Sunday, November 11, 2012

Between a rock and a hard place . . .

Laughing at an apparently insoluble problem (as nothing
was insoluble for him), Peter Bilezikian could often be 
heard commenting, "Spit up and you hit your moustache,
spit down and you hit your beard!"  

Peter, (who, by the way, never had a moustache OR a 
beard), born early in the 20th Century in Marash, Ancient
 Armenia, of Armenian parents, and a survivor of the 
Armenian Genocide, may well have been translating into
English an expression that he had often heard from the 
folks around him who were struggling to survive:  
Asagi turkursen sakal, yukari tukursen biyik.  

That feeling of frustration being universal, you may have heard the expression in American terms: "caught between a rock and a hard place," an expression which probably finds its origins in Greek mythology, "caught between Scylla and Charybdis", caught between two dangers, either of which would bring certain disaster.

Survivor that he was, Peter Bilezikian did not believe in certain disaster.  He believed in God's grace.  He never gave up!  And if he couldn't find the answer to an immediate dilemma, he would always crack a joke!

As Marash Girl often asks her grandchildren, "Do you want to be happy or do you want to be sad?"

Or as Peter used to say to his children, "Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you cry alone."

1 comment:

  1. Great the way you related the expressions of the past to present day expressions.

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