For the Children

For the people of Turkey, April 23rd is Children’s Day, a holiday given by Mustafa Kemal, founder of the Turkish Republic, to the Children. It commemorates the day that the Turkish parliament was opened in the new capital Ankara and is celebrated by forcing children through months of dreary rehearsals for dance recitals and choral performances, that, once trudged through, is not rewarded with games or a carnival or, at our school at least, anything really fun at all except a Blues Brothers looking clown on stilts with patriotic balloons. (Stifle that yawn, traitor!) One unpatriotic little eight year old girl in the Radikal newspaper even said that her teachers had transformed Children’s Day into Torture Day! The anniversary of the founding of parliament was heralded by the banning of seven Kurdish politicians from June’s elections on the grounds that they had ‘records’. (One had been sentences to 10 years for merely speaking Kurdish). Taksim square was decorated with tear gas bombs and water canons, and police danced like strung-out members of an ultraviolent Lords of the Dance, kicking to death two boys in Bismil and even beating down a protester in a wheel chair in their holiday zeal.

For the people of my English office, April 23rd commemorates the day that we have to come in on a Saturday and sit through hours of saccharine shows about peace and chemical warfare. We celebrate by the finding of excuses to avoid going to school—someone has visitors, another person has stomach surgery, another decides to be a Jehova’s Witness for a day. In the middle of all this plotting, I get a call from the principle. ‘Jeff, would you mind reading something in English for Children’s Day tomorrow?’ Every the complacent tool, I said yes, sure, and then hung up the phone. My always-a-step-behind brain then whispered, ‘Ever consider what kind of thing you’re going to be reading?’

Down in the principal’s office, I am met by the Turkish Literature teacher, a very sweet, soft spoken woman who keeps telling me how astounded and grateful she is that I am doing this for her. When she finds out I speak Turkish, she claps her hands in delight. ‘How wonderful!’ We discuss Turkish authors for a bit (she herself once fancied being a writer) then she gets down to business and hands me the ‘text’ I am too read.

Kim Jung Il and Mao Tse Tung could have looked lovingly into each others’ eyes and said, ‘How small the world be to bloody dictators such as we.’

To wit, it begins thusly...‘The three harbingers of Spring descend, first on the air, then on the ground, then on the waters. The air, for Nature’s sake, diverts the bitter cold away and the Earth opens up her bosom to let the little beings greet the sun. The waters meander and flow forth, cleansing the willows and giving life all around. Without expecting anything in return.’

Pretty heady stuff. Biblical. Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony sort of rhetoric here. Does it come from the Psalms? The Turkish equivalent of an imitation Shakespearean sonnet? Reverently cliched, spiritual, mythical. It goes on.

‘The voice of Mustafa Kemal was the first harbinger of Spring that fell on the fertile Anatolian ground. He shaped the earth into a figure and she sprouted with Republic and Democracy, without expecting anything in return.’

I smirked and then tried to hide the smirk. Seriously? Mustafa Kemal is like the eternal gods of Spring?

‘Mustafa Kemal pronounced the contribution of man to the rhythm of nature. Without expecting anything in return!’

Huh? So he controls nature now? Like Storm in the X-Men or just Jesus. No, he is just pronouncing its rhythm. What in hell does this mean?

‘Sometimes he is the voice accompanying the song of Spring or a brush transforming the yellow of the autumn onto the canvas, or at times, the delicate white attire of winter. In the heat of summer, it becomes a rhythm that brings the shore and the waves together, and a duet begins for those who witness and cannot get enough. This is the duet of man and nature! The duet of Mustafa Kemal and the children that pierces through the ages to become a reality.’

O Sweet Christ.

When I finish, I am grimacing gleefully. I feel strange, naughty, like when you bring up some biting little gossip about someone you don’t like in particular—but you’re not sure it’s even true--and then you hear that they have done something horrifyingly ridiculous, beyond your wildish dreams, like raped kittens in front of kindergardeners or ripped apart rabbits at an Easter ceremony. There’s the utter horror, yes, but then there’s this monstrous kind of self satisfaction. I knew it! I imagine it’s the same schadenfreude I saw in my students’ eyes when they ran in the other day with a viral video of what appears to be a Chinese man eating a fetus. ‘See!’ they exclaimed in gleeful horror. ‘We were right! Chinese people do eat babies!’ Yayyy.

The next morning, in anticipation of my promulgating Fascist art, I make sure to buy a copy of Özgür Gündem, a Kurdish focused leftist newspapers that most dedicated Ataturkist consider a traitorous mouthpiece for the PKK. I fold up the hymn to Mustafa in the Gündem and march into the auditorium.

‘Oh,’ says one teacher! ‘You’re reading Turkish? What is that? A newspaper? Which one is it?’ Her face suddenly assumes the look of a woman who’s opened a particularly rank diaper.

‘The Gündem,’ I answer. ‘It’s being published again after, like, 15 years. There’s a film out now about how it was shut down in the 90s. One of my old students is the main actor. Something like 60 journalists were assassinated, probably by the state, brutally, until the government finally closed it down.’

‘Oh really?’

‘See the movie. It’s good. It’s called Press.’

She slinks away and I am maneuvered into the control booth. I will be reading from a microphone behind the scenes, a voice booming down from all directions—a la the Burning Bush. Before I can spew propaganda, I have to watch the various performances that the children have been rehearsing to celebrate the duet of themselves and Ataturk. Some little girls are dressed up like fish and writhe around to a rather slow Cuban dirge from The Buena Vista Social Club CD. Some other kids do some strange kind of interpretive dance to images of children caught in wars. There’s a giant picture of a dark skinned child crying among ruins. Slogans pop up as the first graders undulate over the stage. ‘Peace’. ‘No more bombs on children!’ ‘Get rid of mines!’ ‘Save the Earth!’ ‘End Chemical Weapons!’ The only light moment in all this dreary preaching is a group of saried girls doing a Bollywood number. And then its my turn. The lights dim, images of Ataturk flash across the screen to somber symphony music. I start reading the bit about the three harbingers when the famous picture of Ataturk and his adopted daughter Sabiha Gökçen flashes up on screen. She was Turkey’s first female pilot, renowned for such heroic deeds as bombing the people of Dersim into oblivion in what was one of the worst massacres of Republican Turkey. The Turkish teacher watches me beaming. She actually has tears in her eyes!

As gratifyingly silly as all this is, I am utterly aghast. And more offended as a lover of language than anything else. Here is this literature teacher—in a country where most people seem to have forgotten the value of their mother tongue—in love with her Turkish, refusing to surrender to the fad of English. Yet she uses its highest poetic register for the cheapest of all cheap sentiments—nationalism. And the worst thing is she thinks she is performing a service of some kind. But she is not lifting Ataturk to the lofty peaks of the words she uses, but rather dragging the language itself down to the level of the screaming fascist MHP party who believe that purity of blood is the most important thing in judging another human being. She’s ruining it. Ruining it. And it was a bit unbearable to think back on the first graders dancing to the vague moral bright-light terms like ‘Peace’ and ‘Justice’ and ‘Respect’! They are being conditioned to weep and feel smug at these ambigous niceties by the same people who teach them that the Turk is a special race, that they have no prejudice, that they are braver fighters than other peoples, that they are warmer, nobler, more honest and generous. This is the devil preaching the word of God—and feeling noble about doing it. They are poisoning the language with this schmaltz, shitting up its words, fouling its finer phrases. I think of Nazim Hikmet, ‘The earth will grow cold, a star among stars...you must grieve for this now! For the world must be loved this much if you are going to say ‘I have lived’.’’ Of Yaşar Kemal, of Neşet Ertaş, of Ahmet Kaya, of Aziz Nesin, of Mevlana (Come, whoever you are, come! Heathen, fire worshipper or idolatrous, come!

Come even if you broke your penitence a hundred times, ours is the portal of hope). Of Yilmaz Guney, Haci Bektaş, Yunus Emre, and the many other bards of humanity and dignity who have elevated their language on the wings of much more worthy topics than Volk and Heimat and Ataturk. Of course, most of them have been imprisoned, driven out, our assassinated by the nationalists who penned the treacle I just read. So we do not teach the kids the words of these men. They know little about the most dignified masters of their language.

What exactly are we teaching these kids? To worship themselves? To believe themselves so noble that they are above doing wrong? To be so self righteous that they can dance around to maudlin songs about war crimes as a lesson to the rest of us even as the government they celebrate arrests journalists, covers up assassinations of an Armenian writer, makes light of rape victims, blocks its Kurdish citizens from standing in elections, and beats to death protesters on the streets? Not for nothing, the next day is April 24th—the anniversary of the most punctuated genocide in history, that even the most leftist of rags in Turkey must call a ‘so called’—(‘genocide’). To their credit, a group of Turkish activists camped out in Sultan Ahmet to protest its denial. And they don’t even have signs behind them that say ‘Peace.’ (Maybe it’s like Faulkner said—the ones who have the qualities don’t need the words).

We are reading The Outsiders in the 7th Grade and I asked my students to think about outsiders in their own country and people who suffer at the hands of the majority. One of my brightest, most gifted girls writes, ‘There’s nobody that Turks hate. But lots of people hate Turkey.’ The irony is that she is a Jew and I have heard innumerable people tell me in adult night classes that Hitler is their hero and should have been allowed ‘to finish the job.’ Of course, her schooling backs up this opinion. The National Security class she’s required to take has two whole chapters on ‘The Enemies of Turkey.’ In addition to the Armenians who are trying to seize Turkish land and work nefarious plots in collusion with the traitorous Kurds, Iraqis and Iranians send in secret agents to sow chaos and foment Islamic revolutions. Meanwhile Israel’s Mossad is selling weapons to Turkey’s enemies, and internal cabals are trying to undermine the army. All the while, Turkey herself is trying to fight for the rights and happiness of the children.

But I think Sezen Aksu has more on the ball than the Turkish army.

‘Masum değiliz,’ she sings. ‘Hiç birimiz.’

‘We are not innocent. Not any one of us.’


PS:  After a lot of tumult and hulaballoo--the ban on the Kurdish candidates was lifted, well, on most of them anyway

A Strange Week to be a Stranger in a Strange Land

Yesterday, my nephew watched his daughter being born. I watched him being born some 26 years ago. I can still remember how purple-blue his face looked, and the time that has passed baffles. I don’t feel any different than that 13 year old kid waiting for his sister to go into labor at the hospital. And yet here I am, a generation later, approaching 40. My new niece's name is Savannah.

(Delal's dad wanted to know what 'Savannah' meant--he picked his kids' names with that in mind at a time when giving the names themselves was illegal--they're Kurdish words--but I told him I think they chose it for the sound and we took turns guessing, as we walked down the rainy Kadıköy street--I told him it was an old Southern city, he told me it was an African flatland) 

My mom says that when Jeremy held Savannah, he cried. ‘She’s so little! What if I break her?’ (Delal's dad smiled at this--me,too)  I couldn’t be there. We talked on the phone—I could hear the electricity in his voice.

Last week in Japan, of course, there was the earthquake and the tsunami. The footage was nauseating. On CNN and the BBC and Al Jazeera I watched videos of people running for the lives as a wave carrying houses races up the hill to swallow them—and they fall and disappear. Radiation is pouring over Tokyo. My friends are there, just waiting to see if it turns deadly or not--but keeping chipper as always.  'We are genki!' Megumi assured me.  Kuniko apologized for worrying us. Kuniko's husband already has cancer—for years now, and doesn't need the radiation's help.  He could die within six months according to the doctors. And I can’t be there.

And things are happening here.

The night that my grand-niece was born, I went with Delal to her uncle’s house for dinner. We talked about the wedding—our wedding. We found a hall nearby, and Delal is fishing around for family approval.

Her aunt made a dish that they called qatmer for ease of translation. (There’s a dish called katmer in Turkish cuisine, too, but it’s different). We gathered around a huge flat pan of bread that had been hollowed out and filled with lamb, onions, and currants. It was delicious. I told them about my grandniece, and they were pleased. ‘Gözün Aydın’—‘May your eyes be bright’ basically, a way of congratulating someone on good news. We watched a quiz show after dinner and her uncle kept switching to the news where more images of the tsunami and nuclear power plant played over and over again. I had been excited about Savannah and glowing as I talked and now I went on just as excitedly about what was happening in Japan. There’s something cold about the way they report it—the English websites seem pleased to cover such an excessive disaster. What a professional coup!  It’s not just about having a selling point—it’s a pride in being on the front line of something so horrific. It sells for more than money, it sells for fame, prestige, honor. With this you can buy silences at dinner tables for the rest of your life—you were there when the tsunami hit? Holy shit!

This week has been a flood of good and bad news—my friend’s cancer, the earthquake, Savannah. I can’t quite fit my head around it. I don’t like being so far away from everyone. I am a traveler in some sense, always looking over that next hill wondering what is there, but so many foreigners here seem to so easily cut off their pasts, not everyone of course, but many. I, on the other hand, feel like I am in several pieces distributed around the globe.

Welcome Savannah, you are much loved. And as for Japan, you are much loved too, and I pray for you.

Savannah by the way, was originally a name used for the river in Savannah Georgia and probably comes from a word for the Shawnee nation who lived there for a spell, OR as Delal's dad suggested, it may come from the Spanish word sabana (which gave us savanna) to refer to the African like plains of the deep South--if so, the Spanish took it from the word zabano in the language of the Taino Indians of the Caribbean. So by any accounts it is native.

Let's get thumping...

I generally don’t get religious or quote the Bible. But whatever.


I may now live in Turkey, after having lived for long years in Japan and studied both Buddhism and Sufism and become somewhat California New Agey on the outside, but as a kid I was full on Southern Baptist Evangelical—casting out demons in church, going to revivals, preparing for the Rapture—the whole shebang—and I don’t look down on it now, it’s a legitimate side of the religious impulse. And so I am kind of a religious oreo cookie—with one side Eastern religious, one side skeptical of everything but all with warm gooey Pentecostal center left over from earlier years that you’re going to hit if you bite into me too far. So when people use the name ‘Jesus’ to attack others and then respond to people who call them on it as simply atheist liberals who don’t understand, I’ve got to open up my cookie and smear the white stuff in their faces.

On the Daily Show last night, there was a bit about the new committee set up by New York Senator Peter King to investigate US Muslims in connection with their failure to fight terrorism in the United States and the suppsed ‘growing radicalism’ of Muslims back home. In the lead up to the skit, it shows footage of people throwing metal crosses at Muslims in the street, of an old man praying in New York and being shouted down by people with flags shrieking ‘JESUS! JESUS! JESUS!’ And finally, there is a scene of women going to a shelter for abused wives and girlfriends. They pass huddled together under an overpass filled with demonstrators all bearing American flags and shrieking ‘Go Home Now! Go Home Now!’

The first thing I felt was a decent human fear for their safety. The second, and much more powerful feeling was shame. I teach Muslims in Turkey. Many of my best friends are Muslims. My future wife and her whole family are Muslims. And this is the kind of nasty, violent, fanatical behavior that represents my country and my culture and my people and their attitude toward Islam. God I hope that they are in the minority, but they represent whether they should or not, because they bore flags. They threw crosses. They used the symbols. And they were filmed. And not enough public people seem to speaking out.

They used crosses.

So here goes.

‘Blessed are the meek,’ He said. ‘For they shall inherit the earth.’ That is the most obvious line that comes to mind (and since everyone knows this line in the States—Christian or not, it should be kind of a foundation idea for Christian belief). ‘Meek’ means ‘humbly patient, submissive, kind’ according to Websters. The people in these videos are attacking the meek. Attacking a group of battered women? An old man alone on the street? And in the name of Christ! Christ who said ‘You have heard it said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill, and whoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgement: But I say to you that whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgement.’ That means that anger and hatred are sins in the family of murder. And He also said, ‘Ye have heard it said, Thou shalt love thy neighbors and hate thine enemy. But I say to you, love you enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them which spite you that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven, for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and the good.’

As for the so-called Christians bellowing ‘Jesus’ at the man trying to pray, the real Jesus said ‘If you salute your brothers only, what do ye more than others? Do not even sinners do so?’ The Jesus you say you worship spoke most about love, compassion, mercy, and tolerance. He railed against the hypocrites who claimed to be religious men but tortured and tormented in the name of their faith and law—‘Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye devour widow’s houses and for a show make long prayers, therefore ye shall receive greater damnation.’ You don’t worship the man who said all these things. You worship his enemy. You worship demons and sin and Satan and you carry the cross to do the Devil’s work which, in my mind, makes you beyond all hope.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-march-8-2011/peter-king-wants-to-investigate-any-american-muslim-who-is-not-actively-stopping-terrorist-plots-?xrs=share_copyond

The Bread of Life--and why Turkish guys look pregnant

I remember having this discussion a million times in Japan. ‘We Japanese people must have rice at every meal just like you American people must have bread.’ (At the time, many sentences began ‘We Japanese people).

‘Well,’ I would say. ‘We have rice sometimes too, in the States.’

‘But you always have bread.’

‘ Actually, there really aren’t any rules. You can have  whatever you want.’

‘So,’ (clearly indifferent to anything I have just said) ‘Just like bread is essential to you, so rice is essential to us.

Well, I now live in the country that the Japanese fantasized about—a place where bread is worshipped and over consumed, the modern republic of Turkey. In America men may sport beer bellies that make them look pregnant. In Turkey, men have ‘bread bellies.’ They like to call them their ‘Türk kası’ which translates directly as ‘Turkish muscle’ but might more accurately be rendered as ‘Fat Ass’.

Two examples of the Turkish Muscle--though I think the first is a picture of an American beer belly (Turks also call a stomach a man's 'Balcony')




Although I am American and have no room to be talking about fatness, I have a very personal enmity with all this bread eating. It’s the Joker Batman kind of enmity.

At lunch, I have ‘duty’ in the cafeteria and I am to stop any child from smuggling food out into the main school building. Inevitably every single one of them goes to the bread tray and grabs fist fulls of white bread—ten or twelve slices each. When they try to cross my line I make them eat it slowly by the door or watch as they shove it all into their gobbing maws at one time—the gobs of dough succeeding in doing something no human being can do, that is, silencing their incessant prattling for a moment.

Also, in the morning, the school supplies breakfast—usually in the form of cheesy toast, or a cheese filled pastry called poğaca. The other teachers wait for the arrival of food like dogs looking to be fed, and they fall upon it with canine vigor. I watched a small framed music teacher this morning make off with 12 pieces. The P.E. teacher (as always) prepared a tray of 20 or more for himself. Of course, by the time I get to the breakfast cart, there’s nothing but grease smears and crumbs.

Like Japan, Turkey’s relationship to its staple crop is ancient and mixed with worship and myth. My Japanese friend told me never to leave even one rice grain in the bowl, because in each lived seven gods and to waste them was to show disrespect and cruelty to the divine. Similarly, bread in Turkey has a sacred quality. The Mevlevi Sufis use it in their metaphors for enlightenment. The unenlightened novice is raw dough. The dervish who has attained spiritual fulfillment is a cooked loaf. Upon entering the dervish lodge you would often be sent to the kitchen where real cooking served as a prelude or accompaniment to spiritual cooking

If bread consumption made you divine, everyone in Turkey would be gods. At Delal’s house she, her sister and I often put away two loaves at one meal, just the three of us. Delal even buys loaves of bread to accompany rice-based meals (which would horrify my old Japanese friends). Bread with a table full of mezes is a must (I can eat a whole loaf like this), and one of my favorite meals here is Kuru Fasulye—a steaming bowl of soft fava beans cooked a long time with chunks of meat and spicy oil until it makes a thick stew. There’s nothing better than dipping using gobs of hot fresh bread to scoop up the beans and hunks of lamb. With all this bread eating, I must already be sitting pretty in one of the higher heavens, myself. But then again, Mevlana himself supposedly said, in regards to the uselessness of accumulating knowledge to the spiritual path--‘A scholar is like a person carrying a big sack of bread on his shoulder. But what is the maximum number of loaves they can eat?’ I think the Turk or Kurd (at least my middle schoolers) would answer, ‘More than you can ever imagine, sir. More than you can ever imagine.’

Kuru Fasulye--the best place to get it is at the Suleymaniya Mosque

GETTING MARRIED IN TURKEY—PART 3, SETTING THE DATE

GETTING MARRIED IN TURKEY—PART 3, SETTING THE DATE


Subtitle—Why the Turkish Marriage Process Will Give You a Better Understanding of Kafka Novels



I have had my head in the clouds. Literally. The weather in Istanbul has been rather indecisive lately—am I rain or am I fog? And so the air is teeming with tiny, itsy bitsy swirling drops of powdery droplets that no umbrella can defend you against. They belt you in the wind. They go down and then swirl up in an assault from the pavement. They settle when you’re not looking. They are small enough to slip through and inside any sort of protection you might muster, and yet large enough to soak you thoroughly in ten minutes. It’s like a mist with balls, and this is the weather that Delal and I were priveleged enough to navigate the Turkish bureacracy in.

Everything started off brightly enough. We both took the afternoon off together so that we could go down to the Evlendirme Dairesi and register a date for the wedding. Oh right, back up.

The Hallowed Evlendirme Dairesi

To get married legally in Turkey, you have to register for an official to marry you—whether at a place of your choosing (for which they charge transportation fees) or at the Evlendirme Dairesi.

‘Evlendirme Dairesi’ means ‘Wedding Bureau’. Each section of the city government has one (a fact which will plunge us into the mire of government red tape very very soon). The one in Kadıköy is a gigantic complex near the train station—it has four large wings that sprawl over the land like an octopus and is easily larger than City Hall which sits right next to it.

The Dairesi on a nicer day--imagine this under water

Turkey is obsessed with weddings—at times it seems that its the only socially acceptable question to ask—‘Are you married? When are you getting married? How long have you been married?’ An average Turkish street has a million different little eateries, yes, but is also flooded with wedding dress shops, with frightening benippled (Turkish mannequins have headlights) and faceless mannequins in the display windows spookily guarding the street. Perhaps the marriage questions are a slick marketing ploy by the wedding dress makers—how else could they hawk their billions of gowns to a population of millions without employing intense social pressure?

An elite cadre of Turkish wedding gown mannequins, waiting to be dressed unsinfully and patrol the streets

Kadıköy’s Evlenme Dairesi is conveniently located in one of the worst traffic nightmares the city has to offer. It cowers on the confluence of an entrance ramp to a major highway, a major station in the railway system for all trains East, an exit ramp for another major highway, two city bus stops, a pick up place for the minibusses all driven by people freshly released from the country’s mental health facilities, and one of the only public parking lots for miles and miles. And oh yes, the stadium for Fenerbahçe’s soccer club—one of the most popular in the country--is also right there. Running through all this is also the sparkling brown Shit River—which floats all sorts of cultural refuse to the sea and smells of a sewer. A quaint silver bridge crosses the river between Wedding Salon 1 and Wedding Salon 2.

My journey to the Dairesi to meet Delal is complicated by the fact that my school is about an hour away in the best of traffic. In the worst of traffic, and using public transportation (I normally go by a private school-sponsored van service), it can take two hours to get back to Kadıköy. I left school after my last morning class—around 12:30. I arrived in Kadıköy around 2:30. Now the Dairesi conveniently closes around 3:30, so while I appeared to have plenty of time, we hit our first snag....

The Paper Work—Turkey’s Contribution to Global Warming

To register a date to get married, both Delal and I had to assemble a mountain of paperwork which easily put several forests on the endangered list (Sorry Western Canada!). First, we had to procure twelve passport sized photos each. Then we had to have a full battery of medical tests and bring the results along with with an affidavit from the doctor officially certifying what the printout it was stapled to already clearly stated—namely that we were negative for Syphylis, HIV, Hepatitis B and C. Interestingly—if your interested in ignorance at least-- a few years ago, you only had to take these tests if you were a foreigner or marrying one—the assumption being that only slutty Westerners could get AIDS. In fact, one reporter apparently disguised herself as a prostitute and combed the streets of Istanbul offering random men very cheap sex (5 bucks). ‘I have to warn you, though!’ she said. ‘I have AIDS!’. The grinning boys’ responses were, ‘So what? I’m Turkish! I can’t get AIDS.’ This story could be an urban myth—I can’t imagine any woman in her right mind posing as a prostitute here for any reason--but knowing young Turkish men, and young men in general, and the Turkish attitude toward being Turkish, it’s in the realm of the believable.

Anyway.

In addition to the doctors report, we had to have our Identity Cards of course (for me a passport and a residence permit), and I had to provide a paper from my consulate that certified I was, in fact, single, which then had to be taken across town to the Istanbul Municipal Government office to be stamped by a series of zombie like officials—three in all, lined up in a row so that I could walk assembly-line like from desk to desk until I came to the frowny official in the middle of the room who had to sign off on all these stamps.

Well, when I arrived in Kadıköy, Delal informed me that the Dairesi had informed her that our medical reports had to be reconfirmed by a doctor at City Hall, even though the doctor who had run the original tests was officially recommended and connected to the city government. So we dashed over to City Hall, took a number, and waited for our turn so that a doctor in office four could ask us ‘Do you have AIDS?’ , stamp a paper, then send us to office number 7 so that a zombie woman there could finger type something into her computer, put another stamp on our paper, and then moan ‘Goooood Luck’ (She wanted me to offer her a fresh brain, I could tell, but alas, none was on me. And believe me she could have used one, either to eat or put in her head.)

So off we go, braving the traffic snarl to cross the street and return to the Evlendirme Dairesi where we take another number and wait our turn. Remember, it closes at 3:30. It is now 3:00. Also, in the Turkish government system ‘Closes at 3:30’ loosely means, hoping to have the building vacated sometime before 3:30—times subject to change--so they often stop serving you much earlier, without warning (as they did when Delal went to get her passport). We get a rather chipper woman with piles of curls pinned to her head who has apparently taken one fingered typing classes with the zombie woman who last handled my health report.

‘May I have your paperwork and IDs please?’

We hand the mound over with an audible sigh of relief—we were both sick of having to keep track of all of this.

‘May I have your names?’

She only speaks to Delal, of course, since all foreigners are mute clowns who can’t understand a word of Turkish much less be useful in any way. And I suppose she’s often right.

‘They’re on the passport and ID cards we just handed you,’ Delal answers.

‘Right. And how do you spell them?’

‘They’re on the passport and ID cards we just handed you.’

‘And where is the gentleman from?’

‘The United States,’ Delal says. ‘It’s in big gold letters on the front of his passport.’

There is a computer screen conveniently on the counter in front of us that allows us to follow everything she’s doing. She has to select my country’s name from a menu and has scrolled down to the U’s for ‘United’ I guess.

‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘But the menu is all in Turkish. Shouldn’t you be looking under the Turkish name?’

‘Oh! You speak Turkish!’ she exclaims though Delal and I have been speaking Turkish the whole time.

‘Yes, and you need to go to the A’s for Amerika Birleşik Devletleri...’

She stays in the U’s. What does a slutty Westerner know anyway? Delal also encourages her to go the A’s. She wanders about in the U’s for a while and then finally relents and starts at the top.

‘Oh there it is!’

Around 3:25 she announces that we can finally select the day and time we want to get married and pulls up a list. We decide on the 17th, at 3:00 and miraculously, it’s available. (There’s a rush in the summer months—everyone clamouring for the weekends of June and July) Elated to be finished with this whole process we enter our selection at the same moment the woman says, ‘Oh no! Your residence permit is not enough to register you in Kadıköy! I’m sorry. Do you live in Kadıköy, Miss?’

Delal sighs, ‘Like my paperwork says, I live in Üskudar.’

‘Well then you’ll have to register in Üskudar, get a permission slip from them, and bring it back to us I’m afraid.’

‘But we both took off work to come here! ‘ Delal protests. ‘It’s 3:30! How difficult can it be? Üsküdar and Kadıköy are the same city!’

‘A woman at my school just registered last month using the same document!’ I protest.

‘There was a change in policy last week.’

‘But..’

‘There’s nothing I can do,’ she says smiling. ‘But the good news is Üsküdar’s office closes at 3:45. You have 15 minutes.’

MOTHER *&%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Üsküdar Part 1

Delal makes a quick phonecall to Üsküdar’s Evlendirme Dairesi and asks their closing time and whether or not if we actually arrive before that time, they will serve us. They assure us that they will, and so we leap in a taxi and tell him to ‘Hurry!’

This, in my opinion, is a word you should never say to a Turkish taxi driver. I said something about Turkey’s minibus driver’s in an earlier sentence. The taxi drivers are culled from a similar group of people. Turkey takes its most hopelessly insane mental patients, its most recalcitrant criminals—all its incorrigible maniacs essentially—and closes them in a small room without food or water until they start to devour one another with claw and tooth—then it releases them into the city with a cab. Our driver races so violently through the city along the slick streets in rush hour traffic that I am sure both our lives will end here and now—I love you honey! We were beautiful while we lived!-- but somehow he gets us to Üsküdar by 3:40 undecapitated. We rush into the office, completely out of breath and throw our papers on the counter in front of a startled head scarved woman.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘We’re closing.’

‘We have five minutes!’ Delal says. ‘I called and you said that as long as we get here before 3:45, you’ll help us!’

The woman sighs, glances at our papers, and then tells us to go next door to Mr. Kudret for a stamp to get the ball rolling. We thank her and rush next door. ‘Excuse me,’ Delal starts, ‘But we need a stamp or something from you to...’

Without looking up, the man says ‘You will come tomorrow.’

‘But we both took off work to...’

Still not looking up, in the same undead monotone. ‘You will come tomorrow.’

‘Please. We...’

‘You will come tomorrow.’

‘Thanks for nothing!’ I mutter. And then Delal and I stare at each other in utter rage, defeat, humiliation and frustration, our mounting mountain of paperwork clutched to our mutual bosoms.

INTERLUDE

We have a consolation nice dinner at a restaurant in the center of Üsküdar and take turns raging, as we eat our İşkembe Çorbası (Turkish menudo, that is, intestine soup—hey, it’s good!) This is part of our relationship that works like a well oiled machine. I will rave like a madman (or a taxi driver) and she will keep positive and tell me things will work out and blow things off, and then she’ll start raving and I will play the keep-it-cool nothing-worries-me guy until we are both raged out. We each get to let off steam, but are both calmed down by the end. If we raged together, we might end up burning down something.

İşkembe

Üsküdar is pretty in the rain. Above the shop rooftops, the spires of centures old minarets rise into the darkening sky. I watch a gang of cats crawl single file along the eaves of an electronics store. Right in front of the window where we sit a man charged a lira to refill lighters for passers by.

‘Why don’t we just do the ceremony in Üsküdar?’ I suggeset. ‘We have to register here anyway and it will save us the trip back to Kadıköy.’

‘Makes no difference to me,’ she says.

Well that will be more convenient.

THAT EVENING

I don’t sleep well. I’m reading a book about the history of the PKK to have an informed opinion about it. I have dream after dream of my house being raided by Turkish police who accuse me and Delal of being terrorists. They throw us in jail for murder. We insist we did nothing. But they have films of people who look nothing like us setting bombs and firing machine guns on Turkish troops. ‘This is you!’ they say. ‘You murdered Turkish soldiers!’

THE NEXT MORNING—Üsküdar, Part 2

The weather is the same. Gray. Dark. Wind and the fog that wants to be rain—occasionally turning to sleet.

I have only an hour before I have to leave for work (I have weasled the morning off and could have had the whole day except two other teachers are out—so I HAVE to be there) My timely arrival depends on me catching all sorts of dubious connections from Metrobus to normal bus to a possible taxi.

We arrive at the Üsküdar Evlendirme Dairesi about 7:45, soaked to the marrow. We had to walk there from the bus stop because all the construction for the subway line that will go under the Bosporous Straits is happening between the busses and the Dairesi, so the roads are closed and lined with ugly tin sheeting. We are forced to walk along the coast and right into the wind and rain raging off the sea. Waves pound. Ships rock dangerously in the docks. I am carrying a cheap umbrella, one that you can buy from Gypsies on any rainy day in the city for three bucks. ‘How many of those have you had since coming here?’ Delal asks with a smirk. ‘Oh I don’t know, five or six or...’ At that moment, as if she had cast a spell with her question, a gust of wind comes off the Marmara Sea, rips the umbrella out of my hands and smashes it against a sea wall. The handle breaks, the wires bend upward, and it gives one screech of metal against rock as it skips across the sidewalk and into the water.

‘Thanks,’ I say.

The only person in the Dairesi when we arrive is the janitor. He wears what looks like pink scrubs and has a bushy red moustache. He is surprised at anyone else being in the building. ‘Welcome!’ he says, putting down his broom. ‘You two are soaked!’ He is round like a hotair balloon with high girlish voice. He walks with a small skip and quickly takes it upon himself to give us a tour of the building. He shows us the ‘wedding salon’, a huge room that looks vaguely like a cross between a planetarium and a church. There is a stage draped in white and a huge dome of windows arcing over auditorium seating. Across the way is a ‘Garden Wedding Salon’ that looks vaguely like a traditional Japanese mansion. Windows look out on the Marmara Sea and the Palace of the Sultan across the water.

‘I like it here,’ I tell Delal. ‘I’m glad we decided to do it here instead.’

The wedding hall in Üsküdar




‘Actually,’ she says. ‘My Dad says we need to do it in Kadıköy. He thinks my relatives will have a hard time coming to Üsküdar from Kadıköy.’

Anyone remember the ten minute taxi ride? There are also about ten different buses, two or three shared taxis and several minibusses that go there in the same amount of time. But, of course, the Diaspora of her entire village lives a two minute walk from the Kadıköy Dairesi so Üsküdar basically feels like Texas for them (Texas by the way, is the default for Turkish speakers trying to say ‘the Sticks’) What can I say? It’s ridiculously provincial, but then one of my cousins back in Florida refers to anyone north of the Florida state line (even Georgians) as ‘Yankees’, so I have no room to rage about the extreme localism of relatives. In any case, if the officials arrive on time and there are no new problems and they speed us along our way, I should be able to make it to Kadıköy and work on time. (Fool! Fool! Fool!)

The woman arrives on time—the same head scarved woman as yesterday. Her scarf today is a bright pink pattern of roses. (Üsküdar is notorious for its religious conservatism by the way). She’s surprised to see anyone there so early. We give her our whole story in hopes of arousing some kind of sympathy that turns into speedy processing. She takes our papers one by one, tells us to have a seat, and proceeds to finger type the information into her computer, all the while carrying on two conversations with women on either side of her who have nothing to do.

Peck peck peck

After about fifteen minutes , she calls me up to the counter and says,

‘Your health report is from a Kadıköy doctor.’

I don’t like where this is going.

‘Yes?’

‘We need one from an Üsküdar doctor.’

A wide variety of murder options flash through my mind—my favorite being to stuff gas stained documents down her throat and then setting it on fire, or, covering her in raw meat and tossing to our vicious Kadıköy street hounds--but Delal leaps up, smiles ingratiatingly and begins to argue. ‘We are trying to register in Kadıköy but we have to register here first because his residency permit turned out not to be sufficient so we were sent over here with MY documents so that we could pick up a permit from YOU...’

And all the while I am sending a rather different tone toward the rose scarved woman with ‘angry thoughts’ as the school counselor calls them.

‘Are you crazy you stupid f%&%% twat? Is this a different goddamn country or two neighborhoods in the same F&%& city? Did I change blood when I crossed the heavily mined border into Üsküdar? Did I have sex with the AIDS infected army you keep there to guard against incursions from Kadıköy? Is that what you are f%% afraid of you sick, twister, bureaucratic, b&%&? DIE! DIE! DIE!’

Instead I give a strained chuckle and say, ‘The paperwork between America and Turkey is nothing compared to the paperwork between Üsküdar and Kadıköy.’ This is true. My paper from the consulate took five minutes and it was the only thing anyone wanted.

‘Let me check,’ the woman says and disappears for ten minutes. She returns with a sour face but good news. They will except my foreign Kadıköy doctor's report.

When all is done, we go next door to the accursed Mr. Kudret from yesterday who has reformed from the moisture and nutrients that gather in his predawn office. He’s a bald man with a shiny domed head who doesn’t look up when we come in and only mumbles a guttural oturun ‘sit’ in acknowledgement of our existence. He bends far down over our paper work and over the papers the woman next door has just prepared and goes over each line with a dull pencil with teethmarks on the eraser end.

‘There’s a mistake on the gentleman’s passport,’ he announces to Delal though I am sitting right there.

‘No there’s not,’ I say.

‘On his application form his last name is spelled Gibbs. On his passport it’s GIBBS. This could be a problem.’

‘Those are CAPITAL letters,’ I tell him.

‘Well is it an i or an ı?’

Oh yes, ha ha. Back in the first days of the Republic when Atatürk was getting rid of the Arabic alphabet and adopting a Roman one, he created a new letter, ı, the decapitated i, completely out of his own head to stand for a back vowel in Turkish. The capital ı is I and the capital i is İ. So my name Gibbs should look like GİBBS in Mr. Kudret’s world. But where’s that precious nanometer dot? Now everyone in Turkey has a compulsory 12 year education in English. Not everyone can learn the language, fine, but you would think a general awareness of the alphabet would be widespread among government officials, who also need a university education on top of that.

‘That letter only exists in Turkish,’ I explain. ‘No one else uses it. My passport is correct.’

After an agonizingly long moment of hesitation, he sighs, signs, and still without looking at us once says ‘May you have a happy marriage!’ And sends us on our way. This is the ‘Sevk’ form, a permission pack of papers from Üsküdar that we now have to take to Kadıköy in another harrowing taxi ride so that they can prepare a similar set of papers there and then let us register for a day to get married.

The woman at the Kadıköy Dairesi laughs at our troubles. ‘There has always been a little enmity between our two sections of the city!’ she says. ‘I’m surprised they didn’t send you both packing.’ She then pulls out her trust index finger and begins to type.

Peck Peck Peck.

A typing class! A typing class! Our first born child to give these people a typing class! But then comes our second and last piece of good news. I don’t have to stay. I’ve shown my face. I can run off to work and Delal can choose our date and time alone.

At lunch—three hours later!--she sends me a text message that informs me the deed is finally done.

‘We are getting married at 3:00, Sunday, July 17th.’

Sigh

And all of you are invited.

And it's in Kadıköy

The Kurdo-Turko-Southern Engagement Party

Prelude



Nişan—the engagement. I have been traveling the States with a ring on my finger these past few days. My seatmate on the plane—a woman going to Tucson to hit the Gem Show—schooled me on the system here. She says a ring on my finger indicates marriage, and it should be on the left. She also said that according to her very good girlfriend who studied in Turkey all the women wore burkhas and thank God I’m American. She also said I should have babies as quickly as possible.

There are certain ingredients that every successful nişan must have. Unfortunately, neither I nor Delal really seemed to have any idea what they were. Her grandfather, for instance, gave me the idea of providing gifts for her parents as explained in previous blogs. Of course, Delal had a better idea than I.

The first thing required was parents, in particular a father to say the all-important words to the bride’s father,’ Allah'ın emri Peygamber'in kavliyle kızınız Delal'ı oğlumuz Jeff’e istiyoruz.’ In English, ‘by the command of God and with the consent of the prophets, we request your daughter Delal for our son, Jeff.’ (This bit necessary despite the fact that her father is an atheist and grandfather an Alevi) With my mother in Alabama and my father ‘with the mercy of God’, as the Turkish euphemism goes, we had to find a proxy. Delal chose my good friend and housemate Padraic. Ideally, the man speaking as my father should have been older than me, but elders are getting harder and harder to come by and since Padraic was taller and had more gray hair than me, it amounted to the same thing. It was between him and Ekrem, who often acts as if he is everyone’s wizened grandfather, but I was not a hundred percent sure what Delal wanted done, so I mentioned nothing to Ekrem and left the recruiting to her. In any case, I will, to the day I die, always assume that people shorter than me are younger, and people taller than me are older, so Padraic was a good choice. He spent two weeks memorizing and practicing the phrase—which also involves some ruminating and ‘the love that has sprung up between these two young people’.

For engagement day, the weather took a sudden turn for the Arctic. I met Ekrem around five o’clock down by the metrobus station.

‘So have you bought chocolates yet?’ he asked.

‘What for?’

‘The groom’s side always brings these things, Damat!’

We walked shivering and huddled toward each other in the cold toward the nearest bakery—the Kara Fırın (Black Baker). He kept calling me ‘Damat’ or ‘groom’. How do you feel, Damat? How many chocolates do we need, Damat? We settled on a box of one hundred and sixty which he generously paid for. Then we bought flowers from the Gypsy man at the bus station. I chose white daisies mixed with lavender, because I knew Delal hated red roses. The Gypsy approved then poked me with the bouquet. ‘Kommst du nach Deustchland?’

‘Whatever you say,’ I answered.


Now Delal told me to make sure everyone was there by eight. When I asked her grandfather (hereafter referred to as Dede) what time I should be there he said, in typical Dede fashion, ‘Well I am not one to tell others what to do, I mean, what do I know? But if I were you I would show up at six o’clock.’ And so I did, thinking I would find just Dede and Zelal and we’d help set up tables or move furniture or whatever, but I discovered Delal not at home (she was at the hairdressers’) and in her stead, a whole team of relatives meeting me at the door, none of whom I had ever met before. So I hit the ground running.

Or kissing.

My first task was kissing the hand of Dede who sat grinning on the couch. I completely screwed this up, of course. Though I had not been nervous all day, I suddenly felt like someone had released the world’s entire population of monarch butterflies into my stomach and they were now spreading to other organs, until my whole body felt aflutter. Normally I should bend down, kiss Dede’s hand, then touch it to my forehead, but I got so flustered I just kind of mashed his fingers into my mouth like a dog play fighting. He laughed and pulled me up into a hug. Bright red at this point, I was introduced to a whole new set of aunts, uncles and cousins I had never met before. I immediately forgot all their names.

(A word about Turkish-and Kurdish-families. While we have one word for aunt, they have three. Hala is for your father’s sister, teyze is for your mother’s, and yenge is for the wife of your uncle. Now I can keep track of who is an aunt and who is a cousin, but I find it much more challenging to figure out who is the hala, who the teyze, and who the yenge. The same goes for uncle—your father’s brother is amca, your mother’s brother is dayı and your aunt’s husband is enişte. Generally, I have no idea who is who, which makes Delal think I am simply not listening. This occasionally bears a modicum of truth. Worse, when I try to just wing it, as, for example, when one of Delal’s cousins refers to Delal’s father as ‘Dayı’—I have to back calculate. If he is her dayı then she is Delal’s what which makes her father Delal’s what?)

Anyway, with introductions made, I sat on the sofa, made small talk, and rose to greet the next thirty people to walk in. This was when the category 5 nervousness really hit. This engagement party, what I was about to do, was not just some nod to tradition (as we had been making out for weeks). It was heavy. Everyone was here for me and Delal, and our lives were about to change forever. And it was like a veil lifted—for so long we had been so off-handed in talking about this engagement party. We made it sound like a game of scrabble or a night out for beers, but I suddenly understood how much more it was, how important to me, how utterly and uniquely special. I desperately wanted some of MY other guests--my side of the family--to show—yeah, to even the sides up a little, but also to share the moment with me, to lean on in my terror, to be a part of this-- but they weren’t coming for a while. I was ruminating on all this when Delal walked in and literally took my breath away—she was that beautiful. She wore the ruby necklace I had bought her in Syria and it lay gracefully against her olive skin. (I gave her that! I wanted to shout. See? I’m no cheapo!) Her black hair was wound gracefully in a spiral around her head and she was glowing, that warm smile of hers flowing like the Southeastern sun throughout the room. She was nervous, I could tell, but hiding it from her guests, and even from herself, by playing the magnanimous host.

I don’t often write about Delal. The subject feels a little overwhelming, and I feel like my own feelings for her are a vast secret continent which I am only just discovering, clumsily diving into the forests with a machete and a backpack full of ill-prepared provisions—potato chips in a desert-- but here I will try.

I watched her float about the room with a mix of pride, love, joy, and fear. I knew why she was there, I mean this whole thing had come about because she was going to give herself to me. The idea of this gorgeous woman surrendering her life to me (and me to her) made me shiver—was I good enough? Life seemed big all of a sudden, like when I was diving in the Philippines and I looked down and saw a deep cobalt blue below me and I knew that the bottom lay two miles down and then when I looked to the sides I saw infinite blue in all directions, forever, and I felt so small and fragile and the ocean seemed so majestic and huge and other that I felt that old, ancient feeling of awe, fear and joy and surrender and passion before something holy. I felt a little of that awe now in the face of what we were about to do. And this isn’t right, this isn’t really touching it. It was much quieter than this, the feeling I had. It was more like how in Raising Arizona Ed sits down to take a photo with the baby they’ve just kidnapped and says portentiously, ‘Now Hi, this is an awful BIG responsibility.’ She’s thrilled and terrified at the same time.

The rest of my people showed up at eight--Padraic and two other friends, Stephen and Cari. I looked around-- everyone had surreptitiously gathered into one room. ‘Canım,’ Delal said. ‘Honey, it’s time. You have to tell Padraic it’s up to him to start.’ I sent him a text message because he was so involved in conversation with Delal’s father—the two of them merrily lecturing other like mad—that I knew there would be no lull where I could discreetly hiss his name. But then miraculously a moment of silence fell.

‘I think it’s clear why we are here. Two young people have found love.’ This made me smirk—he was calling me young. But as he spoke, we all settled into a solemn silence and when he finished, asking Dede and Delal’s father for her hand, there were audible sniffles. I felt my own eyes start to water up.

‘Well Dede,’ Delal said. ‘Are you going to give me THAT easily or what?’

There was a possibility of a no. One of Delal’s cousins sitting in that very room had brought her fiancé home only to be told by her father that there was no way they were getting married. Dede smiled and said ‘I’m not sure the groom’s side has given anything worthy of you.’

Everyone whispers amongst themselves in surprise.

‘What do you mean, Dede?’ Delal asks.

He raises his hand and rubs his thumb against his fingers.

‘Money?’ I whisper to Ekrem. ‘Do I have to give money? Is that part of the tradition?’

He shrugs.

‘No one told me about this part? What the hell should I give?’

It’s been like this all night. Ever since I tried kissing Dede’s hand. No, that’s not quite right, Jeff. No, Jeff, don’t kiss her hand. Wait, why didn’t you kiss his hand? You forgot to do this, you have to do that. So here is another thing I was screwing up and no one had warned me about. With an embarrassed sigh I started digging around in my wallet and then Dede said, slapping his knee, ‘Şaka şaka!’ Just kidding! This was a little joke they had worked up at my expense. What cards! Ahem.

Then the rings were brought out, two bands of white gold (No Dedei, they are not silver!) tied together by a red ribbon with gold trim. Delal and I stood and faced each other. Dede took each ring and placed it on our fingers. Then he stretched the ribbon out and snipped it in two. This was it. We were engaged. Her father—a man not known for his gushing emotion to say the least—pulled her into a tight hug. ‘Kızım!’ he said, blinking back tears. ‘Kızım!’ He seemed at a complete loss for words. The whole room was in tears--Ekrem, her family, my friends—the all formed a line and one by one came up to us for a kiss on both cheeks and a hug for the special ones. (There was so much kissing and hugging this night that I felt it had become a kind of sport—we kissed on greeting, after the ribbon cutting, and then on leaving as well—and several times in between just for the hell of it.)

After this we ate, talked, laughed, and had an all-around good time. Surrounded by the warmth of friends and new family, I felt a feeling I rarely have in life—contentment. Stephen played guitar while Cari made up a song on the fly about mine and Delal’s first meeting. ‘He was a CIA agent!’ she crooned, in tribute to Delal’s weird assumption that I worked for the CIA when we first met. ‘And then she rocked his world! This beautiful girl.’ Zelal translated as Delal and I grinned. Delal’s dad talked about the evils of capitalism to Ekrem, perhaps capitalism’s number one fan. He also baffled the boy by quoting Socrates at one point.

The various halas, teyzes, and yenges amused themselves by piling my plate with food, and the food was excellent. I had made deviled eggs (everyone kept demanding the recipe) as my own little insertion of the South into the proceedings. Delal’s mother had made helva and Kurdish katmer—a kind of layered pastry with dried fruits and onions. Her aunts had brought börek and a Kurdish bread called pirgaç. We had cakes and salads and wine. I gave Delal’s father his book on the banality of evil and he actually beamed.



The last event of the night was the eating of the ribbon that had been tied to our rings. I gave it to the single men, Delal gave it to the single women. Traditionally they had to nibble a piece off and swallow it, but most of the girls said 'There's no way I'm doing that' and stuck it in their pockets. The boys were more daring.  Papa Padraic even gnawed off a cord and swallowed it all proper like (although he wasn't convinced that the whole ritual was not just another joke at the expense of the poor foreigners)

I had been nervous for weeks about getting married. That Friday I had broken down at school and blabbed everything I’d been thinking to one of the other teachers—another foreigner who had married a local many many years ago. I hadn’t even realized how freaked out I was. But now I was calm. And it still hurt to look at her, at Delal, but it was a good pain, one it made me happy to have.

I remember a meditation I did a long time ago with a German monk in the Thai Buddhist tradition. His name was Stardust and I thought he was a complete goofball, but he had some wisdom. He had given away his company in Berlin at 40 years of age and wandered the world seeking truth—walking with nothing but a robe and a begging bowl from the Southern tip of India to the North. This man never quit smiling. In the meditation, he told us all to imagine our hearts on the outside of our bodies instead of on the inside, completely exposed and vulnerable, fragile, delicate. We would feel every breeze and every touch of sunlight a thousand times more powerfully than we’d ever had because the exposed tissue was that sensitive, that raw. That was love, he’d said. It made everything hurt. That’s the kind of love you should strive for.

SNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A brief break between engagement party blogs

One must have a mind of winter....

Last night, I lay at the bay window of my Chicago hotel room, upside down, and watched the snow rage down. The way the flurries were lit up by the sodium lamps made the lamps look as if they were surrounded by billowing white skirts. At times, the wind was so powerful it howled around the hotel making the snow fall up rather than sideways or down and sometimes the whole window went white. It was gorgeous. On the way here in the service bus, we saw a small baby rabbit rush into the snow drifts.  One of the women on the bus with a strong Jersey accent lamented 'It's real sad.'

So I arrive in Chicago almost to the minute that the most intense storm in decades descends. There are warnings of tornados, 'thunder snow', sixty mile per hour winds, blackouts. I love storms. And I love the way these kinds of minor disasters create this camaraderie, a kind of bubble society of the people trapped together. The people at the airport were extremely helpful, rushing out into the storm to see if our bus had arrived. They set up hotel reservations for us, gave us vouchers for reduced price--sometimes American service can be the best in the world--after years of dealing with foreigners and living in foreign countries where the US is almost always an object of criticism, it's nice to come home and feel proud of something.  The Turks are fantastic hosts. We are fantastic service providers--usually.

And there's an American style of camaraderie with strangers that I like.  On the bus, everyone was talking up a storm (ahem!), cracking jokes, and making plans to have dinner together--me, a the New Jersey accented woman who, as it turned out, lived in LA; an old Texan farmer and a Mexican American business man all hanging out together...