Packing List for Immigration

Pack… Mulberries

As I tumble down the slick rock face with hail stinging my face, I think that this really must be it. The end. Not how I expected things to end, but okay… There is still a lot left undone – bummer. But also there is a lot I got to do – just this morning I was writing how blessed my life really was. My body tries to fight off gravity and find something to hang onto while sliding inevitably down, down, down. It’s both in slow motion and happening in fractions of seconds. And another thought pops into my head – when exactly did I start hating heights?

I am 12: my knees are skinned and scabbed over and skinned again. I pick the scabs, and blood runs down my dirty shins, and my knees never heal. My hair is dirty and stringy – with no running water washing it is a production and absolutely not a priority. It’s school vacation, and the first thing I do when I wake up every morning is run 13 stories down and into the street and figure out what to occupy myself with today.

Gohar, Liana, and I, in Pushkin Park (now Lovers’ Park) in Yerevan, circa 1995.

Summer comes early to Yerevan. The streets are full of voices of children playing, older men seeking refuge in the shade of apricot trees, counting out their backgammon games, street vendors advertising their wares (brooms, ice cream, knife and scissor sharpening), and fine dust that gets stirred up into the air by the wind that descends off the mountains every evening. The dust gets into everything, seeps into every crack, and leaves a fine coating on every piece of furniture, even with the windows firmly shut. Sparrows circle the old gray Soviet-construction cement block buildings and chatter excitedly, catching bugs mid-flight. My street is illuminated by the iridescent orange glow of the sun tumbling into the Hrazdan river gorge. All nice summer evenings are supervised by the BBC network of the neighborhood ladies in their housecoats, hanging out of their windows or off their balconies, eating sunflower seeds, and minding everyone’s business. This is how I’ll get busted dating for the first time at 14. But at the moment, I’m 12, with scabbed knees, stringy hair, a mean badminton high serve, and the best friends a girl could wish for.

Pack… the Scent of Lilacs

The park is in full bloom, smelling like flowers, fresh grass, and wet earth. Smelling of spring, and awakening, and hope. I’m squatting in the grass that’s already as tall as I am, pushing my flimsy paper boat with a stick down the narrow irrigation stream. The boat bobs and struggles against the rocks in the shallow stream, and I consider whether adding a sail would help the situation. I eye the leaves on the trees around me appraisingly, but it’s still early enough in the spring that the leaves aren’t quite sail-worthy yet. But the shock of purple lilac catches my eye, so I abandon the boat to its fate and head over to investigate. The flowers smell sweet and intoxicating. I bury by face in them to take it all in. And even at 7 years old the scent feels nostalgic of 7 previous springs. I examine the tiny purple flowers – finding a five-petaled bloom is good luck and makes you wishes come true. I look for one wishing for money for a lollipop – a wish that feels aspirational at the time, so when a find a flower with five tiny petals, I eat it for good measure, so as not to squander the good luck away. And the smell of the lilac is then forever imprinted in my memory, taking me back to that spring, and that park, and that paper boat in the stream.

Not quite lilacs, but spring flowers still fill my heart to bursting every year. And I still don’t know with what.

The trees around me seem immense. At 7 years old, the world is boundlessly large, and adulthood impossibly far away. I wish it would hurry up though, particularly since mom said I could eat ice cream whenever I please when I’m an adult, but until then I will have to wait until school gets out in June. And June feels just as far away as adulthood.

I pop my head out from behind the lilac buh and examine the group of older men on the benches. Two of them are hunched over a chess board, frowning, and a small group surrounds them: some watching intently and shaking their heads, some eating sunflower seeds and enjoying the first warm spring evening in a while, most of them giving advice. One of the men at the board is my father – he’s staring at the chess pieces fiercely, his thought process imprinting in the creases on his forehead. He makes a move with one of the pieces jerkily, presses the button on top of the clock, and looks at his opponent expectantly. Is he winning or losing? I try to read the weather. Is he happy or sad? Because on this depends the success of my mission of asking him for money for a lollipop. Will he bark no, or will his anticipation of a win result in magnanimity?

Pack… the Memories You Haven’t Lost Yet

I tell you again that I’m moving to Seattle and I can see the words blur at the edges as they leave my lips, and I know that you won’t remember again. Our realities have been pulled apart by the thousands of miles I put between us a thousand years ago, but now they are also being pulled apart by you retreating, leaving, departing into a world where only your memories are real. You are leaving me, and I don’t know how to stop you. You are leaving me, and I feel angry, lost, blurred at the edges, just like my words. You are leaving me, and I feel orphaned.

So many of my memories of my mom start with me getting in trouble… The time when I was 5 and managed to lick all the icing off my aunt’s birthday cake when the adults weren’t looking. The time when I was 6 and was determined to find out whether a balloon would fit into my mom’s china cabinet – it almost did! The time that I was 7 and had built a flying apparatus and was determined to do a manned test flight as a proof of concept. Mom was always the disciplinarian, the strict parent, the one with the rules, the one in charge of making sure that I don’t run off with the circus or hop out of a window to see if I’d finally learned to fly. I, on the other hand, have always been skeptical of rules: if I couldn’t join the circus, then I would start my own by training the neighborhood stray dogs; if I wouldn’t be allowed to launch my flight prototype out of the window, I would at least challenge gravity by hopping off the top of that same china cabinet (again, that didn’t end particularly well). My mom and I, we clashed often, even if I did see the soft warmth in her eyes while I was getting punished.

Mom and I in Yerevan. January 2022. I love you to the moon…

But there was something that had always brought my mom and me together: our wanderlust. We would pull our world atlas off the shelf and pore over far away continents, planning trips of discovery and adventure. We planned rafting trips on the Amazon, trips to see Mount Kilimanjaro and the Eiffel Tower, trips to the pyramids in Giza and the Big Ben and the Great Wall of China. We played anagrams with names of countries and cities we had never seen. We pretended to eat with chopsticks the kinds of foods we had never tasted. The world was ours to discover, and all we needed was each other.

Pack… Fireworks

We are walking down Saryan Street in full view of the outdoor diners who I think are really only there to show themselves off – they don’t actually care about us. I feel less precarious and take your hand. It’s not something one does around here outside of established relationships because “what will people think?” But I take your hand anyway, and my skin tingles. This is the longest I’ve been home in ages, in more than ten years actually, and I have found myself falling in love. With the tender blush of the sunrises in my city and its empty streets in the early mornings that are just mine, with its smiling babies with enormous eyes, with the easy familiarity of needing haggle at the flower stall on my way to my mom’s house, even though the guy always gives me an extra bunch of flowers for free in the end. I don’t remember what loving these things is supposed to feel like, so when my heart feels full to bursting, I fall in love with people.

*Hiking in Vayots Dzor, Armenia, for New Years 2022 was its own kind of magic. Big thanks to the much talented Sipan Grig for the photo.*

We walk down the street with my hand in yours, despite the sweltering heat of August. It is as if your hand is what’s tethering me down to this city that is both familiar and foreign to me after so many years away. It will all blow away if I let go – the sunrises, the smiling children, the sense of belonging. Or maybe it will be me who is blown away. Either way, I don’t want to find out, so I hold on tightly despite both our palms sweating.

People stare at us. The simple answer is that between the tattoos and the piercings and the strange choices in hair color, my presence is nothing like subtle. Over the years, the more the society has pushed me to conform, the more I have pushed back. You get to have the real me only if you can see the real me, past what’s on the outside. To quote the Little Prince: “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential, is invisible to the eye.” “It’s like dating a firework,” you say. I think I’m supposed be flattered, but it makes me impossibly sad.

Pack… Hiking Boots

A couple of weeks ago I hiked the Northern Summit of Mount Aragats in Armenia. I’ve really loved hiking in Armenia this year – it has helped me feel grounded in what my Armenian identity means to who I am today. But this hike was particularly meaningful to me. And not just because it was challenging and I can’t wait to give it another go when I’m better trained, rested, and fueled. Not just because it’s the tallest peak in Armenia.

Hiking the North Summit of Mt. Aragats, Summer 2021. It was anything but easy. But I loved every painful step of it. Special thanks to Tigran Gasparyan for his company and for the picture.

Aragats has a special meaning to me, it holds a special place in my heart. But to tell you about it, we have to go back, all the way back to the “cold and dark” 90s in Armenia. We have to go back to huddling with the neighbors around the battery powered radio in the dark, waiting for news from the front. We have to go back to how proficient I had become at splitting wood with an axe at 10 years old. We have to go back to going to bed fully dressed with a hat in my head while cuddling a brick heated on the stove and wrapped in rags for warmth. We have to go all the way back…

(As I spend $150 on a pair of hiking pants and a shirt, I am reminded all of a sudden that at one point my mom’s monthly salary was $100. It was one shiny crisp hundred dollar bill, and I was in awe. That month we could afford to eat.)

Pack… Memories of Your First Love

Second grade was the first time I fell head over heels in love. Or so I told my mother when she asked me if I had liked someone. “I don’t just like him, mom,” I’d said “I’m in love.” Mom took the situation with all the gravity it deserved (this had been my first love after all) and took me out for ice cream.

The subject of my ardent affection was Murad, a boy who sat behind me in first grade. He used to torment me mercilessly: I was a huge bow head, and he’d yank on my pigtails throughout the class, until I got fed up, turned around, smacked him over the head, and proceeded to get in trouble with our teacher. As soon as the bell rang I’d chase him down the corridors to seek revenge. Not for the pigtails: I could have lived with that, but I was an uber nerd even then, so getting me in trouble with the teacher was what I deemed revenge worthy.

My 1st grade class photo: I’m the one with a giant bow on my head standing next to the teacher, with “can we get this over with” expression on my face (that tells you everything you need to know about 7 year old me), Murad is the boy standing to my left.

Murad wasn’t all bad though; he would bring me Mamba fruit chews, share his lunch with me, and draw me when he got bored in class (I can’t imagine his drawings were very good, but I remember being rather pleased I was his muse). At the end of second grade we were in our class play together: Alice in Wonderland. I was Alice, of course, in my favorite checkered red dress, and Murad was the Cheshire Cat, and every time we had to rehearse our scene together, we’d both blush to the tips of our ears. But I figured this was method acting at its best: Alice had got to have been flustered by a big talking cat! (Though all this blushing during the play was what had given me away to my mom – I’ve been working on my poker face ever since.)

Pack… Your Ability to Survive a Genocide

My grandma Zabelle was my dad’s paternal aunt. But with his mother’s passing when he was only seven, Zabelle had as good as raised my dad as one of her own. And since I had no surviving grandparents, Zabelle was the one grandma that I knew.

In the late 1980’s she was already a tiny old lady. She wore long sleeve black blouses and a black scarf wrapped around her wispy white hair; even in the heat of August, even while cooking, with all four burners of her stove turned on in the kitchen. Zabelle was stern: I’d get a scolding for trying to sneak my fingers into the bowl of frosting she’d just whipped (I was a famous cake batter and frosting thief). But the woman was all love, her eyes crinkled with laughter all the while she was scolding me. She’d chase me with a wooden spoon under the kitchen table and tell me that if I sat there quietly, she’d let me lick the bowl once she was done frosting the cake.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of Zabelle. But here is my christening at Etchmiadzin.

Zabelle was a proud Vanetsi: her family had been displaced from Van in Western Armenia (now Turkey) in 1915, during the Armenian Genocide. But in Armenian culture Vanetsi people are known and often teased for their frugality (if not outright parsimony). And boy, was Zabelle a Vanetsi in that sense! A survivor of two world wars, 1 genocide, 4 different governments, and a number of more personal privations, she was nothing if not frugal. She was known to unravel old, worn out sweaters, and knit new ones out of the yarn. All the dish sponges in her kitchen had once been nylon pantyhose (don’t question it). And I still love Zabelle’s meat pies because she’d always mix rice in with the meat – years later it dawned on me that she used to do that to stretch whatever little meat she happened to have.

Pack… Your Patience

I feel very cosmopolitan flying to see my aunt in Amsterdam, hopping on the phone with cousins in Moscow, and writing postcards for extended family in Nantes. But the part of the story that’s less suitable for glossy pages of travel magazines is how folks ended up so scattered all over the world and what they had to leave behind.

At the ripe old age of 4, my interests included bunny rabbits, chocolates (particularly from the russian candy factory called “Red October ” – I was a proper Soviet child), listening to my second cousin Levon play the accordion, and watching the children’s evening program on TV (here’s the YouTube link to the opening and closing themes for all my Soviet folks – try not to cry).

On this particular evening in the winter of 1988 we were visiting Levon’s family, and with him being older, he was put in charge of watching me. This made it easy for me to nag him into playing his accordion for me again and again. After dinner the adults had stayed behind in the kitchen, which meant that the living room TV and candy dish were now my domain (try and stop me, Levon). The sugary sweets would surely keep me up past my bedtime – but the adults seemed to be none the wiser.

Left to right: Grandma Emma, cousin Sveta, 4 year old me, and cousin Lena at the Children’s Railroad park in Yerevan in the summer of 1988.

In the kitchen they huddled around the radio. Every now and then I’d hear one of them exclaim in incredulity and what sounded like maybe anger or fear. But cartoons were on – what did I care about a bunch of adults and their boring radio? When suddenly the phone rang: long rings of a long distance phone calls – back then you could always tell.

Pack… A Rabies Shot

The first time I saw Bambi I bawled my eyes out. This, I think, is universal, regardless of where you were born or where you grew up. Bambi’s mom dying was one of the early traumas in my childhood. But Bambi also has another iconic scene that has stayed with me for the last 30 years: the one where two skunks with sultry eyelashes fall in love (remember when the girl skunk is making bedroom eyes at Flower from inside of a bush?). My conclusions were that skunks are fluffy and adorable, capable of blushing and falling in love.

Growing up in Yerevan, a city of one million residents, the only kinds of wildlife I was familiar with were stray cats and dogs, and maybe pigeons. I had a love thing with stray dogs – I was the stray dog whisperer. I’d feed them my school lunches, brush the dirt and mats out of their coats, remove ticks. Some mornings I’d have a battalion of 3-4 strays walking me to school. I really wanted to have a dog, but my parents were unrelenting.

New Years 1998 (I think): Mom, me, and cat formerly known as Sergey.

I did however end up with a cat. I had to pass this dumpster on my way to school, and one day I saw a box of tiny kittens meowing up a storm in it – someone’s cat had kittens, and they decided to throw away the entire litter. The kittens couldn’t have been more than a day or two old. They were tiny loud balls of fur with their eyes not quite open yet. On my way home from school only one fur ball was left – the neighborhood kids said that stray dogs had gotten to the rest. I figured the last kitten had managed to survive for a reason, so I took him home.

Pack… A Swimsuit

Starting this blog has brought me closer to my childhood friends, and so many of our conversations start with “remember when?” One of those conversations was “remember when we used to ‘swim’ in buckets of water?” And boy, do I!

A couple of years ago, I was invited to a 6 am swim and breakfast date, to which I foolishly said yes – things I apparently do when I’m head over heels for someone (or is it head over fins?). The culprit of this crazy invitation and I had been going on run dates, so this must have been a logical extension for him. But what I hadn’t told him was that I could barely swim. And I wasn’t about to let him find out now. I hustled and bought a swimsuit and goggles in the next couple of days, and met him bright eyed and terrified at the pool later in the week.

Our swim date was a roaring success, despite the fact that as soon as I saw the bottom of the pool drop away from me somewhere half-way I clung to the pool ropes, wondering if I would make it out alive. I shimmied along the lane line down to the deep end, clung on the edge of the pool, flipped onto my back, and as long as I couldn’t see the bottom, made it back to the shallow end without any problems. I swam a mean back crawl that day and promptly signed up for swim lessons after my date and I had breakfast.