Not only her clients, but also Armenian immigrants unfamiliar with the customs of the United States. She’d devoted her life to helping people. She was unflinchingly positive about the human capacity for goodness, allowing the petty criminals she supervised to get away with nearly anything on her watch. My father, Jim, and I would remark that she was the last person you’d expect to be a probation officer. Spontaneous and excitable, she could transform a drab doctor’s office or a corner diner into a party, just by raising her arms and breaking into dance. I’d forgotten the never-ending surprises of life with my small but plucky mother, Anahid. In the weeks since I’d left my bustling life in New York and returned to the Los Angeles house where I had been raised, my mother’s otherworldly talks had become part of my universe again. I rolled my eyes and we both laughed, not taking ourselves too seriously. “I ask them for advice, and they always give it to me. “Yes,” she replied, her mood perennially upbeat. “Are you talking to them again?” I asked. ![]() “ Inch ge medadzes,” she said, shaking her head, the Armenian words sounding like gibberish to me. Oblivious to me standing there, my mother continued to shake her cropped brown bob back and forth, moving her lips furtively. I couldn’t quite make out her words, drowned as they were by running water and the clank of Corelle plates. It had been just a few weeks since I had moved back into my childhood home, and there I was in the doorway trying to eavesdrop, just like I had back in grade school. So it was no surprise when, in the summer of 2006, I stumbled on her again like this. At the sink, her hands scrubbing a dish, her voice a murmur. Growing up, I would find her in the kitchen, locked in conversation with Mama and Baba. ![]() Her readers will be rapt-and a lot smarter by the end.”-Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion¶ “Harrowing.”- Us Weeklyįor as long as I can remember, my mother has been talking to her dead parents.
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