Three Apples: The Relic

BY PAUL CHADERJIAN

Once there was and there was not … that place 100 years ago that my ancestors survived, where teenage boys were dressed as girls, young women married off to foreigners and infants given up to Kurds so that they would all be spared. Those handful of survivors, who wanted to live at any cost, did just that so that I could be here, typing on a Mac, having you as my audiences, living in a clean, well-lit room and enjoying a front row seat to world history.

When those survivors lost their parents, siblings, homes, mental health and happiness, they found themselves in orphanages in Aleppo or Karantina, the quarantined garbage dump in Beirut. They found themselves with no belongings, no sense of place or self, and with no closure for the crimes they witnessed. But they marched ahead, rebuilt their lives and made us promise to be ‘Armenian.’

My grandparents didn’t have anything to show for their lives before the death marches. They had no photographs, no gold crosses, no physical, tactile, tangible remnants of their past or the pasts of the generations that came before them. Somehow their forced detachment from material things became part of my DNA, leaving me overwhelmed and uncomfortable with the idea of ever owning or collecting things.

The younger of my two sisters had started a bullet collection after fighting began in Beirut. She would scour the streets for spent bullet shells and exchange them with friends from the neighborhood. My collection was of Matchbox model cars I would buy for 10 Lebanese pounds when I was given an allowance.

When there was no electricity, when cow carcasses were floating in sea across the street from our home, when school was cancelled and there were shortages of food and fuel, I abandoned my model cars and my sister abandoned her bullet collection the day our parents spared us from an uncertain future and moved us temporarily to safety in the U.S.

In my new life in Tennessee and then California, I didn’t start collecting things like others my age. I didn’t save stamps or coins or souvenirs. I didn’t buy comic books or make mementos of ticket stubs from the movies that were like religious experiences in my youth.

Before there was MTV and CNN, I would get lost in the world of make-believe through the silver screen and then write about those experiences in spiral-bound journals. These volumes of meticulously handwritten, artful penmanship piled up over the years and became the only collection I had for decades.

Journaling began on Pearl Harbor Day in 1979 — long before the date became synonymous with the Gyumri Quake — as an assignment for Mrs. Dias’ English class at Hamilton Junior High School. I kept these notebooks as my only keepsakes from my existence before there were personal computers, blogs, the internet and Facebook.

Decades later, in New York City, as a wiser and self-critical, self-aware adult, I couldn’t carry the burden of notebooks full of childish musings with miniature doodles in the margins. I didn’t want to have these carton boxes traveling the world with me, so I forced myself to tear the pages from the notebooks and throw them down the garbage shoot of a building owned by the man who is now making a mockery of the place that for millions of refugees like me was a haven from the chaotic world of war. Had I known this man with his Twitter vitriol and verbal diarrhea would be the leader of the free world, I wouldn’t have rented a room from him or dumped my personal history into the 9th floor garbage chute of one of the buildings on Riverside Blvd that bears his name.

This diatribe about the separation of self from belongings, for me, is rooted in how my ancestors walked away with only the clothes on their backs, and how my family left Beirut with only one suitcase. Not wanting things is not unique to me. It’s a shared trait by millions, including one Vietnam veteran whom I interviewed on the streets of downtown Fresno in the mid 1990s. He explained how vets like him couldn’t stand the idea of being boxed in a room and how they preferred the streets.

Standing outside a soup kitchen in Fresno, the vet told me he had been diagnosed with “shell shock.â€