Rodney Curtis

With the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide happening this month,

I’m re-sharing my personal experience at the memorial to its the slain citizens.

This story appeared in my first book, Spiritual Wanderer, from which this website gets its name.

The trip was exhausting. We were behind the Iron Curtain and at the mercy of the official Soviet travel agency, Intourist. It was 1984. The Cold War was showing no real signs of flaring up or calming down, and my intestines were wracked with what I liked to refer as the commie crud. I sat in a hotel in downtown Moscow, across the street from an enormous statue depicting Russian space flight and all I wanted to do was bend over the toilet. I felt worse than the embalmed body of Lenin who laid in state just down the street.

Our church peace mission, to come visit the USSR, was going along wonderfully up until that point. We were traveling to several different republics including Soviet Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia. But what struck me as odd, as totally incomprehensible, was the bizarre fact that here I was with my borscht coming out both ends and all the while American missiles were pointing directly at my butt as I heaved yet another peace offering into the politburo porcelain. I couldn’t get over the fact that I was one renegade soldier in South Dakota away from witnessing Ground Zero up close at the beginning of the end of civilization as we knew it. Then I puked again.

Earlier in the trip — or later, I can’t remember when — my priest-friend Ron and I were walking near Vladimir Lenin’s tomb singing John Lennon songs. It was surreal as we strolled along Red Square knowing we were some of the only Americans the Russian citizenry had seen up until that point. And there we were singing “Back in the USSR.”

Imagine!

Our trip was meant to be a non-political journey through the lands of our mortal enemy in order to meet normal everyday folks and say, “We don’t really feel like bombing you. Do you really wanna destroy us?”

Everywhere it seemed, I had to explain that all of us weren’t like our president. I became quite good at uttering my favorite phrase at just the right time, “Reagan nyet, Mir da!” Which roughly translated to “No, I’m not a Ronald Reagan fan and I prefer Peace to its alternative.”

It was a jolly good time, really. Knowing that I was probably being watched every minute of my journey. One guy tried to buy my pants, but I think he might have been a KGB agent just testing to see if I would dip my toes into the infamous black market. One night up in Leningrad — with the sun not really setting and it being light until after 11 pm — I ventured out into the public square around the hotel. After meeting some kids my age and giving them a few trinkets, including a “Say Yes to Michigan” t-shirt, the doorman at the hotel wouldn’t let me back in.

“Nyet, Ruskie,” he said pointing at me, implying that I was Russian and somehow not welcome in. I had heard about this earlier and knew that Soviet citizens weren’t allowed in the official tourist hotels due to some weird fear that perhaps we’d influence their thinking. Or that they’d try to rip us off. Anyway, the doorman was adamant about keeping me out even when I showed him my room key. I’m not proud of this, but the only thing I could think to do was repeat an old car commercial to show I was, like in the old war movies, a Yank.

“Look, I’m an American,” I pleaded. “Baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet … you gotta let me in!” I think that swayed him. No Russian kid would be that silly. He waved his arm gruffly and allowed me to walk in.

 __________

The highlight of the peace mission, though, was our trip to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. The city was beautiful and the people were very nice to us foreigners. Throughout our entire stay, Mt. Ararat was visible outside the bustling city. The mountain is the mythic final resting place of Noah’s ark and its rightful boundaries were hotly disputed between the Turks and the Armenians.

Outside of Yerevan, on one of the many hills surrounding the city, was a memorial to the slain Armenians. The early part of the 1900s was a rotten time for Armenia and our guides explained to us that 1/3 of the population was killed by the Turks, 1/3 emigrated and only a third remained in the country. This memorial was a powerful shrine to those who died.

It was an impressive structure that looked like an enormous unfolding flower, with giant stone or concrete arms where the petals would be. Inside, where the bud might be, was an eternal flame burning in remembrance. You could walk inside the memorial and stand around the fire.

Our group did just that, about 20 of us or so. And there — the furthest point I’d ever been from home — I felt the most powerful, otherworldly feeling I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t just me either. All the people in our group, those my age up through retirees, felt the same phenomenon. We were standing there and the most overpowering feeling of sadness hit us all. A young seminarian in our group broke into a spontaneous prayer and later he was escorted out, arm in arm, by an old white-haired woman who was normally the life of the party. And they were both crying.

It hit us pretty hard, just how mournful that place was. Sure, we were acutely aware of war and genocide; after all, that’s why we were on the mission in the first place. But there was something more. The deep, internal, visceral sadness that swept over us was an undeniable message that we were in the presence of something bigger and more powerful than ourselves. Sure, the horrific events that the memorial stood for had happened 70 years prior, but the emotion swirling around the grounds was as real and pervasive as if the genocide had just occurred.

I still haven’t come to understand exactly what we were feeling that day in Yerevan, but I haven’t probed too deeply either. I imagine other people have witnessed the same effect either there or in other holy shrines around the world. My guess is that the best thing to do, is honor those remembered by such shrines and then not stick around for too long afterward.

There was a sense, inside, that we were somehow intruding. But we were also forced to experience something that we weren’t expecting, or used to feeling.

In the end, the message I got — soft yet clear — was if we don’t fully remember our abhorrent past in all its shameful detail, we’re more likely to repeat or simply gloss over our tragedies.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever experience such a powerful, otherworldly emotion. I’m not sure if I want to either. But I feel lucky to have had such an experience.

April 24, 2015 marks the 100 year anniversary of the beginning of Armenia’s Genocide.

To read more about it, visit the Wikipedia page addressing the issue of the 1.5 million slain Armenians.

I just want to say at the outset, that I’m not always as smart as I like to think I am. This surely comes as a shock to virtually no one, not the least of whom me. Heck, I don’t even know if I constructed that previous sentence smartly.

But what I do know is that up until today — the beginning of March, 2015 — I confused Charles Bukowski with The Big Lebowski.

Since I’m both a writer and an avid movie fan, my ignorance is even more ridiculous.

You probably all know Charles Bukowski was a German poet and novelist who made Los Angeles his second home. He wasn’t fictional. Time magazine called him “a laureate of American lowlife.”

The Big Lebowski was a Coen Brothers film about a guy who also lived in Los Angeles. Jeff Bridges played the title character, a downtrodden man whom Bukowski may have written about, if he weren’t fictional already.

Maybe you can forgive my confusion. Probably not though.

I have heard references to both Lebowski and Bukowski for many years. I saw the movie in 1998, four years after Bukowski died of leukemia. I just mixed the two up in my brain and apparently wasn’t too curious about by why people were so reverent about the Jeff Bridges character. Obviously they were referring to Bukowski not Lebowski.

Both were cult heroes. Both had alternative lifestyles. Both lived in LA. But there’s one more thing. They both kind of/sort of looked alike.

Granted, that’s no excuse for me being a moron. But I’ll bet I’m not the only one. I just found out there’s a Big Bukowski Facebook page. It mashes the two up. Apparently the similarity isn’t lost on others. But whereas I confused them unintentionally, others riff on the likenesses. There’s even a rapper named Larry David Flow who writes, “Big Lebowski and Charles Bukowski are the reasons I’m not angry when you call me Kowalski.”

I’m trying to do more research on their similarities, but my browser feels a bit let down by me too. It has seemingly joined their downtrodden masses and refuses to follow my search requests.

“Rodney,” it appears to ask, “did you really think all those cultural references over the years were to the Jeff Bridges’ Lebowski role and that there wasn’t someone else they were mentioning?”

My browser is right. I shouldn’t be allowed to continue searching this nonsense, hoping that others were as confused as me. So in lieu of proof, I offer up this very tenuous possibility.

Other people fall into one of three camps:

⚫ Those who are fully aware of two separate individuals, Lebowski and Bukowski.
⚫ Those who have never heard of Bukowski, Lebowski or both.
⚫ Those like me who had them confused.

Here is a pie chart, better illustrating my point.

Time was, we were the only ones on the block recycling. Now in 2015, most of our neighbors drag their recycling out to the curb. Multicolored bins line our street like giant Pez candies.

We’ve noticed since our girls left the house, that we generally only have a small bag of trashy garbage and two large bins of recyclables. That’s a lot of television time.

What?

You read that right; we are helping you watch more television. Okay, so maybe it’s a stretch, but hear me out. According to timetorecycle.org, recycling just one single aluminum can saves enough energy to run a television set for three hours. Recycle one and you’re doing yourself and the planet a good deed. Toss it in a landfill and it’ll still be an aluminum can in 500 years.

What about styrofoam? Did you know styrofoam — aka Plastic #6 — is now accepted by many, if not most recycling facilities? Recycling it saves twice as much energy as incinerating it.

We Americans generate an enormously disproportionate amount of the planet’s waste, yet we only take up about 5% of the population. Some estimates even say we produce between 25% and 40% of the world’s trash. Whatever the actual amount, we can do a whole lot better.

In 2012, Americans generated roughly 251 million tons of trash, but we only recycled and composted about 87 million tons of this material. That’s about a 34 percent recycling rate says the EPA.

According to many different sources, we throw away enough paper each year to construct a 12-foot-high wall from New York to Seattle. That wall would block the Keystone XL pipeline — which may be one positive benefit — until it rained somewhere in the country.

But there’s good news too. Right now, according to another EPA study, by recycling and composting, we’ve saved the same amount of energy that’s consumed by almost 10 million households each year.

Since I grew up in the Motor City, let’s put this into automotive terms, shall we. Remember that one recycled can that you were running your TV set with? It’s also the equivalent of half a gallon of gasoline for your car. Every ton of aluminum cans we recycle saves the energy equivalent of 1,665 gallons of gas. And every ton of paper we recycle saves the energy equivalent of 165 gallons of gas.

So listen up, patriots, if you want to watch more TV, drive further, or not worry about a paper wall crashing down on you, start recycling. Nah, that’s not the message here. Actually, it’s really simple:

• Recycling is easy.
• Recycling creates jobs. (In New Jersey alone, the recycling effort employs 27,000 people)
• Recycling is great for the environment.
• Recycling adds to the economy (over $236 billion per year!)

Don’t kick the can down the road. Put it in a bin and feel a bit better about yourself.

FUN FACT: The US National Soccer Team wore jerseys made almost entirely out of recycled plastic bottles.