I’ve been thinking about my dad all week. He would have been 80 this year, and we would have celebrated his birthday this week. Shy of his birthday, I received an e-mail Tuesday night from Steven, my best friend in junior and high school. Steven was alerting me that our mutual friend James’ father had passed away and the funeral was Friday, on my dad’s birthday.

It’s past one o’clock on a Thursday morning, and “Coast to Coast AM,” my favorite late-night radio talk show is beaming via headphone into my left ear from an AM radio station in Los Angeles. It has just rained, and inhaling that fresh, clean smell of fresh air after a downpour prompted my first thought of gratitude on this day.

It’s 1980 in the Tower District of Fresno, and what preteens do in this neighborhood is get into gang fights, smoke cigarettes, and call radio stations when there’s a contest.

Everyone is always measuring our worth with units of money. Our employers tell us we are worth this much. We tell our clients we want that much for our time. And some random illogical and unstable marketplace algorithm puts a price tag on the cost of our health care.

I was being lazy lately and not writing much on my blog. The holidays came by and passed so quickly. I had planned a list of things to do, to write, to prepare for the New Year and did so little actually.

Armenia’s demographic landscape is changing; modern-day warriors are emerging. These warriors are not engaged in battle or warfare but exemplify a different kind of courage and daring, one that demands unfaltering commitment and love to our collective concept of homeland.

While most of the world has finished celebrating the New Year and gone back to work, the holiday season is only now coming to a close in Armenia. Most post-Soviet countries like Belarus, Georgia, the Russian Federation, Moldova, the Ukraine, and Armenia continue to celebrate the Old New Year according to the Julian calendar, which falls on January 13.

I have spent more than two years in America now, and one of the aspects of society here that has struck me is the kind of Christianity which one finds prevalent in a significant part of the population.

… one moment in our collective history when we came together despite our differences to celebrate our diversified popular culture. On Sunday, December 13, our hyphenated people came from the north and south of the Equator and the left and right of the Meridian to the entertainment capital of the world, to honor the Armenian stars, the modern makers of Armenian Culture, the ones who shone bright center-stage at the Nokia Theatre.

… a man, mid 40s, wide awake at 2:24 AM, staring at his keyboard trying to fulfill a promise to himself and his editor that he would write a weekly column. He is a weak man at this hour, considering not to ever write again when newspapers of his day via the Internet have become bathroom stalls where any reader with a keyboard can scribble nasty notes and tell the writer to shut up because the reader thinks the writer has no substance.

… three Armenian boys climbing the jungle gym in an Armenian kindergarten in Antelias, Lebanon. They were five-years-old, maybe six, donning their requisite red school uniforms, playing under the watchful eye of their teacher, Miss Jacqueline.

… a neighborhood in a suburb of Kolkata, India, where a tall, pristine white stone wall separates the grounds of a sparkling Armenian church from a modern-day slum and its poverty, smells, refuse, rabid dogs, and noisy rickshaws.

I am Paul Chaderjian. I am eight. The year is 1976. I am Armenian. I’m mixed up. And I am writing this with candlelight. Because, there is a war in my country – Liban. I am at home. All the windows and drapes are closed in our home. If a bomb explodes the glass blows and hurts people. So we keep all the windows covered. No glass. No blood.

You feel a wave of air rush from the underground tube in front of you. The subway train is fast approaching Bagramian Station, your local friends are talking non-stop about Eurovision, and the invisible pressure of cold air – what you feel before you hear the hum of the tracks – embraces and chills you. This is your Saroyan moment.