Outsider Art

I picked a piece of drift wood out of the Flint River yesterday (although my mom warned the rangers would shoot me). It reminded me of when my Dad and I would spend an afternoon combing the woods by the Santa Fe River in Florida, or else out by some creek near Gainesville, hunting along the banks for driftwood. We'd collect an armload and dump them into the back of his El Camino or whatever he was driving. Then we'd cart them home and glue some eyes on them and shellac them and transform them into deer, or raccoons, or armadillos. The plan was always to sell these at the flea market in Waldo (also near Gainesville) or to have some hifalutin Yankee come down and declare them outsider art (I'm sure he was joking about that). The one I picked up looks a bit like a horse head without the ears or back of the skull so I think I'm going to buy a plastic eye and if we go to Omega where my dad's buried, set up my own piece of outsider art on his gravestone.

Amidst chaos last night, my sister prepared one of her signature Southern meals--fried yellow squash, collards with fatback, mashed potatoes, biscuits, creamed corn, and pork roast. It was so good it'd make you want to slap your mama--an old saying. Of course, we all get ready to slap each other without food instigating it. In the car on the way to the barbecue restaurant last night, I was riding with my niece, Caylyn, her husband, Michael, and my mother.

Michael: Where are we going?

Caylyn: Y'all aren't listening.

Mom: If you don't know where we're going then why are we going there?

Caylyn: Y'all aren't listening! We're going to that barbecue place down past Griffin! I can't exactly remember where it is.

Michael: I just want to know where we're eating!"

Caylyn: The barbecue place!

Mom: Well, you can't drive around and around 'cause you don't have a tag and the police will get you.

Caylyn: It's right up here!

Mom: I thought you didn't know where it was!

Caylyn: I don't but it's right up here.

Mom: You're going to run out of gas. And you're going to get a ticket.

Michael: Do you know where we're eating?

Caylyn: It's right there. I see the sign.

Mom: I don't see it.

Caylyn: It's right there! Southern barbecue!

Michael: That barbecue is racist, then.

Caylyn: It is not!

More Food and Fun in the South

Nature. Today we went down to Flint River. It had overflowed its banks and the silt brown water had swallowed several trees and picnic tables. There were rapids shooting up and spraying out over rocks in the middle of the flood. A loan palmetto grew from the bank. A hike up through the pine woods brought us to a wooden deck that overlooks a turn in the river. You could see all the way to the hills in the west, brown mostly in January, but striped with dark pine greens. There were deer prints in the clay, and coon. Mom and I sat on the banks and talked--about Delal, about Kurds, about Obama and grandma. I made her do a little dance for the cheap camera Jeremy bought her.

For lunch, we had slaw dogs and Brunswick stew at English's cafe in town. The slaw dogs were excellent, the cabbage finely grated like I like it. The owner of the cafe specializes in a kind of sloppy joe burger--ground meat topped with sauce. She says some local boys had fifty pounds of them freeze dried and sent over to their unit in Iraq. "Lord, they fought over 'em, them boys," she said. It was barbecued ribs for dinner down in Griffin. The cracklin' cornbread was especially good. This was one of those places out in the woods with "antiques" hanging on the walls. Old plow handles, road signs, irons, washboards etc. Michael, my nephew in law, says "no black people in sight." Then he looks back in the kitchen and says "Figures. There's some guy back doing the dishes."

I had forgotten what starry skies looked like. The moon is near full tonight. Orion hangs over the Western horizon--"there were so many they nearly jingled together" to quote Orhan Kemal.

Back in the South

A sunny day in Georgia (the state, not the country). I'm typing from my sister's living room. My mom is napping through her soaps (the Young and the Restless) even as she insists she's not, and the puppy she's just adopted is staring at me from the couch beside her. I'm back in the South. Thomaston, Georgia, just north of Macon.

Breakfast this morning was at the barbecue restaurant downtown. We had eggs, biscuits, and bacon and country ham. There were the usual covens of old people talking lazily as the waitress, Edie says, "More coffee, hon?" The biscuits were huge and fluffy, homemade buttermilk biscuits according to Edie, and the bacon was thick and crisp. After breakfast we went to the Upson Country Historical Society where I browsed through their collection of Creek arrowheads and their Civil War files. (There was one story of General Wilson, a young Yankee firebrand who didn't hear about Lee's surrender and decided to set the South ablaze. He went on to devastate every mill and factor from Alabama to the Atlantic. His army captured a train engine in Thomaston, set it on fire, and sent it full speed barreling into town.)

We picked up supper this afternoon at the Steve Brown Fish Farm--a catfish farm out in the hills. It's an old fish camp surrounded by shallow ponds. The water is a brown-orange--just like the Georgia clay--and aerated by fountains. Everything looks just like my GrandpPa Carl's old catfish farm down in Florida. Back in the 70s, we used to take our cane poles and go fishing, and I remember loving it because you were always guaranteed to catch something, and something you could eat, too. (On the lake with Dad, I never caught anything but gar which, my dad said, only white trash ate.) The smell of the fish camp was the same smell as my grandpa's shed where he used to keep all his tackle--a musty blend of old wood, rubber worms, and of course, fish parts. The cats are two dollars a pound. Their heads and guts have been removed but in the name of freshness, I guess, the woman running the place doesn't filet them until you pay for them. You can go catch them yourself if so inclined.

The results tonight: fried catfish (really really good), hushpuppies, cheese grits, cole slaw, and a pecan pie.

More Snow Stories

The snow died off during the day, but came whirling back tonight. I was at Lemon Cafe playing backgammon with Delal and between turns I looked out the window at the snow tumble-falling through the sodium lights. There's a street on the way home lined with bars--out front they have neon lights, green, blue, red, pink. The snow danced past those. And it fell into the Ottoman graveyard too, where there are no lights, just century old graves written in Arabic script and topped with turbans where the snow gathers. There's something lonely about those grave stones standing in the shadows gathering snow--it reminds me of a Robert Lowel Poem about King's Chapel cemetery in Boston, if I'm not mistaken. Where the snow gathers on graves of dead colonialists. This cemetery stretches miles all the way down to the Bosphorus, but only in pieces from here to Uskudar. It pops up here and there between buildings, over railroad tressles, on a busy street corner, behind a gas station. (As I write, it's 9:30. The boza seller is wandering through the streets shouting in slow, melancholy bass notes "Boooooooooooooza". Boza is a hot vanilla drink they sell in the winter--perfect for this weather)

A record snow fall in Istanbul yesterday. It's the first time I've seen the city in snow. I crossed the Sultan Mehmet bridge and the Bosphorous was completely whited out, but floating out their in the whiteness was the gothic mosque in Ortakoy, looking very bit like a space ship coming through the fog. The whole city is giddy with snow fever. I went to Taksim to meet Ekrem. Both of us were so reminded of Boston that we were almost high on memory, and kept slinging each other down icy Istiklal and laughing for absolutely no reason. At night, I stayed in with Delal and the housemate and we watched a Turkish film called "Yol". It was pretty good, with a couple of really heartrending scenes in the snow that echoed the howling windstorm outside.

The director of this movie has an interesting story. His name is Yilmaz Guney, a Turkish Kurd from Adana. He was a political prisoner at the time Yol was being filmed and so he had his assistant follow his written directions when directing the movie, which he had spelled out in minute detail--in effect, directing vicariously. When it came time for the premier, he escaped from prison and took the negatives of the film to Switzerland. Like so many of Turkey's writers, directors, artists, and everyone else, he spent the rest of his life in exile. Yol was banned in Turkey until 1999.

Last Day of School and A Visit from a Superstar

A blizzard is forecast. And we are only getting rain. The students who have not been at school all week suddenly descend upon the school like flies landing to feast upon a rotting carcass. Today is report card day. They must come. Trying to run a class is like trying to herd rabid street cats. I get so frustrated at one point (I just want to play a game!) I drop the F bomb and the giggling little goblins hear.

During the break, I have to go down to the accountants office to clear up some paperwork for my direct deposit. As I'm coming out, I'm rifling through my documents and not watching where I'm going. I bump into someone, say "sorry" out loud, mumble "idiot" under my breath, and do not look up. I follow this person halfway down the hall before I notice the line of suits standing at every door, grinning like school boys waiting for their Christmas present. I look up and realize that the person I ran into and the person I've been following is none other than Alex De Sousa, captain of one of Istanbul's football team and one of the most famous men in Turkey! (Imagine running into Curt Schilling at work). Two other less popular players flank him and he's being strung along as if on an invisible leash by the team (and school) owner, Aziz Yildirim.

They pop into each class room to say hello, starting with the one at the end of the hall. I duck in with one of the English teachers (the room located smack in the middle) and pretend I've been there teaching the whole time as we all wait together for the celebrities to descend. The girls are saying how they don't care about football in the slightest as they adjust their hair. The boys are jumping around like chimps. When Alex enters, they all go wild except Ercument--the self-proclaimed handsomest boy in the school. He walks up and deftly slips his arm around Alex's shoulders, whispers something in his ear, and then laughs. Alex laughs, too. They shake hands, and cameras flash. You would think famous Ercument was the one paying a visit to lowly Alex. This kid is slick.

After school, I walk to the bus stop in the sleet and catch a ride to my Turkish lesson. I have written an essay about the sounds of Florida and my memories of Lake Santa Fe, and my teacher, Sevim, puts my paper down and begins telling me about old Istanbul. "Just on the outskirts of the city, it used to be so green. We had such a garden! Every fruit tree you can imagine! Pears, apples, apricots, cherries, oranges, lemons. Mom had a little garden just for lilies. Their scent filled the whole yard. She would cut just two, white ones, and lay them in a basket and then pile in fruit from our trees. These we'd take to the neighbors who would fill our basket with things from their own gardens. Oh, I remember walking through the grass in bare feet. And lying in my room at night and hearing the rustling of the poplar trees outside my window. There was a man named Mahmud--he used to live with his mother until she died and then he was all alone in his big house. We called him Mad Mahmud. He would walk around in bright colored clothing--purple, orange, green--and we used to follow him around and sing songs about him."

And then she burst out crying.

"There's no place left like this anywhere! No where. The smell of lilies, the taste of fruit right off the trees, grass, and wind in the poplars! And those neighbors! Nobody bought groceries in the summer! We just kept bringing food to each other! This city is just houses and buildings and more houses now! And mama and dad! They're gone, both gone!"

I never know what to do in the face of people's losses. And this one clearly affected her deeply--home, parents--all gone now.

Last Days at Fenerbahce High School

This is the week after finals, the week before winter vacation. School is a little bit like an Apocalyptic wonderland. The halls are empty. Papers and abandoned notebooks litter the floor. An eerie silence pervades. Most classes are empty, but the students who are here have reverted to a more primitive state, maddened by the shortage of lessons and books. The loosening of rules and regulations plunging them into a state of primeval chaos. They can only be handled with tranquilizing darts or perhaps, stun guns. They command the classrooms with a sort of rabid fanaticism, and teachers only enter at risk to their own lives or when ordered to stop sleeping in the teacher's room by the principal. The Lord of the Flies dawns upon Kayis Mountain.

It's snowy outside in the hills around school. The rooftops are all white triangles stacked on top of each other with black chimneys in the middle spouting smoke. The minaret is coated in ice, the railings frosted over. Fog and flurries hide the sky and hill behind. Seagulls circle around, white wings on white, like shapes broken free of the snow.

In the park, there are 'excercise machines' that result in the exertion of not one single muscle cell in the body. For example, you step onto two metal plates, put your hands on a rail, and then swing right and left. The machine offers no resistance. There are no weights. No stepping up and down. You could do this for all eternity without your breath speeding up in the least little bit. During the day, the covered ladies take walks to this "sports park". They wear head scarves and long dowdy robes that hide their feet. They flock to this machine and one after the other, swing the afternoon away. Against the white snow, their dark dresses make them look like Scooby Doo ghosts floating and twitching over the park, or like spastic Star Wars jawas, maybe.