The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Diary: A few days ago my son Luka asked me if I knew Aznavour, the French singer who died in 2018, well into his 90s. Do I know Aznavour? We grew up on Aznavour in Lebanon. Aznavour, Becaud, Montand, Piaf, Joe Dassin, Charles Trenet, Maurice Chevalier and the rest of them, though remembering my parents’ tendency to hierarchize everything (an old and very lousy Lebanese habit), they placed Aznavour below Becaud and Montand and Jacques Brel (especially Jacques Brel, Baudelaire of the 20th century who, like my dad, just couldn’t lay off the fucking cigarettes and died at the same age, 46, two years after mine did, in 1978). Aznavour was actually Armenian, and his songs just a bit too popular, even though we loved him as much as the others. We just pretended not to. My maternal grandmother invariably made snarky remarks about his looks. He was more Belmondo in old age than Delon in his Adonis days. Once we’d moved to the United States, nostalgia pushed him up to the top of our tastes’ charts. We couldn’t get enough of him in those pre-internet, pre-streaming days when a 33 LP was a miracle of memories. So the other day Luka asks me if I knew Aznavour. He’d discovered him, all by himself, on Spotify or whichever creepy logarithmic spider had woven a thread from his appreciation of Sinatra (which I share less) to Aznavour. For some reason I found his discovery among the most endearing things of our year of living so distantly. It was as if through song, though “La Boheme,” through “Que c’est riste Venise,” through “Comme ils disent” (Aznavour’s story of a transvestite torch song singer’s double life), we had somehow glided back to my childhood in Lebanon, the childhood he might have had but that maybe, just maybe, he was fortunate enough not to have had. I ran into Gus Ajram the other day at the City Hall dedication in Bunnell. Gus is the owner of GEA Auto Sales. If John Cheever had written a story about him it would have been called “The Enormous Heart.” He is Lebanese like me, one of the earliest supporters of FlaglerLive. Still is. I hadn’t seen him in a long time. He had visited Lebanon recently, and pined for the way people lived life there. “They know how to live,” he said. “They live. They love life. We don’t live here.” It’s all work. He’s right. This is the life–the Lebanese life–I think Luka has never known, and that I knew long enough to know what I am missing–the life of a Mediterranean, as epicurean in its pleasures as it is Homeric in its tragedies. I am pretty secure in the sense that we, Cheryl and I, have done better by our children to have raised them in the United States than in Lebanon. Not just pretty secure, but certain, even though I occasionally wonder what they have lost in not having that Mediterranean soak in them, hopelessly polluted as the Mediterranean can be, and not just metaphorically. But they’re not entirely disconnected–at least Luka isn’t. Gravity’s pull can be irresistible. Aznavour was no Mediterranean but was the lullaby to our Mediterranean years, and he was Armenian, like most of Lebanon’s best and brightest (descendants of the exiled from Turkey’s genocide). So Luka discovering him had the feel of the latest edition of our origin story, if also something all his that somehow touched my origins, without my presumptions getting in the way. As for my daughter Sadie… well, it’s been all Taylor and Travis, and I can safely say that whatever Mediterranean DNA these two share is still a quest of mine that may have no better end point than Voyager I and II’s, while the distance between my two children sometimes feels as vast as that between the Voyagers. At least they are Voyaging, and we can scarcely ask for more. Non, je n’ai rien oublié. 

—P.T.

As I have grown older I see myself as fortunate in many ways. It is fortunate to have had all my life this passion for studying and enjoying literature and for trying to add a bit to it as interestingly as I can. This passion has given me much joy, it has given me friends who care for the same things, it has given me employment, escape from boredom, everything. The great gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

–From Elizabeth Hardwick’s Paris Review interview, Summer 1985.

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