My name is Podrigotuma and I grew up in County Cork and as far as we know in our family

going back generations there's only people from County Cork and County Kerry in the family

but of course along the way there's family members who went away to the United States

to England to South Africa I think and so families like mine are always filled with

poetry and literatures of people who stayed and people who left the diasporic experience

filled with the sadness and the hope and the dream of survival by staying or going.

On the way to Oshagann by Laurie Bidikian I stopped the car across the dirt road to see

what the old woman's selling hoping for a cold drink an extra postcard to write this evening

I find her tucked behind a table under a tarp, fly swatters swaying above her head, stacks

of marble boxes, packs of gum or the only things I recognize among the odd Russian Armenian

labels. She must not hear me because she keeps rolling a square of newspaper into a cone

fills it with roasted sunflower seeds. I ask for one saying Meghath Haji's fumbling

to find a drum among my dollars. Her eyes, the collar of two almonds, rise for only a moment

before she asks with a low coarse parrot voice if I like America, if I'm married and

where exactly is this place called Glendale. With an awkward smile I drop in different

answers for her like coins in the palm. Until this exchange I had convinced myself that

I do not look like a tourist. After all, having an ancestral name, firm family tree, the

language ironed to my tongue since the day I was born, how could I be just another

Americancy? I say this to myself though I'm the one with the walking shoes, the camera,

the plaid pattern pants. She interrupts my thoughts with, welcome to Armenia, please take

these seeds for free. When I extend the money I notice her face shrinks in the afternoon

light. Back in Los Angeles I would have insisted to pay, but with this unexpected visit I

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