Just make it a glamorized story. So much time has passed and so much is glossed over. Not even the people who were there remember how it happened.
--Rebecca Krikorian

The last time I went home, we ended up sitting at the kitchen table long after each meal was finished, just talking. By talking, I mean my parents talked while my brother, my fiancé and I sat with our legs crossed and our chins cupped in our hands, listening to what it was like growing up in a time or place that isn't here and now.

I like hearing about my parents' youths, and not only for the generational differences, which, don't get me wrong, are fascinating.1 But what I really like hearing about is what it was like to literally grow up elsewhere, in another country and culture. Both of my parents are naturalized citizens-- my dad is an Armenian from Lebanon, and my mother is Filipina-- and, to me, stories just taste better when the storytellers have accents. From the way my father enunciates-- sharp on the consonants, and especially harsh on words that have a th-- it's obvious that he is foreign-born. My mom, though-- well, I never even realized she had an accent until my fiancé mentioned it to me.

"It's soft," Keith said, "but she just pronounces some words differently."

So my parents speak accented English. That had that in common, when they came to this country. Regardless, the fact of the matter is this: my parents were two people from two completely different parts of the world, who probably never would have met if it weren't for a little city called New York.

My dad came to the States in 1967, at the age of twenty-seven. Until that point, he had lived in Lebanon for about twenty-five years. His father had been in the French Army, and his family had traveled "like gypsies" until he was five, going wherever the army took them.

When I was younger and learning what the work immigrant meant, I thought that my dad came here to work, for a better life, because that's what I was taught in elementary school. But when I asked if that's why he came, my father started laughing.

"I can't tell you that," he said, and even from over the phone I could tell that he was still smiling, but I couldn't tell whether it was from the memory or from my question. Eventually he said, "I came to New York to be single, to be independent, a bachelor. Back home everyone is expected to live with the family, the parents. I came here so nobody would ask questions."

He continued, his accent trickling through his words. "I thought I would come here for a couple years to have fun, and then go back. But I stayed. And I'm glad I did. Everybody was laughing at me when I left Beirut. I had two cars, six people working for me, my own business. But then the big civil war happened in 1975, and it lasted 15 years. I stayed a month in New York the first time, then came back for good." Almost ten years later in 1975, as my father's countrymen massacred each other in the streets, my mother stepped off an airplane at JFK International Airport. She was twenty-four, and flying in from Madrid 2. It was her first time not only to New York, but to the States themselves. A good friend from college was living and working in the city; my mother moved in, and found herself a secretarial job.

According to family legend, my parents met when my father walked into the office where my mother worked. He asked her out, she said yes, and then they went to dinner in this fancy restaurant somewhere, but neither of them liked the food very much. As he drove my mom home to her apartment and roommates, my father passed a Burger King. Now, somehow during the course of the conversation over dinner, my mother had mentioned how much she loved Burger King, and, to hear my dad tell it, this was back when the burgers were big 3. So he pulled into the Drive-Thru, and they each ate a Whopper in the parking lot. With fries.

My mother tends to reminisce differently than my dad. With her, I can ask rapid-fire questions and get equally rapid answers.

Take this, for example: I called my mother from work and asked her about where she grew up-- Cagayan de Oro, in the northern area of Mindanao.

Was Cagayan a city when you grew up, or was it a village?

"City."

How long did you live there?

"For the longest time. 4

When did you move to Manila? College?

"Yes."

Did you have a yaya 5 still?

"Yes, but then she became a nun." 6

Normally, when I run out of questions, that's the end of the storytelling. The thing is, I rarely run out of questions; my mother's gotten fed up, categorically refusing to discuss the past with me anymore: "What makes you think I even want to relive my life? Just make something up."

My father, on the other hand, likes to tell a story, and he will never turn down the opportunity to tell one: "Have I ever said no? Your mother, she's the villain."

My father, on the other hand, likes to tell a story, and I'm forced to interrupt if I need something explained. When he talks about growing up in Lebanon, he'll tell you what he was wearing, the temperature, if his hair had darkened to brown or if it was still blond, and what language they were speaking 7. He'll also sprinkle his stories with little analogies to help drive his point home 8, but he won't mention how old he was, where his family was living at the time, who was with him, or where his sisters or parents were. I always have to stop him to get this information; if I cut in too often, he gets frustrated, as if only the details he's providing are the details that should count.

The stories my dad tell also seem to revolve around various acts of derring-do. When he was younger, my dad survived scorpions and snakes, dog catchers, dog thieves, and civil war. In that order, all the while keeping an eye out on his two younger sisters to make sure they didn't do anything foolish, like talk to boys. In my mind, though, the best stories were the one in which my dad is the sole player, maybe with a faithful canine companion, because when he was living in Beirut, my dad almost always had a dog. One of them was Picky, who got his name not because of his personality, but because my father and his sisters liked the way it sounded. Picky was scared to leave the apartment because he had once been hit by a car, so, as my father puts it, "Picky did his business on the patio."

My favorite of my dad's childhood pets is Bouboul. "The name didn't mean anything, but you could spell it the French way: b-o-u-b-o-u-l. Here (in the US) maybe oo-oo, but the French is better."

Bouboul had an adventurer's heart; my father was constantly rescuing him from the dog catchers' truck, and, on one occasion, from a dog thief. In 1940s Beirut, most dogs didn't have collars and tags. Your neighbors just knew whose dog belonged to who: "Everybody and the kids and the dogs played in the street," my dad said, "so you knew this dog went with this family or with this kid."

When Bouboul was just a puppy, he was stolen. "Yorgo, this Greek guy, lived in the neighborhood," my dad told me, his voice only a little static-y from the telephone. "He was a very bad guy, eight months of the year he was in jail for something, and he just grabbed it 9, grabbed Bouboul right in the street. I was maybe climbing a tree somewhere, who knows, and someone came running, 'Yorgo has your dog.' The whole neighborhood came with me, to Yorgo's, and I took the dog back. The dog was a puppy yet, with a red nose. I don't know, how much money did that guy want to sell it for, but I guess any money was good for Yorgo. I was eight, nine years old, and that was the first time I had to save Bouboul.10"

The stories of my dad's life-- these were my fairy tales. Hearing about Lebanon in the 40s, 50s and 60s was as far away as I could get from 1980s and 90s suburbia, where my unusual string of vowels and letters was listed on the class roster with kids with names like Gina Termini, Patrick Sullivan and Jillian Kosinski. Things may be different-- New York is neither a desert nor a tropical archipelago, my mother's yaya is now a nun, and my dad doesn't have to shove his sisters to the ground in order to avoid gunshots-- but there is one thing that my parents tacitly agree on: the story.

I called my mom later on that same day, from home, and asked her to tell me again how she met my father. According to her, my parents met like this:

"It was in New York. Your father was making jewelry for a wholesaler I was working for. And that's it, that's how we met."

That's how she would have left it, too, until I started asking questions.

"What more do you want me to say? He came into the door and I thought, Whoa, this is a good-looking man, and there was a New Year's party coming up, and I said, Will you come with me?"

Now imagine my dad in the background. Imagine him yelling, "You didn't ask me, I asked you."

"Either way," my mom says, more to him than to me. "We went to the party, and then we went to a bar and we had drinks."

What about Burger King?

"We didn't go to Burger King that time. Later. Oh, I used to love Burger King. We used to go there so much, even when you and your brother were babies. We used to get from the Drive-Thru and eat in the car all the time."

Then my father starts yelling, "The tomatoes used to be so fresh. And the juice that would come out of it! Now the hamburgers are, eh, so thin..."

And that's how another story begins.

1.Come over and hear my mother sing along to Sergio Medes and Brasil '66, or listen to my dad describe the kind of clothes he used to wear when he went out. You'll be fascinated too.

2.This, I have to say, freaks me out, as I have turned twenty-five within the past two months, and the only foreign country I have ever lived in is Massachusetts, and my mother has Spain and America under her belt.

3.When he talks about what Burger King used to be like, my dad holds his index finger and thumb an inch apart and says things like, "A Quarter Pounder was like this, so thick, and a quarter pound. And the lettuce was crisp, and green like you haven't seen." Sometimes he even talks about the tomatoes.

4.This is a very typical answer from my mother. If she were feeling particularly silly, or nostalgic, she might stretch the O in "longest" so it was about three syllables. As it was, the "ong" is "longest" was the-- well, it was the longest word in the sentence.

5.A nanny. Most Filipino families have one, at the very least. My mother, the second eldest of six-- three boys, three girls, but not as neatly bracketed by age as The Brady Bunch-- had her own yaya.

6.Also a very typical answer-- extra, unrelated information.

7.Arabic, Armenian, English, French or Turkish.

8.My parents love my best friend. Sometimes I get the feeling that my dad lives for her visits, because then not only has he gotten a new person tell stories to, but also because Marcella is feisty. She'll debate with him even more forcefully than most people in our family, probably because she knows she can get away with it. Once, years ago, when talking politics, my father employed a very (in his mind) elegant little simile. "It makes no sense," he said. "It's like taking a donkey to the dining room and feeding it filet mignon. Donkeys eat hay." Marcella and I still use this phrase today. And it's still funny.

9.My dad mixes up his pronouns a lot. You would too, if you thought in one language and spoke in another.

10.I like to picture my dad at year eight, marching to a big, hairy Greek's, with a neighborhood mob on his heels, all joined together to hunt their own village monster. Did my father's face turn red when excited, the way it does now? Had he developed a squint of concentration? Was my father at eight as loudmouthed and brazen as he is at sixty-four?