Memories of Our Childhood from Brother James on his birthday!

Happy Birthday to Brother James who on his birthday shares a letter he wrote 15 years ago to our Dad, Peter Bilezikian!

Dear Dad: 

I am very pleased that you liked the short story, Blossoms and Baseballs. I am hoping to write several more dealing with my childhood and the world of Lowell Avenue, the world of the Armenians flowing through our house, of Van Topalian, and the one word, ‘remarkable’, to which he ascribed things approved by him, of Harry Mooseghian, his natural awkwardness in doing all things physical, but his willing spirit, his shattered hulk of a car, symbolic of the devastation wrought by the Turks on his family prospects, and all the other people, mysterious, and marvelous, that my parents’ hospitality and curiosity welcomed into our home. 

Our home was a fecund garden for a young boy intent on sailing the world and visiting the people of the ports, some backward, some gallant, some heroic and humble, others who were charlatans and savages with city clothes. In all this parade of the human throng there was never danger. A boy could be in the midst of all this and never be threatened by it, because the setting was our home, in which you and mother provided us, like in the original garden, with every good thing to eat for our body and our soul. All of that goodness, that trickery, that pridefulness that strutted, that humility that walked simply upright through our home, was to be tasted in morsels the understanding of which promised to be the fiber of manhood. 

The violin and the bow always lay close behind all of this, because in the midst of this sometime crush of the human spirit, you would call for music from the souls and bodies of your children. Whatever strange and dangerous, brittle and base, lofty and incontinent, that might be parading itself that day in our home of hospitality would be brought back to the cloud of heaven with the single note, and the many notes thereafter that would fall like rain on a spring morning. All would be made right, because the children, like cherubs heralding our August God, playing with heart and humor, steadfastness of purpose, and the zeal to please, would in an instant vanquish the memory of the Turks, the evil of the world, the disarray of the downcast. 

In our home not only flourished an extended family, but an extended garden, a garden that reached back through the generations. It was a garden of the spirit, and the spirit made flesh, of 400 olive trees planted by Grandpa Moses, of great grandfather Sarkis’s conversion to a living faith, of the desire by Uncle Vartan to share the Good News, whatever the cost, of the Bilezikian vineyard in the cool of the summer mountains, of the stones made into bread by the love and faith of 

Grandma Yepros, of the courage of Grandpa Moses whose shepherd status was challenged by the bandits from the hills, at the cost of their lives and their horses. All this was a tapestry, a magic one, for a boy growing up in a family of electricians, who transformed the wire and current of their livelihoods into a garden that filled every niche of their land and their home. 

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