The mutant seagulls of Istanbul are shrieking for just one on the top floor of my Kurtulus apartment tonight. My sister went home on an early morning flight from Ataturk Airport. The heat has yet to work in my room and it feels like camping in the high Cascades in the fall months.
Nevertheless, I feel quite satisfied. Thanks to my sister, Aletta, and the great visit we had, I remember where I came from. When your professional life is in flux and you feel like you are making it up as you go along, when you have no significant other and you are in a foreign country where the language feels like the wall at a marine corps boot camp. When winter settles in that said foreign country and your Jewish mother is in the back of your head telling you need to buy more warm clothes, it’s nice to remember where you come from.
Family clears the picture, helps you remember that no matter how you are constantly forging into the future. You loved the show “You Can’t Do That on Television” when you were in the second grade, you love to make harmless fun of your idiosyncratic, East European
At the Aya Sofya Mosque in Istanbul
mother, you enjoy passing the time catching up on those people who you both know – from the distant or recent past. It’s nice to jar loose from the molasses of time those insight jokes that you used to laugh at when you are kids, and it’s nice to make new ones too. For a short time at least, you don’t have to rely on building up cadres of mutual contacts with newer friends so that you can occupy conversations that are so important to new friendships. You remember that family life is about weaving all the threads of shared human contacts with mutual loved ones.
Aletta was here for two weeks. The first few days were spent here in the big bad Bul (Istanbul). Check out her excellent blog here for more on the amazing things we did, I am not going to rehash them here. We then took a trip within a trip to the south Turkish coast Kusadasi before turning inland to get a taste of “ic Anadolu” (inner Anatolia), Pamukkale, Konya, Sirince, Cappadocia, Selcuk. Not in that order.
The trip gave me a certain previously unknown pleasure: that of the Sherpa. Usually I feel like it’s my “place” to be the one taking notes, waxing poetical about whatever new place I am in. I am always this introspective “artist” just waiting to hatch from my shell was my station in life. But this trip has reinforced a new part of myself that I have only recently been exploring in my professional life: that of the teacher, the guide, the one who shows, the (hopefully) modest leader to let the other explore and get enlightened, and gain the satisfaction of knowing that I helped them become a better person than they were, a more enlightened person, and maybe something will be amazing from that, more amazing than what I could achieve just pushing the gears in my mind to somehow add to the world’s creative output.
Our warm host in Selcuk, Uygur, took us to his relative's cozy wine cellar in the picturesque Aegean village of Sirince
It’s nothing new, being a guide, being a teacher. The reward of being a successful teacher is as old as the human race. It doesn’t take away from the joy of sharing Turkey with my sister. As I settle back in to my routine here on the European side of Istanbul – and though I miss the prospect of Thanksgiving stateside – I have the satisfaction of knowing that no matter how far I am in my travels, family is not so far away.
Bless the modern era.