A Coat of Arms

 

I had a project either for school or Cub Scouts way back when I was around 9 or 10 years old.  It was to create a coat of arms or family crest.  I was not really sure what to do.  I was not sure what to put on it.  I recall asking my Mother for ideas, she thought it was a exciting project and we ended it up doing it together.  Mom’s guidance was perfect and provided a great little lesson in family history and lore.   

She suggested we use the same shield as on the Armenian Youth Federation (AYF) logo because of the importance of organization in our family. The AYF is where my parents met and fell in love.  We used a ruler and a pencil to create the shield which included three horizontal stripes to bear the red, blue, and orange of the Armenian flag thus hammering home the importance of our Armenian heritage.  Preparing that coat of arms was one of the seminal moment in my being tied to and proud of my Armenian heritage. 

Instead of swords or arms, we crossed a pen in an ink bottle with a shovel.  The shovel represented our farming past.  The last real farmer in the family was my Father’s maternal grandfather, Nishan Asoian, who had a farm in Andover, MA in a community with his wife’s, Elmas nee Loosigian, brothers.  The pen was for the family love of education and writing as exemplified by the aforementioned Nishan, my paternal grandfather Aram, and his brother Rouben.  We had Mount Ararat behind in the top part of the shield between the pen and the shovel.

I was proud of the work we did on that project.

Over the years, I am not sure what became of that Coat of Arms.  I thought I saved it but with the passage of time, I am not sure where it might be and have assumed that it is lost.  The memory of creating it and the impact that simple project on me as lasted.  I am very grateful for that which in retrospect is more important than the piece of paper.

This in itself could have sufficed as a blog post, but it only serves as background for this one.  At the time of this writing, my birthday is a week away.  It is a milestone birthday as it ends in a zero.  Given this is the twentieth year of writing This Side of Fifty, well, you can guess my age.

This past weekend, we were in Washington, DC visit my son, daughter in-law, and their three children, three of my five grandchildren.  We celebrated four birthdays:  Mine (June 25^th), my daughter in-law’s father (June 25^th), my eldest grandson (June 26^th), and my only granddaughter (June 27^th).  It is a very nice cluster of four birthdays, and it is always a joy to celebrate them together.  This year we did it two weeks early as it was the only time that fit all our schedules.

My son and daughter in-law presented me with a unique and most valued gift:  a new Coat of Arms.  They put it on note cards, table top flags, and a couple of banners.  It is perfect gift for me, and I greatly appreciate it.

There is a shield with an Armenian eternity symbol in the center.  The gears in the top quadrant represent my engineering background and career as well as my hometown, Detroit, the Motor City.  There is an oud in the bottom quadrant.  There is a pomegranate tree in the left quadrant, another symbol of fertility, abundance, and luck in our Armenian Heritage.  There is a book, a pen, and ruler in the right quadrant.  The pen because I write, the book represents my academic side and being a life-long learner, and the ruler is for my mathematics education.  To the left of the shield is the lion of Armenia.  Asiatic or Persian lions once inhabited Armenia and is one of our national symbols.  The flower is the Armenian Poppy (Papaver lateritium) which is native to the Armenian Highlands.  The other side of the shield is a Michigan Wolverine and the state flowers of the states I have lived in: Massachusetts, Michigan, Connecticut, and Illinois.  Above the shield is, of course, Ararat but as viewed from the West.  Below the shield is our name in a stylized Armenian script.

I couldn’t have asked or even conceived of a more meaningful and so very thoughtful gift.

I am feeling heraldic.