To the Rescue

Felix was my classmate from sixth through eighth and throughout high school in Cambridge. After seven years together, I regret to say that no student really liked Felix. Every day, he wore black pants and a light-colored business shirt. He kept to himself, never socialized or made friends. I don’t think any schoolmate ever had a real conversation with him. Frankly, we considered him weird. Who were we to say? We all had qualified for placement in the city’s Academically Talented program, A/T for short, meaning we were tracked throughout our entire grammar and secondary school experience. Such tracking is no longer practiced. Truthfully, we might be defined as nerds today. Other kids in high school were enrolled in the trades (like my Dad when he was a Cambridge high schooler decades earlier) or in the business program (i.e. training for office jobs). School for us “brainiacs” meant rigorous study and lots of homework. Math went right up to the boundaries of calculus. English classes consisted of writing essays and discussing literature, of which we read 50 pages each school night. The intense labor has paid off handsomely for me. Geometry was to become the basis of the work I did for decades in my own business. Training to read 50 pages per sitting was invaluable in getting my master’s degree a few years ago. Even now, when I read for pleasure, 50 pages per day is still the goalpost. Last year, I read War and Peace for the first time, dividing the 1,200-page tome into three straight weeks of 50-plus pages per day. Though I didn’t know it at the time—and not to sound toadyish now—my English classes contributed to my securing my current position as an Armenian Weekly columnist. I accompany each article with a painting, which I embellish with a descriptive short poem called a haiku, a skill I learned in high school, having been selected to write the class poem for graduation. Some classmates, however, came close to falling through the cracks. Two come to mind. I’ve forgotten their names; they detested Felix. While in grammar school, the pair, whom I’ll call George and Michel, decided to take out their dislike on poor Felix. They didn’t lock him in his locker; they heaved him headfirst into the nearest trash receptacle. I’ve painted the incident in watercolor from sketchy memory, substituting my Dad’s solid copper, decorative, miniature trash barrel for the actual one. Taking artistic liberty, I’ve placed myself as sheriff, based on John Wayne’s portrayals in his Rio Bravo trilogy, replete with his apricot-colored shirt and beige pants, rescuing unlucky Felix. On that dreadful day, we all ended up in the principal’s office, where the offending duo got a tongue-lashing and whatever punishment I don’t recall. I must confess that Felix is not his real name. I’ve changed it “to protect the innocent.” I intentionally chose Felix because, ironically, it means “lucky” in Latin, another subject I took for two years in high school. Latin has helped me decipher English and Romance language words ever since. While trying to determine what names to assign to my two culprits, I found the George and Michel combination quite serendipitously on Google. They were the infamous Tanielian brothers of Beirut, a.k.a. the Taxi Driver Killers, convicted and sentenced to death around 2011 for 11 counts of murder of cab drivers. Alas, Armenians aren’t exempt from being criminals. Now, this story’s got a happy ending. To my knowledge and recollection, all of us in our A/T class went on to college, even George and Michel, who paid their dues and ultimately straightened their ways. As for Felix, he made out quite well, getting the last laugh. Though he lived a short walk from our grammar school, on commencement day, he was chauffeured to the building in a black stretch limousine. He also received a full ride to Harvard University.

To the Rescue

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Robert Megerdichian

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This story is FREE for you...

Robert Megerdichian

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