Category Archives: Nostalgia

I had a beautiful dream this morning. I was visiting a huge gathering of my family for a Thanksgiving, and seeing people I hadn’t seen since I was a child. At one point, I left with my paternal grandparents to drive to the farmhouse where they lived when I was a child, and where we often visited them. We talked on the drive and once we got to the house. They were so interested in what I was doing and so proud of me. I showed them pictures of Berkeley and the Bay Area. We were so happy to see one another and talk. I could see that they were about to move, as the living room was empty and there were boxes piled up. We were just about to go upstairs to have a last look around the rest of the house, and a sudden noise from a housemate woke me.

No mortal ear aside from my own heard the most plaintive cry from me on waking this morning back to the world. My grandparents died nearly twenty years ago.

I’ve just been enjoying a beautifully illustrated site about the abandoned Armenian royal city of Ani, unfortunately located in Turkey. It’s a somber thing to read about the destruction of such beautiful monuments, some still completely intact and in use until 1920, due to pogroms, earthquakes, official policies of neglect or “restoration,” and, of course, Muslim religious iconoclasm. Separated by a small river from today’s nation of Armenia, it must be heartbreaking for the Armenians to see from the other bank the continued destruction of such a magnificent heritage: an ancient city still alive in the early part of the twentieth century is now a field of rubble.