Found him again.
Dead.
Oh come on, it’s a good bit of stand-up. And of course even funnier because it’s true.
It’s Father’s Day and I’m typing this while listening to the great Charles Aznavour, who, for a fleeting moment was my birth father. A 33 year old Armenian living in Paris in the 1960s? A little young maybe but otherwise it all tracks. It could have been. If only Sandy my 20 year old birth mother had held out for a shag with the crooner rather than the Economics MBA student at INSEAD.
And if only he’d been less of a Dik and had supported her when (if?) he knew she was pregnant then I could actually be the French girl that I was destined to be. But yes, it’s all water under the Seine now, which would have been difficult for Dikran as he apparently wasn’t the swimmer that the Church of England Children’s Society described him as.
But today I’m allowing myself to wallow a bit about the loss of two fathers, neither of whom I really knew.
Read more in this post from 2021.
I love this photo of Dikran Herardian that I got from my first cousin a few years ago. Instantly it’s me, my face and that’s all I ever really wanted.
And he looks happy which apparently was a rarity and as he grew older I’m told that he became more of a religious zealot and was further alienated from his family. Which explains why my cousin wasn’t aware that he died 3 years before I found her via 23andme..
On our last phonecall Sandy promised me a Charles Aznavour album and said my birth father would probably look exactly like him so perhaps she too always regretted not holding out. But apparently I have inherited the Armenian nose which is one of those noses that spreads horizontally, gradually taking up more of the facial real-estate.
But I’m too chicken to get a nose job so I try to embrace the growing conk along with the sticky out right ear that will definitely be listed in the identifying features on my FBI missing poster.
A few years after I performed my solo show Hot Dogs at the Eiffel Tower, my cousin Ron got in touch. It was his sister Shahasp whom I’d first found via DNA. Ron said that Dikran had stayed with them in the 1980s and he shared a few memories plus some letters written by Dikran to his brother Missak in the 1960s. No, not just ‘the 1960s’. Written from Paris in the summer of 1965.
In this one written June 22nd he has just graduated. Had Sandy already left by that point? She would have been 4 months pregnant with me. There’s no clues or mentions of her in any of the letters but it’s quite something to see letters by my father’s own hand. We don’t share handwriting style, but everyone who has talked about him says Dikran was charismatic and very well spoken. But not funny. Definitely not a funny man. So can we really be related?
To be fair, Tony Gallant wasn’t very funny either. But he was a dog lover and a hardworking family man just waiting for the chance to start a family. I’m glad that Miles and I fulfilled that wish.
It’s time to end an indulgent few hours. But endings are hard. So I’ll leave this snippet from a text from cousin Ron because it’s probably the kindest thing anyone has ever sent to me.
