Haunting Marash Girl to this day is her only memory of her great grandmother [see http://marashgirl.blogspot.com/2012/10/dust-particles-dancing-in-light.html] and the mystery of her name and where exactly the memory took place. The haunting was refreshed when Marash Girl received from her distant cousin Louis Kurkjian a piece of a genealogy that he had put together. In the genealogy, Marash Girl learned the name and a few bits of other information about her maternal great grandmother, Noussia (Lucia) Danielian Bosnian, born in Aintep in 1855, died in Winchester, MA, 1944. In this genealogy, Noussia is described with three words: "humorous, light hearted, very wise". Marash Girl's memory could not corroborate those words.
When Iffar and Enila asked their Ama for funny stories of her childhood, she told the story recorded at http://marashgirl.blogspot.com/2012/10/dust-particles-dancing-in-light.html, and Iffar replied, "She must have hated herself, then!" referring to his great-great-great grandmother in exactly the same way that Marash Girl had ended her blog post, "Dust Particles Dancing in the Light - October 25, 2012".
A major piece of the memory recorded on October 25, 2012, was the grand piano, and yesterday afternoon, Marash Girl once again saw that grand piano in reality, not in Winchester, Massachusetts, but in the grand ballroom of the Armenian Cultural Foundation in Arlington, Massachusetts. Gazing at the piano as she talked with Dr. Suzanne Moranian, Marash Girl learned that the piano once belonged to Dr. Moranian's family, an ancient grand piano with magnificent tone which had graced an Armenian living room in Winchester, Massachusetts. Could that be the same grand piano that has haunted Marash Girl's memory since the tender age of one?
I found your blog on the piano both moving and haunting. The piano my mother donated to the ACF is not the same piano you recall from Winchester in the 1940s. My mother's family lived in North Begen, NJ, until 1946, and they brought with them to Winchester two other pianos which are long gone (and were not Steinways). The Steinway in the ACF currently was the one that my parents bought in the 1960s from a dealer in New York City, and, thus, it is not the same one from your childhood memories.
ReplyDeleteWhere is that grand piano that I saw in the late afternoon sunlight in Winchester, Massachusetts, oh, so many years ago?
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