return Piccoli’s medal to Adeline Rockko, now 86 years old, and today the medal is displayed at the Italian American Civic Association in Watertown, New York.

Fike, 32, is a Purple Heart recipient himself. He’s a self-described army brat, born in Germany to a pair of Army drill sergeants. (His mother, he says, was among the first female drill sergeants.) In the small hours of the morning on September 11, 2010, he was wounded in a Katyusha rocket attack at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

Without exception, the families have been profoundly grateful to have the lost medals returned. Fike shared with me an example of how these precious mementoes are lost – and found:

“A married couple in Pennsylvania is exercising on their community track, and as the husband bends down to tie his shoe, he sees a Purple Heart in the snow. The owner had given the medal to his granddaughter, before dying in 2009. The granddaughter carried it with her in her pocketbook. But then her car is broken into and her purse is stolen. When the thieves were emptying the purse, they threw the medal away.”

Whenever Fike comes across a Purple Heart on ebay or in a pawnshop, he buys it with his own money. Before returning it to the family – often in a ceremony with the family and a local chapter of the Military Order of the Purple Heart – he pays to have it mounted and framed. He covers his own travel to wherever the family lives: “We try to honor and symbolize who the soldier was – to celebrate the sacrifice and what he meant to his country.”

To fund his efforts, he has now started a non-profit organization called “Purple Hearts Reunited.”

“I knew this was my calling as soon as I got started,” he said. “It’s my mission in life. I’m giving these families a ceremony that is meaningful and joyful, and they will always have that memory.”

And, of course, they will also have the medal.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day – a day in which we remember our veterans who have died. It’s a tradition that dates back, at the very least, to 1868. Thanks to Fike, now soldiers such as Corrado Piccoli are not merely remembered: Their legacies have been linked with their sacrifice. The medals have come home.

* * *

To learn more about Fike’s project to return Purple Hearts to their owners or families, visitwww.purpleheartsreunited.org .

The column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 26, 2013.

Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives in six weeks.

Hollywood’s blockbuster season is here: Duck.

It was over thirty years ago that the Hollywood Blockbuster Season gave us “Odorama.” Yup, 1981’s version of 3-D was a scratch and sniff card with numbered aromas. When a number flashed on the screen, we in the audience would scratch. It was a John Waters gimmick for his film, “Polyester,” which has been used only sparingly since. I saw the film, but all I recall are the ovals on the scratch and sniff card – and one “aroma:” stinky shoes.

We are now once more in the midst of the Hollywood Blockbuster Season, which is kind of like hurricane season except all of the mayhem is digitally rendered and the only casualty is the nation’s collective hearing. I shudder when I think of how many hearing hair cells in my ears have been pummeled by Cineplex explosions, engines, and screams. As a middle-aged man, I may actually have more hair in my ears than I have hair cells. It makes a guy miss “Odorama.”

Nevertheless, I like this season. I really do. When it comes to movies, I have the emotional depth of a thirteen-year-old. A new Batman movie? I’m there. A new Jackass movie? My wife and I are there together. (Diligent readers will recall that my wife and I did not merely stand in line for a recent Jackass film, we were among the first in line on opening night. We were also – by far – the oldest people there. When it comes to movies, apparently neither of us has a whole lot of pride.)

These days a summer blockbuster is likely to come at us – quite literally – in 3-D. We have the technology and so we use it. Baz Luhrmann’s 3-D “The Great Gatsby” opened earlier this month. J.J. Abrams’s 3-D “Star Trek into Darkness” opened this weekend.

Historically, this has been the case with most technologies: When we can do it, we will do it. Among the rare cases when we have not leveraged an invention are the nuclear bomb – at least so far, thank heavens – and supersonic passenger flight. The Concorde allowed people to fly between North America and Europe in less than half the time that it took a traditional passenger jet, but in its nearly three decades of operation, there were relatively few takers. Saving a few hours wasn’t worth the extra cost.

But filmmakers are using 3-D a lot, especially for the movies that premiere in the summer. As anyone who has seen Luhrmann’s 3-D “Gatsby” knows, we don’t merely don the plastic glasses now for the likes of Iron Man, Superman, and Thor. We don them for James Gatz and Daisy Buchanan. Meanwhile, consumers are starting to spend serious scratch to bring 3-D TVs and home theatres into their living rooms.

And while 3-D is not a bad thing and it’s certainly not a gimmick thing, I wonder if it is quite so necessary. Is it as critical a cinematic breakthrough as sound – as talking pictures? As replacing black and white film with color film? As, for that matter, transitioning from film to digital technologies? To computer generated imagery and special effects?

The short answer? No. The truth is, we had 3-D in the 1950s. Who could possibly forget the 1953 3-D science fiction classic, “Robot Monster?” Okay, that’s a bad example. But you see my point. And while 3-D is better now and has the benefits of being married to CGI technology, I’m still not sure it’s essential for most movies. My favorite moment in Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” was that riveting, climactic scene toward the end when Daisy must choose between her husband and her lover. And that was all about writing and screenwriting and acting and directing.

Am I a dinosaur? Maybe. But I don’t think so. I just prefer my 3-D to be in the service of James Kirk — rather than James Gatz.

(This article appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 19, 2013. Chris’s new novel, The Light in the Ruins, arrives on July 8.)