Black Dog of Fate: A Memoir

This chapter ruminates on the author’s relationship with his Armenian grandmother, Nafina Aroosian, when Peter was a middle-schooler in the northern New Jersey suburbs of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Peter had a close relationship with his grandmother, who lived nearby, despite significant cultural distance between them. During one of their Friday baking sessions at her apartment, his grandmother told the “black dog of fate” story about a young, poor woman’s meager offering to the mythical character Fate in the form of a dead, cooked dog with a “wormy” apple in its mouth. Fate accepted the offering kindly—more kindly than offerings of fine stuffed lambs and rubies from richer visitors (9-10). The author, speaking from the perspective of his young self, did not understand the moral of the story. His grandmother cryptically explained that the dog represented hope and mystery in the human world—that “appearances are deceiving” (11)—but the old story, like many qualities about his grandmother, remained elusive.

In other ways, Peter and his grandmother shared modern interests and spoke in a modern vocabulary that appreciated rock and roll music, construction on the Garden State Parkway, and baseball. The author notes that his grandmother was an avid Yankees fan, and that “she felt the game more deeply than anyone knew” (12).