The ghetto in Athens were I was born and raised has been torn down and paved over. The school in Venice where I was educated has been converted to a hotel. Even so, they continue to live in my memory and dreams. Canada, where I have spent most of my life, has so far failed to enter my dream world. From my days in Venice I remember Garo Basmajian, a pale sickly boy of fifteen from Marseilles who knew the PETIT LAROUSSE by heart and could identify a Rossini overture as surely as a Mozart symphony and a Beethoven sonata. What happened to him? I have made several attempts to reestablish contact without any results. I remember Padre Elia Pechikian, (Elia the Good), a Mekhitarist monk and headmaster of the Moorat-Raphael who loved to reminisce about his childhood in a tiny village in some forgotten corner of the Ottoman Empire. “When I asked my dad about the size of the moon,” he once said, “he replied: ‘Same as our backyard.’ The poor fellow - he was just an uneducated farmer.” I remember Padre Elia (the Bad) another Mekhitarist headmaster and a notorious sadist who believed and practiced corporal punishment. He ended his career by defrocking himself and running away to Argentina with a young mistress from Beirut.