Three Apples: Does My Armenianness Embarrass You?
a column by Paul Chaderjian for the Asbarez newspaper Once there was and there was not … I’ve been thinking about my dad all week. He would have been 80 this year, and we would have celebrated his birthday this week. Shy of his birthday, I received an e-mail Tuesday night from Steven, my best friend in junior and high school. Steven was alerting me that our mutual friend James’ father had passed away and the funeral was Friday, on my dad’s birthday. It’s that time in our lives where our fathers are dying and we are becoming the adults. We are supposedly carrying their legacies, their surnames, their family histories, and their genomes to hand to our progeny, via DNA or via words and stories. But how good of a job are we doing with this singular human directive? With deaths and funerals, I can’t help myself but ask, are we all that our fathers had hoped for us to be? Did they struggle and toil to provide for us to be proud or ashamed of our legacies, identities, stories. Did ...