Grandpa Moses, tough as he was, loved animals. One of Marash Girl's earliest memories - Grandpa Moses' canary flying around the living room (upstairs) at 474/476 Lowell Avenue, Newtonville, and everyone -- very young, very old -- chasing after it, (everyone except for the cat which by that time was no longer with the family), in a vain effort to return the canary to its cage. [It (the canary) finally returned to the cage on its own when it got hungry and tired of giving the family a "run for its money"! ]
In Marash, Grandpa Moses had had his own horse and would ride in the mountains -- ride to protect the sheep herd he was guarding, ride with his pals, ride to protect the Marash version of "wagon trains" from attack by brigands. Moses was an amazing man. By the time Marash Girl knew him, however, he was old and silent, sitting in the winged arm chair "upstairs", watching "The Lone Ranger" on early television (around 1948), reminiscing, Marash Girl is certain, of his own past in the mountains of Marash.
In Marash, Grandpa Moses had had his own horse and would ride in the mountains -- ride to protect the sheep herd he was guarding, ride with his pals, ride to protect the Marash version of "wagon trains" from attack by brigands. Moses was an amazing man. By the time Marash Girl knew him, however, he was old and silent, sitting in the winged arm chair "upstairs", watching "The Lone Ranger" on early television (around 1948), reminiscing, Marash Girl is certain, of his own past in the mountains of Marash.
As a little boy, as little as two years old, I would sometimes venture into the dark world of the basement. It was a world of mist and myth that beckoned me. My imagination as to what my silver bullet grandfather,a waif of history, if not for the love of his children, his love for his blind wife, and his love for the omniscient who loved him unto the salvation of his soul, was doing before the stove, a black iron lion of marash that fed on paper and wood chips, and nursed cauldrons of boil, boil toil and coil. Grandpa Moses always a man given to the truth never a lie escaped his lips, and only the lye cooking in the pot of iron was good for the soap he made. Those who lived by the lie and crossed his path, and sought the truth of his shepherding responsibility, never could pull the wool over his eyes, as they saw through the darkness of a hillside moonscape in eastern Anatolia, the same moon that had guided Alexander 2300years before to Persia, the one land that Rome never could conquer. Grandpa Moses awoke, as the story goes, to find his sheep no more. The trail of the marauders, miscreants all, numbered the fingers on one hand, his right, his shooting hand. Never hesitating, always careful to care for his own horse, he tracked them to their hidden valley in the hills, 20 miles distant. It was a hill that was more of a depressant in the grassy hillside, large enough for the moon glow to gather depth. Moses found the gang, took back the sheep, and the horses of bandits, and left their bodies basking in the cold light of the dark side of the moon. What they did not know, and learned only with their last breaths, that Moses was the a shootist, a master shootist with either hand, and with long or short weapon. He spent his final years as the eyes for his wife, twenty years younger than he, who had lost her sight, but not her way, twenty years before.
ReplyDeleteThank you for this beautiful memoriam to Grandpa Movses!
DeleteWhat a story.. what a heritage!
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