Uncle Garabed's Notebook (Dec. 8, 2012)

A Matter of Perspective

Mountains appear more lofty the nearer they are approached, but great men resemble them not in this particular.

… Lady Marguerite Blessington

Daffy-nition

Anti-semantic: Describing someone who is prejudiced against using meaningful words.

From the Hoover File

My first glimpse of Paderewski was years before in 1893 or 1894. Two of my classmates and I at Stanford University, in order to augment our income, had organized a sort of entertainment enterprise. We sought out professional musicians, lecturers, and other notables visiting the West Coast, for whose appearances we could sell tickets to the faculty and our fellow students. We agreed upon a fee and usually made a profit as the University furnished free the assembly room, light, and heat. Upon learning of the impending visit to the West Coast of the great musician, we settled with his manager on a fee of $1,500 and a date several weeks ahead. Unfortunately, our date turned out to be a University holiday and we had no hope of collecting the $1,500 through the sale of tickets. Our collective assets were about one-tenth of this sum. We finally decided that the only thing to do was to have a meeting with Paderewski’s manager the moment he arrived in California and try to negotiate a settlement. We were in this meeting at the Palace Hotel with our $150 when Paderewski walked into the room and inquired what was going on. We explained our problem and said that we might possibly raise some more from the profits of future bookings. The manager had inquired into the details of our enterprise. He asked whether we had an office and a bank account. We confessed that our head office was on the pavement and that our meetings were held between classes. Paderewski laughed and propose that we suspend the engagement until some future occasion when he was in the West. One of our members suggested we might not be able to do that as we might then have dissolved, and again offered our $150. Paderewski laughed again and said that we would postpone that also. I recalled this episode to him when as Prime Minister I met him at the Peace Conference. He chuckled again.

(A footnote in the book Freedom Betrayed by Herbert Hoover, published in 2011 after being held back for almost 50 years by his heirs.)

What’s in a Name?

Safarian/Seferian: Arabic in derivation, identified as a descriptive term or a trade, safar is defined as journey or voyage; thus a voyager, traveler, and possibly a merchant. The Swahili word safari for journey or expedition is borrowed from Arabic.

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CK Garabed

Weekly Columnist

C.K. Garabed (a.k.a. Charles Kasbarian) has been active in the Armenian Church and Armenian community organizations all his life. As a writer and editor, he has been a keen observer of, and outspoken commentator on, political and social matters affecting Armenian Americans. He has been a regular contributor to the Armenian Reporter and the AGBU Literary Quarterly, “ARARAT.” For the last 30 years, Garabed has been a regular contributor to the Armenian Weekly. He produces a weekly column called “Uncle Garabed's Notebook,” in which he presents an assortment of tales, anecdotes, poems, riddles, and trivia; for the past 10 years, each column has contained a deconstruction of an Armenian surname. He believes his greatest accomplishment in life, and his contribution to the Armenian nation, has been the espousing of Aghavni, and the begetting of Antranig and Lucine.