Posted by pancho from customer-148-233-93-55.uninet.net.mx (148.233.93.55) on Tuesday, February 11, 2003 at 7:24PM :
Figures...and I might have known. As soon as you step far enough away from this thing, you realize ten books wouldnīt begin to do the subject justice.
I need a lot more research...and I donīt mean Aprimcrap. I sat this morning just touching on Urmia...the escape...Agha Petrous...the camps in Iraq, the British...the Levies...Simelle...the Assyrians in Turkey...the First World War. I thought about my great-uncle Babajan Malik...bodyguard to Agha Petrous at 19...the battles they fought...the dangers, the adventure. Babajan at 16 eloping with his 14 year old fiance...she, left alone with children to raise while he went off to fight a war from which he may not have returned...what would she do with the children? The 25 Kurds Babajan shot at point blank range because theyīd tried to ambush Ahga Petrous, having allowed them or others to go free after a previous attempt...the sunken ship, the 300 drowned Assyrian guerillas, my grand-uncle, a young doctor of 23 with them...the ammunition the Brits wouldnīt delkiver closer to the villages...the awful decision to go to where they would deliver it because the soldiers were running low...having to leave their families behind unprotected...the dash to the site only to find nothing there...the hasty return, hearts sinking within them at the thought of what thyey would find... then exile in France with Agha Petrous and their families...his move to America where pride forced him to get work as a dish washer nights in a pizza joint because he wouldnīt allow anyone to support his family...his anguish and remorse years later when he lay dying in a convalscent home in Turlock...weeping tears like a baby as he begged Godīs forgiveness for the killings and so many more horrors all in the service of his people...lay there diapered like a great baby, this incredible man of which we produced several and matched them with women as courageous and outstanding...lay there crying asking me to kill him and spare him the final indignity of being spoon-fed by a teenybopper...
Itīs an epic...and what the hell am I doing trying to tell it?
But how do I avoid it? How can I deny that it bears great relevance to my own life...to almost everything I chose to do...from fighting school, to fighting college...to fighting the Justice system...to fighting for the boys...to the sculpture...to the Met...to the monuments...? How do I leave out anything?
Aww nuts...
-- pancho
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