EXTRA! The Armenian Weekly has offered me my own column. Me, a columnist? The guy who’s run his own business measuring buildings for 35 years. The fellow the Boston Globe called the “Glove Whisperer” and our beloved Tom Vartabedian of Poor Tom’s Almanac wrote about in 2014 regarding my sideline work restoring old baseball gloves. To join the hallowed ranks of Uncle Tom and distinguished others who have written, and write, for the Weekly: wow. As Boston Red Sox announcer Joe Castiglione screamed into his mic, “Can you believe it?”
In the interest of full transparency, I’m no stranger to writing. Yours truly wrote and recited the class poem for my Cambridge High and Latin School graduating class. I’ve tackled various Armenian writing assignments over the years, most not getting beyond being self-published, if they even got that far. I’ve written a short story that’s nestled only in the website of my father’s metal art.
Sure, I read a lot; aiming for a book or so a week, and I do crossword puzzles. For a decade, I created and gave clients A Word a Day calendar—my attempt at satisfying my fascination with etymology. Jim, my engineering school classmate, former squash partner and now walking companion has called me the best writer among the engineers he knows. But getting the Armenian Weekly’s nod rockets me “To the moon, Alice,” as The Honeymooners’ Ralph Kramden repeatedly chided his wife.
It’s inexplicable how actions are connected, intertwined and how one thing leads to another. Each week, I attend painting class in a senior center. My classmates paint snowmen, trees and birds nesting, a lighthouse or a tranquil landscape, portraits of their pets and grandchildren. All admirable undertakings. But, unlike my fellow painters, I’m not one to agonize week after week over getting eye/hair/fur color just right. I simply, and quickly, want to revisit previously joyous moments by updating time frames and creating unlikely assemblages of people. I scour family photos for unusual poses or circumstances, especially those which sons, Greg and Eddie, regularly upload to Becky and my digital frame.
Naturally, my favorite subject is two-year-old grandson, Bedros. I cut out his face and glue it onto the settings I paint. Amuse, amuse. Then again, it’s impossible to illustrate a toddler with spaghetti on his face and be taken seriously. One painter in my class says she’s been painting for decades and hasn’t seen anything like what I do. I take her remark as a compliment, though I don’t understand it, for I haven’t invented anything. I only reinvent. Once the artwork is complete, I write how creating it has affected me, mining for resurrected feelings and memories. My musings have already found their way into the Weekly, and now, my reader, know they will continue to do so.
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“All About IDs”
There’s nostalgia in my artwork. I reproduce the “good old days” growing up in a nuclear extended family that included live-in grandparents. Many nowadays don’t have that arrangement, but who am I to judge? All I know is that our erstwhile arrangement — not uncommon with first or second generation Armenian families — worked. We actually ate dinner together, quaint by today’s standards. I’m about capturing recollections. It’s feel-good material and I’m not ashamed of it. Now, I’ve discovered my art is the marble, or shall I say Armenian tufa, that constitutes a column. Infinitely satisfying.
I accompany this article with my artwork entitled Robert’s Scrolls, which in future columns will become my caricature, my John Hancock, my thumbprint. I still can’t get over it: my art and stories in a column. The closest I’ve ever come before is including a facsimile of my Dad’s own thumbprint in a painting of mine entitled All About IDs.
So here I am, your newly minted Armenian Weekly columnist. I look forward to writing for and hearing from you. Let the kinee flow.
