Hagop Baba St. Jacob
(Dedicated to Jacob Abbéllo ,Ara Hagop Salerian)
March 17, 2015
Soon it will be April
23 the anniversary of my father's death. strangely I observe ,I never knew his
birthday -of course one reason was celebrating name days was the custom back
home in Istanbul- and we did celebrate
St. Jacob two weeks before Christmas every year at the expense of his birthday.
I miss my Baba more than my mama. I second-guess myself for not investing more
time to have known this gentle nervous man better.
My baba used to say
being alive is an accident….. I couldn't quite understand what he meant by it.
I thought perhaps this was his perspective sculpted by
as a persecuted minority with
untamed intolerance in a young democracy.
A few years before
he flew to heaven , during one of our
rare private talks I gained a different insight.:My father viewed himself as a lucky survivor, an orphan
protected by Angels- one of them is oldest sister TATA -who took care of him
after two third of his body suffered second and third degree burns. He was hospitalized ,first told he would
never walk again but managed to walk with much help from…Tata. He had already
endured the abrupt losses of mother to pneumonia
and father to cancer. The fire crippled his joy of playing the violin the same
way a stroke stole the pleasure of playing the piano at the age of 59.
Baba prayed quietly ,cried listening to
Bach violin partita and never complained about unfairness of life.
His journey to heaven was heavenly. He died in his sleep
next to mama.
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