Mother’s Day — by the book

If you are a little boy and want to test your mother’s love, color in the leaves on the dust jacket of her first edition of Harper Lee’s novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Or draw the Starship Enterprise and a Klingon battle cruiser in the sky on her first edition of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” I did both.

In all fairness, I’m not sure my mother viewed either book as an “investment.” They just happened to be first editions because my mother was a voracious reader and bought both novels soon after they were published. Nevertheless, she made it clear when I shared my work with her that she would prefer that I didn’t use book covers as coloring books in the future.  

She had, in hindsight, a pretty impressive library, and when I was a boy the books sat in long rows of floor-to-ceiling bookcases that one of my father’s best friends, Bob George, built against the dark wood paneling of our family room. And it was a pretty eclectic collection: Alongside the Saul Bellows and the Philip Roths, there was a lot of stuff that was seriously steamy. We’re not talking handcuffs-on-the-cover steamy, but plenty of passages that I couldn’t wait to share with my friends. Exhibit A? Xavier Hollander’s “The Happy Hooker.” Exhibit B? Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather.”

I’ve thought a lot about my mother’s library lately, and not merely because today is Mother’s Day. My most recent novel channels select moments from my childhood, and as I have talked about the book on the road, I’ve found myself flashing back to my boyhood – and, in some ways, why I write books for a living in the first place. My father always believed that my mother was instrumental in my becoming a writer, if only because she was always reading and sharing her love of fiction with me.

But here is one footnote that I never really focused on until this spring: The way it was my blond, blue-eyed Swedish mother – not my Armenian father – who helped connect me to my Armenian literary ancestry. Over the years, she bought me a lot of books, but among them were three that I recall instantly: “My Name is Aram,” Pulitzer Prize-winning writer William Saroyan’s tales of growing up amidst the Armenian community of Fresno, California; “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh,” Franz Werfel’s magisterial epic of the 4,000 Armenians who held off the Turkish Army in the first summer of the Armenian Genocide; and Michael Arlen’s memoir of his reconnection with his Armenian heritage, “Passage to Ararat” – a winner of the National Book Award.

My mother died when I was a much younger man and struggling sometimes mightily and sometimes pathetically to carve out a career as a writer. Given that she was a pretty astute reader, she must have realized that my earliest books were utter train wrecks. Even a mother’s love couldn’t have made her blind to the disaster that was my “apprentice” work. Here is the first sentence from my first published novel: “Lisa Stone slept curled in a ball, a grown woman rolled on her side into a croissant.”

But she kept giving me books. Certainly part of the reason was simply that we both loved to read. But she also knew that I loved to write. Looking back, my sense is that many of the books she gave me were presents born somewhere in that foggy intersection between inspiration and hope. They were a mother’s love made manifest in pulp and ink and glue.

Which is, of course, one of the many things that good mothers do. They prod and they pray and they hope. They are encouraging; they are the last to give up. I had one of those moms. My daughter does now.

Happy Mother’s Day.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on May 12, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives in less than two months now.)

Hope springs eternal: Play ball!

You might not know it from what I share in this column, but I played some pretty serious football and baseball as a boy.

First of all, I was on the same high school football team – the illustrious Bronxville Broncos of Westchester County, N.Y. – as Roger Goodell. Yup, that Roger Goodell.  NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. The only difference between us was that he starred at tight end and it was going to take a bus accident in which two-thirds of the team broke their legs for me ever to play in a game. The one time my name appeared in any newspaper in the context of football was when our field goal kicker and I had to swap jerseys so he could play cornerback that afternoon. He happened to kick a winning field goal that day that was, by high school standards, spectacularly long. I got the credit in a newspaper story and, yes, felt pretty horrible. In any case, I was on Roger’s team.

And one year when I was a Little League baseball pitcher, I made the All Star team. Not kidding. I started the All Star game and gave up, I believe, a thousand runs. Okay, maybe not a thousand. But a lot. It might have been as many as eighteen. My strength as a pitcher was pinpoint control, which is indeed rare in Little League. I didn’t walk a lot of people. Unfortunately, my fastball topped out at about ten miles an hour. Umpires and batters alike would doze off waiting for the ball to travel from the pitcher’s mound to home plate. During that All Star game, my control eluded me. The game might still be going on if the coach hadn’t finally given me the hook.

I mention this because Little League baseball is back. I live no more than 150 yards from the baseball field here in Lincoln, Vermont, and while I don’t watch a lot of games, every season I will watch a few. Eight years ago, when my daughter was still in the Lincoln Elementary School, I knew who most of the ballplayers were. Now I haven’t a clue.

Of course, when I would watch an occasional game two decades ago, before my daughter was born, I didn’t know the names of most of the ballplayers either. Neither did Ken Lougee. Who was Ken Lougee? Ken was a neighbor here in Lincoln, a much older fellow who passed away years and years ago. But when Ken was an old man and I was a young man, sometimes we would watch the games together and talk about baseball and, yes, the meaning of life. Neither of us had an answer, but it didn’t matter because part of the meaning of life is simple human connection. He would carry his aluminum lawn chair with the nylon webbing to the grass on the small hill on the third base side of the diamond, and there we would discuss how we had come to Lincoln and the state of the world. Ken was smart and funny and kind. Our conversations would be interrupted – as are all conversations at a Little League game – by the metallic ping of baseball and bat, and we would stop in mid-sentence to watch what was transpiring on the field.

Which brings me back to my own career as a pitcher. Perhaps my favorite memory of my years on the mound is this. It is late on a Saturday morning and the game is perhaps half over. Between batters, I gaze into the small bleachers along the third base side and I’m surprised because there is my father. He had been on a business trip and wasn’t due home until much later that day. But he has, I realize, caught an earlier flight. And there he is, watching.

“Baseball is continuous,” poet Donald Hall has reminded us, “like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.”

Maybe that’s why I watch. Maybe that’s why Ken and I used to watch together.

It’s that time of the year. Suddenly it’s spring, even here in Vermont.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press.  Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives in two months. You can learn more about it here.)

What it means to be Boston Strong

It has been almost two weeks now since the Boston Marathon ended in a nightmarish terrorist attack; it has been nine days since Boston was paralyzed by a manhunt and Watertown was a battleground. The news cycles are moving on.

But among the elements of the story that will stay with me a long time is this: The reaction of my good friend, Khatchig Mouradian. Khatchig lives in Watertown and the firefight between Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev and the Boston police occurred in his neighborhood. When I woke up that Friday morning, April 19, and saw Watertown was in the news, I texted him to make sure he was safe. His response? “I just gave an interview to a newspaper in Turkey. I said I’m so used to explosions that I slept through them.”

Khatchig grew up in Beirut during that country’s cataclysmic civil war. He spent so many nights in bomb shelters teaching his younger sisters to play chess – taking their mind off the reality that their home was, once again, being shelled – that both girls would grow into Lebanese chess champions and win numerous regional and international tournaments.

Likewise, there are my friends from Israel who, at different points in their lives, knew that any moment a bus might burst into flames or a missile might explode in the street.

Obviously our country is not exempt from terror. At different times in the past two decades, we have been targeted by foreigners and by our own citizens. We all know the worst examples of each: The attack on the World Trade Center in Manhattan on the one hand, and the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, on the other.

And we will be attacked again. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security may unravel and stop a thousand schemes, but eventually they will miss one – as they did with the brothers Tsarnaev. This is not a criticism of either organization; it’s only an acknowledgment that perfection is impossible in this game. We’re not talking nine innings; we’re talking every single day of every single year. And this is a very violent world.

But we don’t live under the shadow of terrorism the way some parts of the world do. We don’t for two reasons: First of all, because even though perfection is impossible, we come impressively close. Second, because even though we know the violently alienated are out there, we don’t let them win. We go about our lives.

Sometimes, I’m frustrated with our country. Most recently I was aggravated when we failed to achieve meaningful gun control, despite the horrific slaughter at an elementary school in Connecticut last December. But more times than not I am proud of who we are and what we accomplish. The heroism of the runners and doctors and first responders that followed the Boston Marathon bombing is another legacy to that tragic moment in our history. So was the work of our law enforcement officials. The spirit of Boston in the days after the attack has left me moved and inspired.

Which brings me back to my friend in Watertown. Khatchig is the editor of “The Armenian Weekly” and a genocide scholar. If anyone understands the historical context of violence and terror, it’s a genocide scholar. If anyone understands a world where people detonate bombs designed to kill innocent people, it’s a fellow who grew up in Beirut. He also happens to be one of the smartest people I know. This was his response when I asked him what it felt like to witness the sort of violence he knew from his childhood and young adulthood in Lebanon occur in his neighborhood in Massachusetts:

“It is when hatred and violence strike close to home – whether home is Beirut or Watertown – that our true commitment to the values and principles on which we pride ourselves is tested. Terror is defeated by upholding those principles – across the board and all the time – and not by renouncing them with the excuse of making home a safer place. That, for me, is homeland security.”

It will be long after the news cycles have moved on that we have fully regained our equilibrium. In the meantime, I will take pride in the people of eastern Massachusetts, and comfort in the courageous way they have, pure and simple, gone on living. That’s what it means to win. That’s what it means to be Boston Strong.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on April 28, 2013. Chris’s new novel, “The Light in the Ruins,” arrives on July 9.)

It’s in the bag — even the air horn, duct tape, and corkscrew

The other day we had some massive trees cut down in our yard and the fellow taking them down wanted to be sure that he didn’t accidentally incinerate the center of Lincoln by dropping a six-story maple on the lamppost at the edge of our driveway and causing an electrical fire. That would have put a damper on everyone’s afternoon. So he first made sure that the wiring in the lamppost wasn’t live. Then, after the tree was gone and he was wiring the lamp back together, he asked me if I had some electrical tape. I said sure and was about to run into the basement of the house to get some.

Before I had started for the front door, however, my wife said to him, “Here. I have some.” Then she reached into her purse and tossed him a roll.

“You keep electrical tape in your purse?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Of course.”

I should note that my wife is not an electrician and her purse is hip and small and Italian. It’s from San Gimignano, Italy, a village that is known for its medieval towers, its hip little purses, and its two (Two!) museums of torture. Yup, bring the kids: It’s Disney designed by Torquemada.

In any case, I was curious what else women keep in their purses. So I asked. Here are a tiny few of their answers.

• Lecia Balian: “Empty Ziploc baggies for collecting seeds or plant cuttings. A magnet. An ace bandage. A micro-recorder. Ear buds. Tic Tacs. Lip gloss. A vintage German folding knife. Two Pilot pens. Toothpicks. My wallet.”
• Bobbie Moser: “An anti-static sheet that you use in clothes dryers. I rub it on my head to take the static out of my hair on winter days.”
• Deedee Swenson: “Water purifying tablets.”
• Rose Mary Muench, who happens to be my wonderful aunt and a second mother to me: “Swiss Army knife (your grandmother, Higoohi, always had a knife in the car to peel fruit for trips to the Armenian Alps), hearing aid batteries, black indelible marker, craft glue, pen, glasses, tape measure, toothpicks, Tic Tacs, cell phone, and the usual stuff.”
• Sarah Potwin: “A bottle of maple syrup. As displaced Vermonters, we’re disgusted to find regular syrup at restaurants here in Florida.”
• Judy McCarthy: “A small oral airway in case I need to do CPR.”
• Ferg Pat: “An air horn that my mother’s husband found at a tag sale.”
• Jan Morse: “A telescoping back scratcher.”
• Seaason Violi Whitney: “My purse is pretty standard for a mom of five. Snacks, straws, napkins, crumbs, spare change. But I have a box in the car that has some ‘emergency’ supplies: pantyhose (for a spare fan belt and as a filter or sieve) tampons (they make a great water filter), duct tape (duh), aluminum foil (works as a reflector or an insulator), plastic wrap. And I have the standards: water, flashlight, blankets, crackers, cans of food, and a can opener.”
• Liz’beth Statska: “Blister balm stick for sad feet.”
• Connie Ogle: “I used to keep a corkscrew, until the TSA got touchy about us carrying them on planes.”
• Sharon Hopwood: “A copy of the U.S. Constitution.”
• Julie Foster: “A harmonica. It makes me feel spontaneous and fun.”
• Deborah Bird: “A leash, in case I find a loose dog.”
• Lorinda Henry: “A small cotton towel to cut down on paper waste in bathrooms.”
• Elizabeth Seidler: “Duct tape. It can be used to restrain someone on a plane. A baseball. A small heavy flashlight with a fairly long wrist cord. It can also be used as a weapon. A safety pin or two on my key chain. Those are my staples.”

The biggest surprise of all, however, may belong to Stephanie Furtsch. One evening when she was at a Chinese restaurant with her son and daughter-in-law, Andrew Furtsch and Joan Heaton, she saw her grandson, Matt, was struggling mightily with his chopsticks. No problem, according to Andrew: “My mom reaches into her purse and pulls out a set of plastic, one-piece, child-friendly chopsticks.”

Now that’s – to allow myself a very bad pun – clutch.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on April 21, 2013. The paperback of Chris’s novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” is now on sale.)

We are still the mountain

IN THE coming days, Armenians around the world will come together to acknowledge what I have come to call “The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About.” April 24 marks the 98th anniversary of the night the Armenian religious and intellectual leaders were rounded up in Constantinople — and the start of the Armenian genocide.

And yet most of North America probably can’t find Armenia on a map. Certainly only a few of us could pinpoint the mountain of Musa Dagh. Yet Musa Dagh has become for me — an American who is half-Armenian and half-Swedish — the story that brings the Armenian genocide to life.

In the summer of 1915, roughly 4,000 Armenians from six villages in southeast Turkey refused to be marched from their homes by Turkish soldiers and gendarmes into the Syrian desert to die. Roughly 1.5 million of the two million Armenians in Turkey would perish in the First World War, many of them by starvation, dehydration, and disease in the unforgiving Syrian sands.

But not those 4,000. They climbed Musa Dagh, at the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, and used rifles and a few captured cannons to hold off the Turkish army for nearly two months. The women sewed a flag with a red cross on it and dangled it over the side of the cliff that faced the sea, and eventually a French battleship saw it and rescued the Armenians.

If anyone knows bits and pieces of this story, it is likely through German writer Franz Werfel’s magisterial 1933 novel, “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.” The novel was an international bestseller when it was published, though it was loathed early on by the Nazis. When the Germans were mercilessly putting down the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1944, the soldiers were surprised by how many copies of the novel they found among the dead Jewish fighters. It was my Swedish mother who gave me a copy when I was teenager.

Last year I saw that hand-sewn red cross flag. I held one of the rifles the Armenians had used from atop Musa Dagh. The flag and the artifacts sit in a community room beside the school and church in Anjar, the Lebanese town where the French eventually settled the survivors of Musa Dagh. Outside the building is a massive statue that looks at first glance like a sword with its blade in the earth, but on second becomes a cross. And on a mural inside that community room is a summit with an inscription that reads, “Let them come again. We are still the mountain.”

I journeyed to Anjar, as well as to Beirut and Yerevan and the “Bird’s Nest” orphanage in Byblos — where Danish missionary Maria Jacobsen saved the lives of thousands of Armenian orphans — for a lot of reasons.

First, there was my novel, “The Sandcastle Girls.” It’s a love story set in the midst of the Armenian genocide in the First World War. Every day that I was writing the book I felt a tug: I needed to view the bones that were pulled from the sands of Der-el-Zor. I needed to pause before the statues of Saroyan and Mother Armenia that anchor Yerevan’s streets and parks. And I needed to walk the grounds of the monastery at Khor Virap and gaze across the Turkish border at Mount Ararat.

There is, of course, an irony here. Ararat, the majestic 17,000-foot massif that dominates the western vista from Yerevan and symbolizes our heritage, isn’t even inside the country’s borders: It’s across the guard posts and fencing in Turkey. So, of course, is Musa Dagh.

Another reason for my journey was my father, an Armenian-American who died just as I was finishing the novel, and his parents, Armenian immigrants — and genocide survivors. These are the sorts of subterranean emotional currents that can inspire a novel and draw a person at mid-life to the Middle East and a small, landlocked country in the Caucasus Mountains. And Armenia is small. Barely three million Armenians live there, compared to approximately seven million outside the country. That’s how big the Armenian Diaspora is: 70 percent of Armenians don’t live in their homeland. And yet, we have retained a national identity: Our sense of a shared history and our sense of place.

Which brings me back to that community room in Anjar and the mural. My sense is that whoever wrote on the wall there, “We are still the mountain,” wanted the sentence to be interpreted two ways. Certainly he meant Musa Dagh: Attack again if you want, we are still those warriors. But he also meant Ararat: Even here in Lebanon, we are still Armenians.

Most of the time when I was in Armenia, clouds masked the summit of Ararat, even when I was at Khor Virap. Around 6 a.m. on my last morning, however, soon after I had climbed into a cab for the airport, I was greeted with a sign that the cosmos is not completely detached: The peak of Mount Ararat, snow-covered even in May. I asked the driver to stop. And there, against a sky that grew from agate to cerulean, I watched the nearly full moon set over the mountain. It was a poignant, powerful, and perfect way to remember that while April 24 is about mourning the dead, it is also about the triumph of the living — and how, indeed, we are still the mountain.

(Chris Bohjalian’s 14th novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” was published in paperback earlier this month. This column appeared originally in the Boston Globe on April 14, 2013.)

No escaping death, taxes, and Honey Boo Boo Child

The other day my wife stepped on a shrew. The good news is that it was already dead and so she doesn’t have a dead shrew on her conscience. When you spend as much time as she does volunteering at Homeward Bound, the animal shelter in Middlebury, Vermont the last thing you ever want to do is squash a living shrew with the thick wooden sole of your clog. The bad news? She thought the shrew was either a funky ribbon or a seriously drooled-upon cat toy when she saw it on the hard wood floor, and so she casually picked it up.

It gets worse, at least in her opinion. It wasn’t simply that she was holding a dead, squashed shrew in her bare hands; it was that she was holding a dead, squashed shrew in her bare hands in our bedroom.

Tomorrow is tax day. None of us can escape it, not even Republican Presidential candidates. As the old saying goes, there are three things in life that are unavoidable: death, taxes, and a new reality TV show about singing or dancing or adultery. Or being a bachelor. Someday I hope we have a reality show called “America’s Got Bachelors,” and Howard Stern, Donald Trump, and Honey Boo Boo Child judge which of two bachelors gets to date a super model and which one has to eat bugs.

So, the first thing I want to be sure that the IRS knows is that my wife and I are not going to claim that dead, squashed shrew as a dependant, because we honestly aren’t sure it was alive in 2012. We think it was, because supposedly shrews are born in the summer and live about a year. But we have no birth certificate or receipt, so we are going to let this deduction go.

We also have not taken our six cats as dependents, though it’s pretty clear they depend on us. One might have killed that shrew, but apparently none of them felt like they needed to eat it.

Nor are we claiming that our three-foot tall garden statue of St. Francis of Assisi is a foster child and, thus, a dependent. He’s not.

Ironically, if we had chosen to keep our shelter cats as “foster” pets instead of adopting them, their veterinary expenses might be deductible. Nope, we adopted them. They’re ours.

Also, while foster pets in some cases might be deductible, Neopets rarely are – unless, perhaps, you’re filing in Neopia and don’t mind risking time in a Neopian jail.

I am not taking the 6,132 ounces of Sugar Free Red Bull I consumed in 2012 as a business expense, even though I couldn’t have written one word without it. Instead I am simply going to dedicate a novel someday to my favorite “Go Go Juice.” (Just for the record, that 6,132-ounce figure is neither an estimate nor an exaggeration. That is precisely how much Red Bull I consumed in 2012. I’m not proud.)

My wife is not deducting the $17 gazillon she spent on cat toys to bring each week to the animal shelter. (Just for the record, that figure is an exaggeration. It was much closer to $11 gazillion.)

The truth is that even if I could deduct that dead, squashed shrew, it would have been a small deduction at best. Shrews do not eat like NFL nose tackles. They eat worms and bugs.

Besides, I tend to agree with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was way back in 1927 that Holmes wrote in an opinion, “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” Sure, I might spend our budget differently than our Government will. I don’t think any two people in this country would distribute our federal and state assets in quite the same way. And, yes, I believe a little tax reform might make the world a better place.

But tomorrow I will render unto Caesar what’s his. And it won’t be a shrew.

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on April 14, 2013. The paperback of Chris’s novel, The Sandcastle Girls, goes on sale this week.)

Throwing the book (seller) at comedy

Josie Leavitt is coming to Burlington, Vermont tonight and hoping to kill.

“I bombed. I killed. The language of comedy is all very violent,” she said. It’s worth noting that Leavitt said this in almost the same tone of voice with which she had gleefully shared with me the color of the nail polish on her toes: “Flashbulb fuchsia.” She’d just had a pedicure.

Tonight she will be a self-proclaimed comedy diva at the FlynnSpace at the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts. There, along with three other women – some of whom started as students in the standup comedy class she teaches at the Flynn – she will be hoping to kill. When you’re a comic, killing is good; bombing is bad.

And usually she does kill. I’ve seen Leavitt and I’m a fan – and not simply because I’m a novelist and she’s a bookseller by day, co-owner of the Flying Pig Bookstore in Shelburne, Vermont.  I’m a fan because she’s very funny. My wife’s a fan, too.

People used to make jokes about female comedians, but no more. At least no one does who has a brain or eyes or who has spent even a nanosecond watching TV. In addition to the standup genius of such women as Amy Schumer or Lisa Lampanelli or Sarah Silverman, there has been the inspired TV and film work of Mindy Kaling and Tina Fey and Kristen Wiig.

This June marks the twentieth anniversary of Leavitt’s first time doing standup in a club. It was June 4, 1993, 10:20 at night. She was at a club called “Don’t Tell Mama” on the edge of Theatre Row on Manhattan’s West Side. “I had a five-minute set and everything worked,” she recalled. “I left my body. My life changed.” Back then she was an English teacher by day, but she spent the next three years working the bars and comedy clubs, sometimes bombing but more often killing.

When she moved to Vermont in 1996, she expected to continue teaching. Instead, with her partner Elizabeth Bluemle, she opened a children’s bookstore in Charlotte, because jobs were scarce, Elizabeth had been a children’s librarian, and – oh, by the way – there was an empty building for lease just west of U.S. 7. They killed there, too, and in 2006 moved to a bigger location in Shelburne, where their store is today. But she resumed her standup career, and tonight marks the 30th time that she has performed “Standup, Sit Down, and Laugh” at the Flynn. Leavitt curates the show, which means that she picks the comics.

She freely admits that she tries out material on customers when she is at work at the Flying Pig, which is an added benefit to shopping there when she kills – and a chance to heckle when she bombs.

She also teaches standup these days at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington: “I never find out what the crime is until after the class. I want to work with the inmates as comics and judge them as comics; I want to help them become better writers and speakers. It helps them with their parole hearings and job interviews. If they can write a joke, they can write a resume.” Of course, even the very good inmate comedians don’t put “killed” on their resumes.

What she finds particularly interesting about her gig as a jailhouse comedy coach is this: “The men are much more respectful than the women. The women push the boundaries more.”

Leavitt’s routines tend to be about her own experiences and what’s going on in her life right now.This is her strategy even if her life is awash in disaster. “How can I make something funny?” she asks herself. “If I can do that, it takes so much angst out of life. It’s a fun way to live.”

So, what might be in store for us tonight? She returned last Sunday from Florida. On Tuesday she had her gall bladder out. And at home she has a 15-year-old dog with dementia.

That feels to me like the makings of a pretty good set.

*     *     *

IF YOU GO:

What: “Stand Up, Sit Down, and Laugh”

When: Sunday, April 7, 7 pm

Where: FlynnSpace

How much: $12

(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on April 7, 2013. The paperback of Chris’s novel, The Sandcastle Girls, arrives next week.)