I’m getting settled in nicely at the new gig, it would seem. I feel I am on the precipice of nearly having been there long enough to start being blamed for any mistakes I may make. I am currently enjoying the Salad Days of being the “New Girl”. If I goof something up, my boss just says, “That’s okay. You didn’t know.” or, “I probably didn’t tell you this, but…” (and sometimes it’s true and sometimes, I just forgot). Well, I feel these days are fleeting so I am cherishing them whilst they last. Undoubtedly, there will be more goof ups in my future and I shall have to handle the backlash gracefully.

Truth be told, the Boss Man is a pretty easy-going guy. I get a lot of, “You’re doing a wonderful job, Tara” s, which always feels nice, let’s face it. Being appreciated? Not over-rated by a long shot. But I am also starting to see that he can be a bit of a bumble head and that everyone in the shop is happiest when he leaves early to go play golf. The best part about having a bumble headed boss is that if you have your shit even slightly together, “You’re doing a wonderful job, Tara.”

Here’s what I like best about being the shop mistress: I make everyone’s life a little easier; at least, that’s the plan once I am fully functional;)
I float around and go where I am needed. I finish a task and then I ask someone, “Hey, is there anything I can do for you now?” and I really like that. Our office manager, Kelly, is a lovely person, but she is clearly overburdened with too many tasks. When I go into the office to see what I can do, her shoulders visibly relax and she smiles and claps her hands with delight when she says, “As a matter of fact, yes!” By helping Kelly feel better, I feel better. See how that works? Good stuff!

I am also learning all sorts of new skills, which always delights me. I’m totally into learning random things. The other day, they taught me how to reclaim screens. Doesn’t that sound awesome? Trust me when I say it IS!

When a screen has completed its work making a nice image on a shirt, it needs to be reclaimed, or made new so that it can be used again later in its life. As is it, that image has been burned into the screen material with a special machine. It’s not so easy to just remove. You’ll be needing chemicals, and plenty of them. Truth be told, this is the only drawback about my job so far is the usage of a myriad of chemicals. I don’t know what they are or what they might be doing to me, but I suspect they’re not enhancing me in any positive way, like a B12 complex or something.

But if you wear rubber gloves and put on a medical face mask, you can at least have the illusion of safety and so I do when I reclaim because that room is probably a toxic death chamber.

Did I mention it’s a toxic death chamber with a power washer? What fun! Holding that power washer made me feel like Linda Hamilton in Terminator. It made me feel really bad ass. I’m sure that people who use power washers on a daily basis do not experience this same thrill, but for me, this is a novel experience, so work with me on this one.

So you stand in this little room that has a plastic booth that’s lit up from behind. It casts a ghostly glow. The power washer also hums, adding to the ambience.
The back splash has a thin metal shelf where the screen gets placed. You hit the screen with the power washer for all it’s worth and try to get as much ink off that puppy as possible. All that should be left behind is the burned image on the screen. Then you will be needing more chemicals. Bad chemicals. It’s so bad that the little box that contains it is only about a quarter full at all times so that the handle of the brush that lives inside it will not touch the liquid and it doesn’t get on your hands. I believe this is another chemical that will burn right through your skin. I am almost getting used to those now, unfortunately.
So, you take that little brush with some Haze and you scrub the dickens out of the screen. And hopefully, when you hit it with the power washer again, Linda Hamilton, it will look virgin by the end.

After you have reclaimed this screen, you will need to dry it off and walk it over to the Chamber of Impending Doom. This is my nickname for the exposure room where the screens will finish their process of being reusable. It is a closet that is illuminated by a weird pink light bulb and when you see that light under the crack in the door, the words, “impending doom” will spring to mind, I assure you. You just place it on an empty shelf and haul ass out of there.

So yeah, maybe the shop mistress will reclaim screens, or maybe she will clean squeegees (one of my greatest joys of the day and I am not joking) OR maybe she will stand in front of a 400 degree heat press machine and press numbers into soccer jerseys for hours at a time until her eyeballs feel like they are on the verge of falling out. Who knows what sort of hijinx the shop mistress might get mixed up into tomorrow? It’s all just part of the fun!

I don’t know how society women do it, seriously. I am just not a pampered woman of leisure. I can see why these women are forever planning dinner parties and arranging charity luncheons because getting facials and massages and maxing out credit cards just can’t be enough, can it? I am thankful that I will never have to test that kind of theory.

I also regard my friends with real jobs, in actual places of business, with some form of awe. I wasn’t built for it. I once had a job where I sat at a desk in front of a computer and a phone and was subjected to the burble of the water cooler all day. I wasn’t a TV watcher and so I felt totally alienated from all the inner office chat about what everyone was watching. I had a hard time faking interest when someone leaned on my desk to tell me about something amazing their kid did. I took up smoking just because it meant ten whole minutes of being allowed outside. When I was asked to join the company bowling team, I knew it was time to cut out for good. I turned in my badge at the end of the day.

My horticulture job was perfect because it was equal parts working my butt off and getting sweaty and dirty and driving around to different job sites and having some human interaction. I was on the move from sun up until I was ready to pack it up. It suited my energetic nature and I just enjoyed the heck out of it. I even learned to love the smell of wet mulch, which is proof positive that I loved what I did, believe you me.

Being a nanny was richly rewarding in so many ways, but by general standards of employment, it was a cake walk and I knew it. I was getting paid to jump on a trampoline, play Wii baseball, eat lunch at fancy restaurants, go to London, spend ten days on a yacht. During the school year, especially in the last two years, my little charge’s work load was such that my only task might be to copy/paste something from Wikipedia, eat a dinner prepared by a professional chef, watch a little Disney Channel and go home. For all of this, I was paid close to thirty dollars an hour. No, really. It was a pretty good reason to stay abroad.

This past Friday, I was asked to come in and be cheap day labor where my sorta-sister-in-law works. They had an intense workload and needed an extra set of hands. I immediately jumped at the chance to get out of the house, do something productive and make a little money.

It’s a small screen printing workshop. There’s a lot going on in that small space and well, it’s August, and it’s hot as balls. We arrived at the shop at 8 am, ready to roll.

And yes, we are talking about mindless tasks here. What I did on my first day could just as well have been done by lightly trained chimps, no question. I think PETA would probably have something to say, though, about animals working in those conditions, so college kids on summer break and people freshly arrived from years overseas, will do for labor on the cheap.

I immediately liked the guy who owns the place. He shook my hand and said, ‘Let’s get to it, then.” I like a no-nonsense individual. He set me up at a work station with an, “Okay, you got that? Good. Come back to me when you’re done and I’ll get you on something else.” During each task, he came back to me only one time to ask, “How’s it goin’?” or to say, “Lookin’ good” and that was it. He basically acted like I was a competent adult who could be trusted to properly perform what was laid in front of me and I appreciated that attitude. There’s nothing as humiliating in the workplace as being treated like an imbecile by someone who is drunk with the idea of their own superiority over you. I can almost see why someone who gets stuck in a lateral position in a company and spends their days getting bitch slapped by a middle manager with an inflated sense of importance ends up going postal.

So, yeah, being left alone to do what I need to do is the way I prefer to handle business. I am someone who works very hard, who doesn’t slack, who can only feel good about myself when I am giving one hundred percent. I obviously like to be acknowledged for those ethics.

And it turns out that the guy who owned this place had more than half a brain because he hired me on. He watched me bust ass all day while the college girls (sorta-sister-in-law excluded because she’s an ass buster) lingered at what they were doing, took little breaks to gossip, sat on their butts whenever they thought they could get away with it. And he said to himself, “This one’s a keeper.”, so he kept me.

I do love a smart man;) And did I mention that I love having a job?

I’ve been back home now for nearly a month and this time has been fraught with discoveries of all sizes. For one, I haven’t lived with my nuclear family since I was seventeen years old. And here’s the thing about leaving behind those you love and striking out on your own: you can easily forget that those people have not been frozen in time. Their lives have gone on without you, even though your memories of them may be encased in amber. They are growing and changing and going through trials of their own in your absence. And so the people that you meet six months later, a year later, or five years later, are not the same people at all. They are still your family. You will always have that blood tie and shared memories (though you will have your own versions of them). But they are new people just as you are and you have the responsibility, nay the privilege, of getting to know them all over again.

We’re worker bees, our family. We’re not loafing types. We’re definitely roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-as-dirty-as-need be-until-you-feel-satisfied people. My parents bought all of their kids cars when they turned sixteen, but we had to get jobs to pay for the insurance and gas. I have worked since I was thirteen years old, when I worked Saturdays filing in my Dad’s office. My parents took the time to instill the value of a strong work ethic in all of us and as a result, we have all turned into people that they can feel proud of having raised.

In all of the years I have been on my own, I have been unemployed for exactly three months. This was time that I took off for myself. It was time that I felt I had earned. I expected to relish every moment of it. I had a veritable mound of things I’d hoped to accomplish in that free time. Instead, I ended up feeling itchy and neurotic and bored stiff about a month in. I felt like a caged animal and worse, accomplished even less than I might have had I just kept my schedule the way it was. I had a real pity party and it was the least productive time of my life; especially emotionally.

So it goes without saying that the feeling that I am “on holiday” is beginning to subside. As I plant my feet day by day and become an organic member of this household, I am less content to spend the day laying out in the sun by the pool with a book.

This is why I am so glad that the family has a new project. I get to make myself useful. It doesn’t matter that I am not getting paid. Just having a place to put my energy and coming home to feel I have earned my rest is payment enough.

My brother and his family have recently taken on a broken down old farmhouse. It’s a big ol’ five bedroom house on a dairy farm that has been allowed to fall to hell, quite honestly. They have agreed to fix it up and knock whatever they spend in materials off the rent. It’s an ideal situation for an old farmer who has his hands full and a young family with three kids.

The thing is, it’s not yet quite habitable. Apparently the former residents were a couple of morbidly obese people who had long ago closed off the top floor as they could no longer climb the stairs. They had cats and a pot-bellied pig running around the house just peeing wherever they pleased. My brother had to wear a hazmat suit to remove the carpet. There’s a lot to be done before children can be safe in that house, so sleeves have been rolled up.

Today my mother and I went over there in order to let a plumber in and to make a dent in the kitchen area. It must be noted that Mumsy is excellent to work for. She is highly organized and has her game plan all figured out before she walks in the door. She has her tools ready and doles out assignments with the ease of a seasoned foreman. I like working for people like this because, most of the time, if you just point me in a direction and tell me to do something, I am pleased to do just that.

It’s true that Mumsy and I do have different standards, however, and though one might think that this would cause a fatal clash, we found that it actually proved beneficial. Allow me to illustrate this with an example called The Living Room Curtain Dilemma.

Once we had hashed out the curtain rod situation, we hung some curtains in the living room. Though they were not my style, they did match the throw pillows and served the purpose of creating a buffer from the noonday sun. I walked away satisfied. Mumsy, however, lingered in front of them for some time.

“I just don’t like those curtains there”, she said.

This turned into about ten minutes of switching different curtains around and general fretting.

I knew I had to take control.

You see, Mumsy is an interior designer so her artistic eye is profound. Curtains that she feels don’t quite suit a room are literally something that can wake her up in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find her downstairs at 4 in the morning sewing new curtains for that room.

It was my job to remind her of a few facts. Namely that our job was to make sure the house was habitable and safe and no more. Which curtains went where was something that ultimately is the responsibility of the lady of the house, who incidentally is neither my mother or myself. So it was my pragmatism that got Mumsy away from those curtains and back in the kitchen where she could actually serve a purpose;)

Score one for Team Family.

My family loves to get out into the wilderness, and we’ve had our fair share of animal run-ins on camping trips. A story that my mother loves to tell involves me and some foxes. I had gone out in the woods to pee (because we didn’t have a fancy RV back then) and for some reason, I chose a fallen tree with a hole in it. Well, what I could not have known was that a fox had stashed her babies in there. She was less than pleased by my behavior and chased me out of the woods. I came flying out of there with my shorts and underwear still around my ankles. Despite probably being freaked out, I still thought seeing those foxes had been a major highlight.

Yesterday as we were pulling out of the driveway, my Dad had to put on the brakes. A mama pheasant was standing in the middle of the road, blocking traffic, while her babies made their way to the other side. Pheasant crossing. After the pheasants waddled into a field, my Dad said, “Oh, look. Groundhogs!” and sure enough, there were two portly groundhogs rolling themselves into some woods. And throughout the day, the wildlife just kept on coming.

We spent the day at a place called Indian Lake. Were one to simply drive by and look at that water, they wouldn’t think much about it. One might even be appalled to know that I have happily jumped into it many a time. The water is brown, or green, depending on the way the sunlight hits it. And yes, fish do nibble at your fingers and toes like you were a gigantic piece of bait and that might be too much for people to handle. But the way I see it is that I am a guest where they live and it’s my job to be polite. I think Indian Lake is one of those places that can offer a lot to anyone willing to take a chance. You’d have to get on a boat and do some investigating to know what I am talking about. You might actually be amazed, as I was, what a teeming ecosystem exists there. Birdwatchers would have their work cut out for them, I know that much. I finally got a few good shots of a blue heron, something that I missed the last time we hit Indian Lake. There are miles and miles of water lilies where snakes hide amongst the slippery roots, turtles sun themselves on fallen trees as though vacationing on a remote island for one.

The ride home provided even more joy. I casually glanced out the window to an especially majestic sight: a very proud six-point buck standing against a fence while about seven or eight does nibbled the grass. It is pretty unusual to see the males, especially with a rack like that, and you can probably figure out why, so I knew I had been witness to something special. He looked every bit the sultan protecting his harem and I felt thankful to have seen it.
By the time I saw a red-tailed hawk swooping down out of a tree to chase after a doomed baby bunny, I was nearly exhausted entirely. One can only ride so many emotional roller coasters in a single day before one crashes.

I have been home now officially for one week. Even before I left for Turkey for five years of living abroad, I had been in Baltimore and Portland, Oregon for the previous eight years. I have been away for a long darn time, in other words. And part of reconnecting with people is listening to them spin their yarns. Mumsy has been amusing me approximately every ten minutes with tales of her youth; most of which I am hearing for the first time. But it was a story that my brother told me yesterday that was awarded “Story Most Likely to Lead to Spontaneous and Helpless Incontinence”

He has a friend with a son who is highly autistic. There’s not much that is funny about autism, so please do not think that I would joke about that. I am hoping that we can all get through this story without getting our noses out of joint and taking it in the true spirit in which it was intended.

Anyway, the mother rarely leaves him alone in the house because he tends to get into trouble, but on this particular day, it couldn’t be helped. Apparently the man is thirty five years old, so he is at least old enough to be home by himself.

Well, he kept calling his mother at work with benign details about his day. She was getting rather aggravated as she was getting no work done and her boss was looking over her shoulder. So when he called and said, “Mom, I found a leprechaun. Can I keep him?’, she’d reached a threshold and said, “Yeah, sure. What do I care?” and hung up.

About an hour later, her son called her back and said, “Mom, the leprechaun is hungry. Do they eat Skittles?” and again the mother, frustrated with these repeated interruptions said, “Of course they eat Skittles. Skittles are all they eat.” and hung up.

When she came home from work, she called for her son and he said he was in the kitchen with his leprechaun. She was astonished to find a dwarf tied up in the pantry; her son pitching Skittles at him.

He was a census worker who had come to the door. He spent the entire day being tied up in someone’s pantry being pelted with Skittles.

And something like this is happening somewhere right now in Ohio; of that you can be sure.

I would never complain about any of it. It molded me into a super-adaptible flexible human being. I am someone who embraces change; who relishes it. I am one to take off at full-speed and jump off the cliff, screaming with delight the whole way down. It doesn’t matter at all to me that I don’t know what I am leaping into. I’ll find out when I get there. That’s me in a nutshell.

I think a lot of people totally freaked when I moved to Turkey. Turkey is just not a place that we learn about here in the good ol’ US of A. People here think it is in the Middle East; that there is sand and camels and everyone walking around in burkas. People, my own family included, couldn’t fathom why I wanted to live there. The answer was so simple: I wanted to see how other people lived. People far away from where I had grown up; an entirely different culture in a land that I had never even thought to imagine.

And you might be surprised to learn how I lived in Turkey. I made so much money that not only did I pay off twenty five thousand dollars worth of credit card debt (I know!) I’d been slugging around, but I put off coming home for five years. As a nanny to a very well-off family, I was pretty much living the high life. I found myself jumping off the upper deck of a yacht into the Mediterranean off the coast of a Greek island. I found myself having high tea at Harrod’s in London; taking a taxi to to theatre district to see Mary Poppins with my best girl.

And as amazing as all of that was, it didn’t spoil me. I didn’t find myself feeling envious of their lifestyle or feeling disgruntled for just tagging along. I was grateful for the chance to see “how the other half lives”, no doubt. Sitting at the dinner table over there was often surreal to the point of priceless.

Example of an actual conversation at dinner one night:

the Dad: “Tara, what do you think? Private plane or helicopter?”

me: “Well, they both have their merits. But I think that now that you have the penthouse in NYC, the plane might make more sense for you guys.”

Fast forward to today: I’m out in the country with my folks. And my heart has never sung louder.

Yesterday, my little brother drove down Holy Cross Epps Road on the way home. It’s a generous country road that runs parallel to my parent’s road. As I looked out the window, cardinals and jaybirds, those brighty-plumed noisy birds of my youth, swooped by. And when I caught sight of a clump of cat tails, my heart skipped a beat. Years ago when I came home broken-hearted and depleted, I rode my bike out to that pond. I sat down there and listened to a chorus of frogs as the sun sank down and the bitterness in my heart melted away. For the first time in many months, the tears that streamed down my face were joyous ones. Seeing those cat tails just brought it all rushing back.

When we turned the corner, the road turned shady and the temperature seemed to drop about ten degrees and my brother pointed out the creek.

Now I’m a girl who loves a dang creek. Creeks were always prominent in my youth. As a little kid, we had a creek that ran behind my elementary school. And every day, we came home and changed into play clothes and our gang gathered at the creek. Some days we came armed with jars for catching crawdaddies (crayfish, which look like tiny lobsters). Other days, we built ramps out of fallen wood to launch our bikes off Evel Kneivel-style. There was also a series of concrete drainage tunnels that served as props for many a good game. We ran through them, shrieking, running from some imaginary foe; whomever it was we were most scared of at the time. For a long time, it was J.R Ewing, at the height of the Dallas craze.
Off in the distance high up on a hill, there was a castle-like building that was probably a church. I had my little sister convinced that it was Cinderella’s Castle. I don’t know how old she was before she figured out that it was not possible to see Orlando, Florida from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Now all I can think about is getting my bike fixed up so that I can go down to the creek.

It made me realize: sometimes, it’s the little things that make our hearts really skip.

I sometimes wonder who I would be had I grown up out in the country as my youngest brother did. He drives a pick-up truck, works for our Dad, has a dirt bike, goes cat fishing. His childhood was entirely different from my own. And he’s a laid back, easy livin’ kind of guy. He never felt the need to go halfway around the world to find himself. He’s content with going out to the garage to tinker with the engine of something. It can be a good exercise to imagine your life if you stepped into someone else’s shoes.

This morning, I wandered out into the back property to have my coffee on the porch swing without a porch. As I sat there, I was instantly divebombed by mosquitos and biting flies. I know insects are a vital aspect of this intricate dance that is the ecological web and all, but how about some mutual respect, I said to them as they sampled my flesh. It’s all about give and take in the country. If you want to have trees for the whistlin’ you’ve gotta’ be willing to endure all the tiny creatures that call those woods home.

As for the not so tiny creatures……..

I looked up from my mug of coffee when I heard some rustling in the treeline at my back. I noticed what appeared to be a dog standing out there, picking through the grass with its snout. And I thought, “Oh, that poor dog. Somebody must have just dumped him out here.” He was really skinny and scrawny, so I assumed he was out there hungry. My first thought was to go inside and get some food from Mumsy for him.

Then it looked at me and I realized, “That’s no dog.” It was a coyote.

Now I have never been scared of any animal that I have ever run across in the natural world. I stepped on an alligator in Peru and that just made my damned day. I ran that shit into the ground back at the lodge. And this coyote wasn’t bothering me one bit, but I didn’t look forward to telling Mumsy about him or her.

A few years back, a coyote decided that he had fallen in love with Mumsy, I guess. He’d come out of the woods when she was walking down the half a mile drive to the mailbox. He’d slink along the treeline keeping pace with her and she didn’t especially think it was chivalrous. It freaked her the hell out because day by day, he was less shy and got closer. She told my Dad about it and they kept their shotguns loaded and kept an eye out for him, but he ended up moving along, probably humiliated by his unrequited love.

They used to have a Border Collie out here named Boo and he really was a great warden of this land. He kept a very close watch, chased away anything that he thought might threaten his people and gave Mumsy peace of mind. But Boo’s gone now and the animals of the surrounding forest have finally figured that out.

In the months following Boo’s departure, the yard was once again inundated with rabbits and the hawks who love them. The deer could be seen trimming the grass every morning once the gnawed up deer hip bones disappeared.

And now the coyotes are back. And Mumsy doesn’t like it one bit because she has two small dogs. Recently, one of their neighbors saved their own dog from a coyote attack. Eight hundred dollars worth of surgery later and the dog survived. So it didn’t make me happy knowing I had to tell my mom what I saw in the woods this morning, but I knew it was my duty to do so.

I worry about those coyotes, truth be told. If they are coming out of the woods to eat dogs, they are not doing well out there. And who eats coyote? Not anyone I know. There are no organized coyote hunts to thin out their populations like there are for the deer. I don’t like knowing they are out there with their bones poking out. It makes me terribly sad. But I also don’t want to fathom one of my mother’s dogs not coming back to the house one day.

So you see, country livin’ may be refreshing to the spirit and all that, but it still keeps you on your toes. I’m not going to go all soft out here or anything. Not when I have to be on coyote watch.

And bridges figured in once again on my flight. Usually on international flights, I force myself to stay awake long enough to enjoy the first meal service. Once I’ve eaten what seems edible, I am wont to curl into fetal position and fall dead asleep. I could sleep on the rainforest floor with nary a mosquito net and wake up covered in fire ants, fully refreshed. That’s what an accomplished sleeper I am.
But those butterflies not only didn’t go away once I boarded the plane, but they called their friends. I knew sleep was not forthcoming.

So I decided to take advantage of the onflight entertainment. And boy, did I!

Not only did I watch FOUR movies, but I watched the cheesiest, most gut-wrenching chick flicks I could summon up from the available options. Let’s be honest about it: if there were ever a time to indulge in cinematic frivolity that might lose you some street cred, this is the time.

My first pick was especially embarrassing for me: Bridges of Madison County. I generally avoid movies made from books featured on Oprah’s Book Club and especially those that make forlorn housewives all swoony with heaving bosoms. And to be frank, knowing that Clint Eastwood was the lethario in this film was not necessarily much of an incentive. Clint’s a little long in the tooth to be affecting my bosoms.

Here’s the best part: Not only did I freaking love it, but I balled like a baby; dabbing my eyes with tissue, ignoring the curious sidelong glances of my seatmate; whom I was determined not to speak to. “He waited at the traffic light! And she had her hand on the door handle! And he drove away! And she fell apart!”, I said in my own head.

Does this mean I’m old now? It certainly implies that I am a sappy son of a.

It was just a landslide of pride from there. I’m not going to say what I watched next. Just know that it was a Nora Ephron movie. That’s all that needs to be said. In fact, it took a lot of courage to even type that much.

Fast forward now to the drive home.

I looked out the window and was delighted by so many simple pleasures which were utterly delicious to my exhausted spirit. Fireflies! Deer frolicking in the corn! Grain silos! Wind whistling in the trees! Baby wild turkeys in my parents’ woods!

These are all things I may have once taken for granted. But after five years of intense city life in one of the most bustling cities in the world, I don’t mind telling you that my heart had become weary.
Well, the country air, seeing the little dipper, and the promise of riding my bike over covered bridges to the tune of singing frogs made me feel so happy to be alive.

I needed that feeling more than I could ever say with mere words. You’d just have to see this smile on my face.

1) Approximately one am: got caught up in a veritable landslide of messages and comments on Facebook due to my provocative status update. I rather casually announced that I will be homeward bound exactly one week from today. To say that this took some by surprise is putting it mildly. Often, though, when I make a decision, there is very little dragging of the feet. There’s a whole lot of getting cracking, if you’re with me. I suddenly knew that five years had been quite enough and the ticket home was in my hand within hours.

2) Approximately two am: tore off a small essay for a weekly post I contribute on a friend’s blog.  www.aricwithana.com) I might add that this particular piece was especially effortless; the sort that seems to write itself, even. Bold words that flowed out of me the way a mountain stream burbles free after the first big snow melt.

3) Approximately three am: the friend I am staying with woke up. She’s a mommy, so she often wakes up at the slightest sign of possible trouble. She stumbled out into the living room where I was furiously pecking away at the keyboard and offered me a slice of buttered toast. Truth be told, I was rather peckish and took her up on her offer, allowing myself to feel odd about eating buttered toast at 3 am for about ten seconds. The feeling passed so quickly that when she offered a second slice, I wondered if there might be any jam forthcoming. She had bergamot. That’s Claire in a nutshell.

4) Approximately three thirty am: “Fancy a cuppa tea, then?”, Claire asked. She’s from the U.K., so expressions like this are forever springing forth for my amusement. The idea of a cup of tea (not herbal, mind you) at such an hour seemed rather reckless indeed. Claire, perhaps feeling the need to dissipate my doubt, said that back home in Scotland, it’s a rather common occurance to pass one another in the hall in the middle of the night and offer a tea and toast date. Unfortunately, caffeine chooses what it shall do with me, at a particular instance of its choosing and to what degree. I am its slavish pawn. And last night, black tea made a mockery of my need for sleep. I showed it who was boss by going straight to bed.

4) Approximately four fifteen am: My eyelids refuse to seal themselves after lying in bed for forty five minutes. That’s not a promising start, I can assure. I like to say I sleep like a dead person. My mother used to say she prayed she never had to wake me up to get me out of the house because of a fire or tornado because I would surely sleep peacefully through either event. Slinging me over her shoulder was equally unthinkable considering my mother is the Missing Hobbit.

5) Approximately five am: Just as my eyelids are starting to get really bored of being open, an audubon death match broke out in what seemed to be the neighbor’s yard. There was a deep rhythmic scratchy brittle noise; the sort of sound that seems to be coming from the bowels of Hell, so unnerving is it. It was so measured, I reasoned it must be mechnical. I wondered who could be performing auto repairs or a similar activity before the sun had even risen. It turned out to be a very angry crow. It’s worth noting that crows here are frightening. They are gigantic, maybe three times the size of a crow back home, and aggressive. I don’t want to talk about it, but I will set up the equation for you: shrill nasty crows plus a lot of helpless kittens on the street equals? (*shiver*)
I’m not sure if it were a momma crow protecting her babies or what, but a seagull soon got involved and my amusement level went from extremely low to non-existent in record time.

Approximately five twenty five am: I’ve lived here for five years. I know this is when the first call to prayer emanates from the minarets of the local mosque(s). When you first move here, you will probably be incredibly enchanted by this sound. After all, sometimes there can be several mosques surrounding you and the call will bounce between them in row fashion and the acoustic effect of that is pure majesty. Well last night, it seemed as though the house had been inundated with mosque speakers and that the call to prayer were being drilled into the house in order to root out the infidels. I also wondered if it were the start of a Muslim holiday or if some especially important person had died because it seemed to go on for about twenty minutes, which is not the norm. I rolled around in bed moaning, “Enough! Alright! I get it! Jaysus!” until it mercifully faded into the rising sun.

Approximately six am: It seemed clear that sleep was not on my agenda. “So be it”, I declared nonchalantly. I’d just get up, breathe new life into the lap top and……………………..

Approximately nine am: I woke up feeling as though I had fallen asleep in an Easy Bake oven. The bouncy strings of a Disney melody flowed from the living room. I came out and kissed my four year old room mate (Beliz, AKA The Midget) on the forehead. I felt unusually spry so I got on with the morning ritual that precedes breakfast with no looking back.

Three hours may prove enough to get me through this day. Thankfully, I won’t have to operate any heavy machinery, though I would be awfully tempted if some brawny construction worker (like the one next door who bathes shirtless in the street with a hose) asked me to back up his Bobcat.

Imagine if you will that many years ago, you rented a storage facility in another city. And in that storage unit, you have placed some items of significant sentimental value. You don’t lug them around with you because the memories associated with these mementos are bittersweet at best. Before you stored these things, you gave them a good hard look. Some of them gave you warm feelings that led to butterflies in the stomach, contagious smiling disease. Others left you feeling dizzy and unsteady; heart-wrenched. You made the decision to part with these items and put them somewhere else for safe keeping. After all, you weren’t quite sure you could ever part with them for good, but you knew you couldn’t have them under your nose, either.

Life goes on. It carries you far and wide. You collect other items in your travels and decide what to do with them. While these items may be interesting in their own way, they lack the aggressively confusing value of the items in the storage unit, so they hang around. You don’t keep them on permanent display, but you take them out when need be.

Then one day, something unexpected happens. You receive a notice about the storage locker. The notice, it’s worth noting, is vague. You are not quite sure why it is that they have contacted you.
Your heart skips a beat as you remember all of the things you’ve placed there and how they affected you. You have trouble breathing, trouble focusing and you remember why you rented that unit in the first place.

That’s when you make a decision.

You drive yourself to the facility. You get the key and taking a deep breath and mumbling a little prayer, you open the door. As expected, upon seeing those things after so many years, you feel more than a little winded. You know that you made the right decision renting this place, but seeing these items suddenly makes you rather sentimental.

For better or worse, you empty it out. You fill your car with these items and you effectively terminate your contract.

When you arrive home, you find yourself unable to unload the car. You stand there, just looking at them, not sure what your next move is to be. You decide to leave them there until you can make a decision.

The next day you get on with the business of living. You almost forget that the car is full outside; that something needs to be done with those things.

Curiously, you don’t feel the expected elation at having removed a heavy burden. The whole “weight off my shoulders” tagline? It somehow missed you. In fact, if you had to name the feeling, you might even say the you felt a little flat inside; incapable of eliciting any emotion at all. The only time that has ever happened to you in your entire life was when your doctor stuck you on Prozac for a few months. Feelings, and the verbalizing of them, are your bread and butter.

Suddenly, you go into a bit of a tailspin in your brain. You wonder if you’ve made a terrible mistake. Should you have just left those things in that storage unit? Were those items, sight unseen, serving some sort of invisible purpose on a subconscious level? Have you now, by removing them, by disturbing them, effectively performed some sort of emotional lobotomy?

In other words, have you, in one fell swoop, altered the course of your destiny forever? Are you brave enough to even consider such a notion?

More importantly, are you going to close your eyes and jump off the edge into the darkness, anyway?

I arrived fully prepared to face the Turkish toilet, as I had been much warned of its odious presence. To be perfectly frank, I don’t get what the big deal is there. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a wilderness gal who grew up squatting behind many a bush and wiping with many a leaf on camping trips or what, but the TT didn’t freak me out at all.

Actually, that’s a bit of a lie. It managed to unnerve me twice.

The first being when I landed at Atatürk Airport (here in Istanbul for my maiden visit), a modern facility by airport standards, and opened a stall to be faced with a TT. It was suggested to me afterwards that it may have been left there for visitors who are just used to them and may prefer them as a result. That’s something I can get behind if it is indeed the case. To be honest with you, it seems a rather natural position in which to do your business, so they get my vote.

The second unsavory TT experience happened last summer when The Boyfriend and I were on the road. We had pulled over to gas up and I ducked into the loo. Unlike Britney Spears, I am not a big fan of gas station bathrooms, but my bladder is not as discerning as I.
It can be more than a little tricky in a TT scenario when you are trying to hold back your pants, keep your purse aloft and generally make sure everything is out of the way. What’s unforgivably stupid in this situation is placing your sunglasses on top of your head. You probably see where this is going. Needless to say, they were irretrievable and I tucked it away as a life lesson, never to be repeated.

Bathing is also a different experience over here insofar as quite a lot of people (usually of the male sex) don’t seem to do it much. Even the little lass, whose family is not stressing about any utility bills, only bathes three nights a week and washes her hair twice a week. When I told her that we had a bath every night growing up, she was beyond shocked.
Even as an adult, back home I was in the habit of taking a shower every night after coming home from work. Of course, I was a horticulturist back then and frequently came home smelling of wet mulch with black fingernails, which is exactly as attractive as it sounds. But even if I weren’t all sweaty and dirty, I would still want to wash the day off. Maybe that’s just me.

Many people here have jacuzzi bathtubs in their houses, but they weep of disuse. Older Turks usually keep a small plastic stool in there and when they bathe, they sit on it and douse themselves with the shower wand. Some real old school types even prefer to fill a bucket rather than get involved that with newfangled wand.
Mumsy has a jacuzzi bathtub and every night, she turns her bathroom into the Four Seasons Bali. She lights candles, puts on a little Celine Dion or some nonsense like that (love you, Mumsy:), enjoys a glass of wine if there’s a box open (huh huh), and she drifts far, far away. And that’s her therapy. It’s something she needs at the end of her day and I don’t begrudge her. I just wish the people on my bus smelled like her.

Public transportation can be especially treacherous on the senses in the summertime. The minibuses really pack in the bodies and it’s not uncommon to get shoved right underneath some ripe dude’s armpit, for example. Most of these guys-who-don’t-care-to-shower feel that if they douse themselves in chemical body deodorant, they’re good to go. I stand before you (okay, I’m really sitting) to attest that this is a delusional falsehood.

Recently, I have noticed that our hygienic products are getting increasingly fancier. Selpak, our main toilet paper and tissue company, has just introduced the completely bizarre Spa toilet paper line. It’s like five-ply and it has an ultra padded center that makes you feel like you’re wiping with a feminine hygiene product. It was sprung on me at work and it momentarily traumatized me.

We still do not have anything like my beloved aloe-lotion Kleenex; the best weapon for your face when you have a nasty cold, but we do have scented tissues now. Of course, these are rather disgusting and pointless as I discovered when I accidentally bought some at the bus stop the other day. All the same, it’s progress and choice, right? That can never be a bad thing in a country that is haunted by so many remnants of the Communist system. Go, capitalism!

I’d like to present a generic paired down scale of the hired help paradigm to help illustrate the point. On the lowest end of the scale, there are the Eastern Bloc ladies, mainly Moldovians.

We all know that the U.S.S.R broke up long ago. What many of us may not know are the names of the new countries that formed as a result. I consider myself an adequately educated person and even I didn’t know that a country called Moldovia existed until I came here. Apparently, the economy in Moldovia is dismal and many middle-aged women find themselves leaving their families behind and coming to Turkey to find work as domestic servants. Modlovian women are usually hired as live-in maids/butlers, although middle class people sometimes hire them to act as nannies. They speak pidgin Turkish which is good enough for a woman who doesn’t want to raise her own kids, but doesn’t want to pay for a native speaker.

These women break my heart, and I have known many of them in my time here.

There is an area of town on the European side called Aksaray. Most expats know it as a ring of bureaucratic hell as this is where the Foreign Police is; where we must go to have our visas renewed.
It is also an area that is populated by many Eastern Europeans. There are many shop signs in Russian here.
A seedier side of Aksaray is known only by a few, and I wish I wasn’t one of them.

There are houses in Aksaray where one can find illegal immigrants from these countries to work in your home. These houses are run by a woman who functions not unlike a madame. You come and choose a woman and you give the madame a cut. If the woman is not up to your standards, you buy her a bus ticket and send her back after an angry conversation with the madame.

I know a woman who actually takes the passport of the new woman that is sent to her. This category of personal servant is notorious for fleeing in the night. They are treated cruelly in many cases. They often sleep in dank basement rooms and are not permitted to eat with the family, or even in sight of the family. They are frequently treated like dumb animals, constantly berated for their lack of education. As a result, they spend any free time they can manage in tears. They cry about how much they miss their children, to whom they send most of their monthly pay. They cry about how their mothers are ill and they are so far away. They cry and try not to get caught doing so.

The second tier of hired help are the Filipinos. If anyone can explain to me why Filipino women end up here in Turkey, I will give you five dollars. (I’m not rolling in money over here!)
Turkey is not exactly in the same neighborhood as the Phillipines, for one, and there is hardly a thriving Asian community here.

Filipinos are a valuable commodity here, as well, as a go-between. It’s seen as being classier than having a Moldovian, but not quite as chic as having a native English speaker.
Filipinos here usually speak passable English as well as pidgin Turkish, so they can be yelled at in either language, which can be convenient. They most often work as nannies and most of the Filipino nannies I have met have very sunny dispositions and have strong bonds with the children they care for.
The top tier Filipinos work in the fanciest houses as butler-types due to their ability to speak English, (which is impressive to Turks who cannot), and their strong work ethic.

And then you have the creme de la creme; the educated native English speakers, myself included. A nanny from America, Canada, England, Scotland, Austraulia, or New Zealand is something to show off at any given opportunity. We are like an antique that has been purchased from Sotheby’s: something that others admire at parties and seen as a good solid investment.

I never dreamed that I would be a nanny. It has thrown more than a few people that I know for a loop, to say the least. And while I have enjoyed many a perk because of this job, it has not been without its occasional indignities. I am not one to swallow my pride or bite my tongue and I have done much of both activities over the last four years as a nanny. It has tempered me and taught me a lot of humility that I feel has been good for my over-all character. I could write a book. Of course, it would have to be anonymously written, but what a delicious read it would be!

Native English-speaking nannies are not always treated as well as I have been. I have heard some real horror stories. The difference is that, in most cases, at least they are paid well enough to justify enduring it. At some point, their pride may overtake them, at which point they tell their boss to stuff it, but at least they go home with a nice dent in their bank account.

The way I carry on when preparing a meal, one might assume that I had a Masters of Culinary Arts from the Cordon Bleu Institute. If this were the case, it would lend credence to my nazi-like tendencies in the kitchen.

When I settle in to make dinner, I am rather anal about each and every step. Getting down to business means that all ingredients must be properly prepared and at the ready before a burner is turned on. Vegetable will be appropriately chopped (slices will not do when a recipe calls for diced) and grouped in piles in bowls or on plates next to the stove. Spices will also be lined up for easy deployment.

The Boyfriend has proven himself a worthy sous-chef, but his hazing has not been without its pain. One concept that he simply cannot get the hang of is prep time. When you have several elements that need to come together in one meal, timing is key. If you get the rice going too soon, it will become cold and hard, is the basic thinking. Thusly, one must know how long it will take rice to boil. That piece of information seems as elusive to him as the location of the Holy Grail, and that’s alright, because it means I can knock him out of the way and take over in exasperation, which can be a cheap high, really. You can’t accuse me of dishonesty here, ladies.

And he’ll be the first to tell you that I am rather sophisticated in the kitchen. This translates as decadent, as in, life is too short, and eating one of life’s greatest pleasures, so why mess about eating crap boring food?

Take lunch today: the Boyfriend offered to boil up some pasta as we are scarce on lunch fixins at the moment. The cooked pasta was then separated into two piles, his and hers. He wanted to sautee his pasta in butter and then smother it in yogurt because that’s how Turks like pasta. I wanted mine with the amazing artichoke pesto I made a few days ago. The very idea of artichoke pesto was repellant to him and why? Because it contains a vegetable.

The Boyfriend has recently informed me that I have become a Vegetable Nazi; forcing him to eat the repulsive things when he would be happy just eating bread and cheese all the live long day. This resulted in a heated nutritional lecture about how one simply cannot live a healthy life on a diet of bread (especially Turkish bleached flour bread), cheese, Coca-Cola, chocolate and Kent White cigarettes; which is, incidentally, most likely what he was living on before I entered the picture.

It’s bad enough that I feel my own vegetable consumption has been drastically reduced to the handful of veggies that he will agree to eat. The days of pumpkin soup and stuffed butternut squash are long behind me, apparently. But now I find myself being berated for cooking delicious food that is good for him? Dude, when did I become the mother of a fussy six year old?

Incidentally, I can’t help feeling like maybe I have been the victim of false advertising.

In the beginning of our relationship, he was super hip to whatever I made for us to eat. He did cartwheels over my grandmother’s meatloaf. Tacos now make him as excited as the stock market going up. He even declared my steak marinated in wasabi and soy sauce to be beyond compare. But all of a sudden, it’s this:

Date: Wednesday, May 5th
Time: approx. 7:30 pm
Location: our living room
participants: me and The Boyfriend
the meal: vegetable terrine with puff-pastry and artichoke pesto

I don’t mind saying, it was a revelation. I sauteed the Vegetables-I- Am-Permitted-To-Cook and spiced them to perfection. I then alternated layers of puff pastry, the pesto he didn’t know was in there, and the veggies and shredded cheese. I brushed them with egg whites and sprinkled them with sesame seeds for a flourish.

They were glorious. I ate mine with relish. The Boyfriend, however, appeared to be in science lab for how he was managing to dissect it on his plate. His theory was that the dough was the best dough he had ever had (and trust me when I say that Turks are dough experts!), but the vegetables ruined it. Why couldn’t I have just made it with cheese and dough, he honestly asked me, much to my disbelief and disappointment. “Well,” I tried to reply as diplomatically as possible despite my rising blood pressure, “Dough and cheese might be fine for tea time, but NOT for dinner. Where is the nutrition?”

Alas, my argument fell on deaf ears and we spent the next however many annoying minutes rehashing the argument that I now see will dog me indefinitely.

Am I doomed to cook meals for someone who would rather eat spaghetti with yogurt?

So it seems.

Are there bigger problems in the world?

You bet your sweet ass.

I would first like to thank whomever runs the Asian girl porn site for linking our blogs. Surely those who peruse your site, where most of the women appear to be approximately thirteen years old, will be thankful having been directed to my own blog. After all, I do discuss a wide variety of Asian topics, such as living on the Asian side of Istanbul, the lamentable lack of decent Chinese food here, and the fact that I look Asian in pictures.

Without further ado, I present to you the best of Key Phrases the Redux:

It’s worth noting that there are several questions in this list. I would like to address these first a la Dear Abbey.

Dear Tara, Are flip flops offensive in Turkey?

Dear Hippie,
Your question says so much to me. First off, it tells me that you are a foreigner who is either visiting or living in Turkey. I would like to first and foremost applaud your cultural sensitivity for even asking such a question. I think it’s admirable that it matters to you to “do the right thing” in a culture that is not your own.
I also think that the fact that you are wondering whether or not certain footwear is offensive here indicates that you have been here long enough to know that many, many things ARE considered offensive here. I know. It can be exhausting.
To answer your question, while flip flops are not considered offensive in Turkey per se, they are a blatant symbol of your being a foreigner as Turks don’t consider them fashionable nor do they wear them. Even down at my apartment complex swimming pool, women wear high heels with their bikini/sarong ensembles. I wish I were kidding as it makes me feel like a sloppy hippie when I show up in my Havianas, but that’s the fact, Jack.

Dear Tara,
What is the right response if someone tells me I am fat?

Dear Probably-not-even-close-to-being-fat,
I can only assume that you live here in Turkey if you are asking such a question as yes, as I have discussed here, Turks think your weight is their personal business and/or an appropriate conversation starter. We know it is not, but we are living in their country, are we not?
To that end, I feel it only right to answer your question with a response in Turkish so that you might be understood whether or not the person speaks English. You simply say, “Sana ne?”, which means, “What’s it to you?” and implies that they ought to back it the hell up immediately. Enjoy their face when you say this and savor that sweet victorious moment.

Dear Tara,
Is Ankara boring?

Dear person-considering-going-to-Ankara,
I would first like to point out that I am far from an authority on Ankara, having only been there once. It’s true that Ankara is rumored to be boring; especially by Istanbullies who think their city is superior to any major city in the world.
While it’s true that Ankara cannot match the sheer volume of restaurants, tourist attractions and manic energy of Istanbul, I feel that it ought to be judged on its own merits and not unfairly compared to another city. I would suggest you go and see for yourself what Ankara has to offer and please do not blame me if you can’t somehow manage to enjoy yourself.

How to get over an uneducated men (sic) who broke my heart

While I am sorry that a man has broken your heart, you may want to consider your own grammar before casting stones.

I have made ciğ köfte.

Is that right? I couldn’t be more proud of you if I knew you.

Eat whatcha got/lets’s chew

I couldn’t agree more. Who’s cooking, me or you?

bonding with Turkish boyfriend

I am going to go out on a limb and guess that you are dating a guy who does not speak English. I have two suggestions for you here.

1) Turkish guys are guys. Straight guys of any nationality basically want the same sorts of things from women, so feel free to let nature take its course.

2) The key to a Turkish man’s heart is his mother. If the mother likes you, you’re in. Period. So if you like this guy, make that a personal goal of yours.

Russian woman steals boyfriend

Hey, it happens. Bottom-feeder chicks of any nationality have been known to steal another woman’s man. The fact that she happens to be Russian in this case is purely coincidental. It’s worth noting that any boyfriend who allowed himself to be stolen away from you was either not happy or worth your time to begin with. I say move on, good riddance and don’t be a hater.

Ohio history is alive on the walls

It is????? That sounds vaguely menacing and provocative. To wit, not a bit like the state I know and love.

What to do been scammed by Tara

Hmmmmm, well…….Scamming is not really in my nature, so I am thinking you might have the wrong Tara here. If you, however, have proof that I am, in fact, the offending Tara, please send this to me and I will give it to my lawyer post haste.

The poor kids, however, are still being very much left behind.

One of my biggest pet peeves here in Turkey is the fact that most people drive around with their small children just bouncing around their vehicles. It’s not uncommon to be behind a car that has several children under the age of ten smashing their faces against the back window. Women hold babies on their laps. On their LAPS! I don’t even want to imagine how many people die in automobile accidents here every year or how many of those people happen to be children. I honestly can’t think about it.

I have only recently seen people here using car seats for their children and it is always people of a privileged income bracket. I told the Boyfriend that back home, we have special programs that help poor mothers obtain car seats and other necessities for their children. Every year, our local fire department used to collect used car seats and high chairs to give out to such women. So where are the charities here? Where is the goodwill to help those in need and the motivation to see to it that they get what they need?

My friend Claire is from Scotland. She and I sometimes have a wee rant about the uncivilized nature of things in this country. The fact of the matter is that for all this talk about Turkish hospitality and what have you, there is an awful lot of looking the other way, as well. All societies are full of their own unique mores, some conflicting. And there doesn’t seem to be much of a social outreach on behalf of the better off towards those in deepest need; such as babies whose parents can’t afford car seats.

Claire has taken matters into her own hands and is now busily arranging her second charity auction. Last year, we raised over one thousand lira for Lösev who helps children with leukemia and their families. This year we are donating to Mor Çatı, a women’s shelter organization who assists abused women and single mothers. Claire has taken it upon herself to truck all over town, on both continents to pick up donations from many, many people. Clothes and shoes, books and movies, baby clothes and even a smoke detector (okay, Kate! Haha.) It will all be sold off to women hungry for a bargain with all proceeds directly benefitting the charity. The unsold items will then be donated directly, as well.

I’m so proud to be friends with women like this. Those who see a need to be filled and take it upon themselves to just make it happen, rather than wait for something to be done about it. If you’re sitting on your hands waiting around in a country like Turkey, I hope you have a lot of patience!

The boyfriend and I were driving a black SUV along with my brother, Nick and a mystery woman (already my brother is in trouble). We came to a river and were confused to find no bridge with which to cross said river. What stood before us instead was a huge tower that appeared to have been recently constructed.
Not seeing any other option, we drove in.

We were greeted with a stairwell just narrow enough for our car to pass through and so the Boyfriend drove up. I closed my eyes and fought my terror. In real life, I have an utterly irrational fear that a car will flip over backwards if going up a steep enough hill. (and yet I am a roller coaster freak. Go figure!)

Anyway, we finally arrive at the top and are greeted with what appears to be an observation deck. I decide to get out of the car and go look for help. I begin to yell, “Hello? Is anybody here?” And then I hear a woman’s voice, “In here, honey child.”

I enter into what looks like a small staff kitchen and there is a plump black woman dressed in a highway patrol uniform making a fresh pot of coffee.
I explain our predicament to her and she looks around the corner and then back at me with a sympathetic look on her face. She says, “Baby, they still building this tower. That door shouldn’t even been open. But I don’t see no car out there. You sure you ain’t all by yourself lost?”
I look back and am terrified when I see the car is indeed gone. I race down the stairs as fast as my feet will carry me.

When I get to the street, I do not see the car. What I see instead is a very tall office building. It features a long Times Square-style electronic billboard. It suddenly hums to life and letters begin to scroll down. I see, “Dear Tara,” and I realize that it is a letter from the Boyfriend.

As the words tumble down, they are interspersed with images culled from the internet: two porn stars wrestling in a baby pool full of pudding, two black women pulling one anothers’ hair in a Jerry Springer “Who’s the baby daddy?” type episode, the midget from “Fire, Come Walk with Me”. This all seems perfectly normal to me. Then something I consider irrational happens.

A Britney Spears video appears. And suddenly, Britney Spears appears in 3D and she is about twenty feet tall and she is blocking my view. I start yelling, “Britney! Move! I can’t read the letter! You are in my damn way!” But she continues to dance on, oblivious to my pleas.

All of a sudden, I hear voices calling my name in unison. I look over and in a parking lot in front of a Starbuck’s is the SUV. The Boyfriend and my brother have their cups hanging out the window, as though they were toasting me.

“What are you doing over there? Let’s go. I got you a chai latte.”

That’s when the real time Boyfriend nudged me gently on the shoulder and said that I might want to get up, seeing as how it was two in the afternoon and all.

And that’s how my day began. Not sure it can possibly get any stranger than that, but I can always have hope:)

Lately I have become obsessed with ada çayı. I am preparing and consuming no less than three mugs of it per day all of a sudden. If I threw sophisticated dinner parties (unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot of THAT kind of thing going on), I would serve it between courses as a palate cleanser. It feels that good on the tongue. It takes any bad right out of my day.

Ada çayı is also not anything peregrine. It is really just sage and that’s about it. It’s not even dried sage that has been mixed with tea leaves. It is literally a bag of sage, stems and all. Sage has one of those gloriously earthy scents that I find entirely comforting. But truth be told, sage only ever entered my mind around Thanksgiving because it was a must-have herb for the stuffing. Otherwise, I didn’t have much use for the stuff. I was even a horticulturist back home, and brewing sage as a tea never once figured into my imagination. Why would I brew sage when I had all the Yogi teas I could fit in my tea cubby?

This sudden and rash obsession with sage made me think of a reverse cultural exchange involving another herb.

I was spending the weekend at the beach house of some friends on the Marmara Sea. We had gone to the butcher shop in town and had gotten an assortment of meats, including lovely lamb chops, to throw on the grill that evening.
While waiting for the grill to stoke up, I was giddily distracted by the sound of tinkling bells and barking dogs. I knew that a shephard must be bringing his flock close by, so I ran out into the back yard for a closer look. I hurriedly dashed through the low shrubs serving as a border fence and was stopped dead in my tracks by an unmistakeable odor: rosemary. The air was suddenly filled with the scent of it. I looked back at the “fence” that I had cut through and upon closer inspection, found the source.

After watching the sheep pass through, I broke off a few sprigs of the “fence” and headed back to the house. I then washed and proceeded to mince the rosemary along with some garlic bulbs. The Turkish mother of the house asked me what I was cutting. I had no idea at the time what the Turkish word was for rosemary, so I just pointed out the window to the shrubs. She then looked at me as though I were out of my ever-loving mind. Apparently, rosemary is a nice plant for making a fence where she comes from, but it’s not something you put on your food. My friend calmly explained to his mother that, yes, we did eat rosemary in America, and in fact, in many other parts of the world, but she simply refused to believe it. But god love her, she let the crazy American girl rub those lamb chops with the chopped up fence and the garlic. It’s worth noting that the chops were an instant hint and I had scored major brownie points with the mother for teaching her something new.

So I guess you give and you take and the world keeps on spinning, no matter where you are on it.

If the internet has had a hand in facilitating serendipity, Facebook has had a hand in doing its bidding. Now I don’t know what your M.O. is, but I am not a friend collector. I find Facebook distracting enough as it is. Notice I blame Facebook for my lack of productivity. Blame shifting is awesome! I should teach a seminar, seriously, but I digress (often).

Facebook has been, for me, instrumental in bringing many lovely people to me; as I’ve mentioned, some of whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting in the flesh. All the same, through the exchange of messages and personal energy, I feel quite close to many of these people.

A mutual friend brought me together with Aric, for example. Aric is, like me, a bit of an itchy wanderer, or modern day gypsy, if you will. He flits around in a dizzying pattern provoking wanderlust in others, taking fine ass pictures and amusing the masses (or as he puts it, “tens of people”) on his website. (www.aricwithana.com)
We were supposed to have met, but alas, the stars were not properly aligned. He passed through Istanbul when I was home for Christmas, a fact that I was rather bummed about. But, thankfully, we have continued to converse via Facebook and Gmail, and it has even led to a new collaboration tied to his site, which I hope you will be checking out.

Another arbiter of friendship for me has been my old blog, Secretly Turkish. It was the previous forum of my more melodramatic life; a veritable soap opera that had women all over the world (or so my site statistics showed) hooked on the narcotic-like emotionally overwrought ramblings. I became somewhat of a Harriet Tubman for women in cross-cultural relationships; although mostly women married to or dating or in love with Turkish men. I received very candid, sometimes heart-wrenching, emails and comments from women I didn’t know, begging me for advice or thanking me for my insight. It was occasionally overwhelming, I don’t mind telling you. But in the end, it brought me together with some amazing humans, a fact for which I will always feel grateful, even if Secretly Turkish, and the woman who wrote it, are both no more.

I don’t take broad strokes in the pool that is social networking. I have enough trouble trying to reign in my attention deficit tendencies. Even now, I have work to do and until someone starts paying me to write this, an offer I would seriously consider, it is still just goofing off. So perhaps I ought to exercise a little self-discipline now and stick the proverbial fork in this post?

And……………….stuck!

It appears to be a hub of activity at all times of the day and night. Trucks line the street waiting to be allowed into the compound, even at 3 am, coming from as far away as the very far east of Turkey. And anyone who has been here can attest that trucks here are rather colorful. They usually boast hand done paintings of rural scenes of their hometown. Trucks from the Göreme region always have chimney faeries painted on them, for example. Trucks from the Black Sea region usually display a message about being proud of being Laz (an ethnic group typically found in this region of Turkey).

There’s a small tea salon in front of the compound that serves as a trucker’s diner. It looks like your run of the mill men’s salon here. Yes, my foreign friends, we have men’s salons. This is usually where the men gather to hide out from their women. They drink tea and Turkish coffee, play tavla (backgammon) and okey (a game played with tiles that resembles gin rummy) and watch futbol matches, reveling in the stench of testosterone. I wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall, really, I can assure you. I have learned by using public transportation that personal hygiene is not as strictly adhered to as it is back home (at least by the men), if you get my meaning. I don’t even want to imagine what a tiny diner full of sweaty truckers smells like!

But whenever we pass by the line of trucks, I wonder what goes on inside the gates of the Hal. I asked the Boyfriend what he knew about it. Granted he is neither a farmer nor a pazarcı, but he could provide me with enough to pique my interest.
Apparently there is a council of men known as the Kabzımal, which is a cool name for a powerful and mysterious coven, if you ask me. They are the brokers, the ones who decide what you are going to pay for tomatoes this week. This is one of those coveted positions in Turkey that resembles the way a mafia works. It is not easy to become a kabzımal because they make a buttload of money and have a lot of power. Just think of it in terms of the crack dealers’ hierarchy (as one does): the pazarcılars are like the foot soldiers and the kabzımal are the neighborhood gang leaders.

I think I get so excited when I see those trucks because I wax nostalgic about the truck stops of my youth. My family did its fair share of cross country travel and when you have four kids and a mother with a bladder the size of a chickpea, that means a lot of bathroom stops. And we loved us a truck stop, boy howdy! A truck stop after midnight is a thrill to behold, let me tell you. I would remind you that me and my siblings were raised in cushy suburban Ohio where we were generally sheltered from the seedier sides of life, much to our chagrin. So for us, the truck stop was like sneaking out of bed to watch a dirty movie when our parents thought we were asleep.
Truck stop diners were hole in the wall dives with grease stains on the walls and shower stalls down the hall for fifty cents. Bearded truckers strung out on over the counter amphetamines and sometimes even Berthas, too (that was the nickname we had for truckin’ wives/partners).

But the cherry on the top of the truck stop experience were the Wandas: the truck stop good time girls. Yes, scantily clad women for sale, right next to the gas pumps. Imagine how our eyeballs popped out when we got a load of those ladies.

Now I certainly don’t think that there are working gals behind the gates of the Hal, but if there aren’t, I think it’s mostly because they haven’t thought of it yet;)

My parents quit smoking over a year ago and my father put on a shocking amount of weight. I didn’t eve recognize him when he came to the airport to pick me up when I came home for Christmas. The ony person who addressed the subject with him was my mother. As his wife, she was afraid for his health and the way it had affected his mood. She made him go see his physician and he subsequently lost a lot of it in the end.
But even though he is our father and we are his children, ask me if either myself or any of my siblings EVER said anything about this issue to his face? We were raised better.

Yesterday when I got to work, the little lass had a Turkish tutor at the house. When I walked in the room she said (in Turkish), “Oh, hi Tara. You’ve put on weight.” and then she waited for my response. I have never exactly figured out what I am supposed to say to that, so I usually just return the comment with a frozen smile frought with the tension I am feeling.

People have even gone so far as to defend this behavior as such, “Oh, Tara, it’s actually a compliment coming from older women because they have much more of a Middle Eastern mentality about weight. If you’re fat, then you must be rich and happy.”

Sorry, but I don’t buy it.

The fact of the matter is that I do not have a complex about my weight at this stage in life. My weight has always yo-yoed five or ten pounds over the years. This is why I keep clothing in a range of sizes and have learned how to cleverly dress myself. You will never see me trying to squeeze myself into skinny jeans or wear leggings. I am a realist and work with what I’ve got.

There’s also the fact that when I have some meat on my bones, it means that I am feeling warm, happy and settled and secure. When I get depressed or my nerves get frayed, I lose my appetite and drop weight. When this happens, as it does after a bad breakup, people always compliment me on how I look and that feels terrible. It’s not as though I have any reason to be proud of that weight loss. I have not achieved it by working out, for example. What do I say? “Oh, thanks for noticing. Yeah, I am forcing myself to eat at least once a day and I usually can’t hold it down because I am crying too hard. But don’t I look great in these jeans?”

I know I shouldn’t take it to heart, but I just can’t seem to help myself. I think the reason it bothers me the most is this: for five years I have tried my hardest to be a good girl and not do anything that might be construed as offensive while being a guest in this country. I go out of my way to pay attention to my environment and behave accordingly because I try to always be respectful. So when someone comes at me with something that is considered quite offensive and sensitive in MY culture, it’s hard to deal with. I know that most Turks probably don’t realize that it is a social faux pas where I come from, but it stings all the same.

It’s just one of those feelings that I have not been able to compartmentalize here.

I spend quite a lot of energy lauding my adopted homeland with positive accolades about its people, its culture, and its cuisine. I have found myself in the position of having to defend my decision to live here to folks back home who cannot fathom why I would choose such a life. I think I have done a mighty good job of it, as well. Since I have lived here, I have had four friends visit me here and my brother even came for an extended stay of three months when I was going through a rough patch. All left with extremely warm feelings about Turkey, vowing to come back one day. Mostly I want to paint a positive picture of living here for the sake of my family, who worry about me being so far away in a land they can hardly imagine.

Now I do not mean to portray the fact that I am living in a dangerous place or that my health or well-being are at stake in any way. That would be far from the truth. I suppose what I am getting at is that once you have been a part of a landscape for long enough, you begin to see things as a native might in some regards. You start to pay attention to what’s happening politically, what’s going on in the society in a deeper way.

Let me attempt to get my point across on a microcosmic level as it is not in my interest to get too controversial about this.

I have made mention before about the state of the neighborhood where I am living currently. It is a satellite suburb of Istanbul that has been gobbled up by developers. It is now home to luxury high rise apartment buildings, shopping malls, fast food establishments and no less then three Starbuck’s within walking distance.

The problem is that this land was not vacant. There were already people living here. These people are living just across the street in a makeshift village in illegal housing cobbled together out of scrap building materials. Our post office is located in that neighborhood so whenever we need to make a visit there to pay a utility bill, I get an eyeful of life “on the other side of the tracks”.

There are families of who knows how many people living in what appears to be an average size gardening shed with nothing more to cover them than a piece of tin roofing. It is not unusual to see chickens and the occasional rooster strutting through the main road. Women sit outside and wash their rugs in an empty concrete lot next to their homes. Children play soccer in the streets wearing only house shoes, usually without coats on very cold days. There are even a few emaciated horses trying their best to find viable grass to nibble on in barren lots.

What will happen to these people when some developer decides that they want this land or that they do not want their well-heeled future tenants to have such a view? Where will they be pushed next?

This is not a unique experience that I am having in my part of town. One can see evidence of this in urban lanscapes all over Istanbul, on both continents. In my old neighborhood in Çengelköy, we had a gypsy village that even managed to steal our site’s electricity with some anarchistic electrical rigging. You almost had to admire their tenacity. There was a house there that was completely obscured in the summertime when the corn stalks all around the house towered over it. There were days when the air was completely polluted outside my apartment because they had chosen that day to burn the trash they threw on a hillside. The whole environment was a source of endless fascination for me in those days, but I knew better than to wander down there alone.

Recently, I was reminded of Celebration, Florida. For those of you not familiar, this is a town that was built and maintained by the Walt Disney Corporation. I have never been there, but just reading about it gave me the creeps along the lines of the Stepford Wives. This is a city where leaf-shaped confetti streams out of the lamp posts in autumn to simulate the falling of the leaves and where a fountain foams over with soap suds in December to simulate snow falling. Reportedly, it is a community that has very strict standards about conformity, as is this is a city sponsored by a heavy hitting corporation, none of that should come as any surprise.

While I most certainly do not wish to see this sort of homogenization happen here, I do wish that there was a more proactive approach by local goverment and city planners for some sort of cohesive living plan. But really what can be done? Do we just erect walls and seperate the haves and the have nots like cities such as Los Angeles have managed to do? Do we push the poor further and further out into undesirable parts and let them form their ghettos away from our line of sight?

I certainly do not have the answers to these questions. I just wish I knew what to do with the guilt I feel as a relatively wealthy foreigner living in a country that seems content to leave so many behind.

So I just opted out of all of it. I made sure every new man in my life knew that I didn’t celebrate it and that he needn’t feel he had to make a big deal of it. If he were a particularly romantic soul who wanted to spoil me on said day, I tried to be gracious about it. Just imagine the one year a new beau gave me a giant stuffed teddy bear holding a heart that said, “I love you.” I was touched and horrified at the same time, which is a very confusing melange of emotions.

For some reason, I got to thinking about it all this year. What’s interesting is that I believe the impetus for this was having seen a horrendous movie. I probably don’t even need to tell you that it was the movie Valentine’s Day. I would just like to defend myself by saying that I saw it only because the girl I nanny wanted to see Taylor Lautner, whom she, and most twelve year old girls on the planet, is in love with. However, I cringed upon remembering that like Jessica Bel’s character in the movie, I once had anti-Valentine’s Day parties and they were well-attended every year!

While the movie itself was appalling in nearly every way, it made me open up a dialogue with myself about my attitudes towards this day.

I thought back to how much I loved it as a child. In kindergarten and first grade, it was one of my favorite days because we got to make cards for everyone in our class. I was a very artistically motivated child so whenever the teacher hauled those giant pots of paste out of the supply closet, my heart skipped a beat.
Even when the trend was just buying store made cards and those candy hearts with the messages, going shopping for those was a major highlight in my February.

When I started thinking about it, I realized that the person that always made Valentine’s Day the most special was my very own Dad. He started a tradition with his girls, my mother, my sister, and I. He spent a lot of time at perfume counters, testing perfumes in an attempt to find each of our signature scents. When I was fourteen years old, he gave me a bottle of Samsara for Valentine’s Day and I wear it to this day. In fact, at the age of thirty six, I have just now found another scent that I occasionally wear. He also always gave us a very sweet card, telling us how much he loved us, how we were all his sweethearts. My Dad is not a particularly mushy guy, either. I mean, like so many men, he is a total teddy bear, but damned if he’s going to show it. So these cards and tokens of his love meant the world to me.

Perhaps Valentine’s Day became a day in which I thought no one could ever measure up to my father? Paging Dr.Freud……..

The point is that, of course, this weekend, I told The Boyfriend that he needn’t bother even making dinner reservations. As usual, I was fine with not celebrating. Then something unexpected happened.

His father called us today and announced that he had made dinner reservations last week to my favorite restaurant, Develi. It was not just to mark Valentine’s Day, but to send off The Boyfriend’s grandmother who had been visiting them. Needless to say, I was delighted. I was further delighted when his father hugged me and gave me a little Valentine’s Day treat in monetary form.

As we sat eating, I allowed my eyes to wander around surreptitiously and I was very surprised by what I felt just then. I had been hit by cupid’s bow! As I looked around that table, I felt so much love for the people sitting there with me and felt loved by them in turn. I felt so fortunate at the moment to feel so welcome in The Boyfriend’s family, and not just tolerated, but adored by them. It is something that I neither take for granted nor ever wish to.

And so I hope that this feeling that I had at the dinner table will be the new happy memory that I have of Valentine’s Day; that I can draw on it fondly year after year. Feeling loved and included and cared for are not small things. In fact, their true value is inestimable.

So I say, “Bravo to you, Cupid!”

This year you reclaimed a lost soul.

Every now and again, I wonder wistfully how different my experiences here would be if I were flying solo. I don’t mean to romanticize it entirely or imply that I wish I were single.

What I mean is that I sometimes envy my single girlfriends here who get to set their own agendas. If they want to take a bus to Bulgaria, they do it and no one tries to stop them. If they want to go to a sketchy neighborhood and take pictures, they go right on ahead. Ditto with going out dancing.

But in my case, I am under the protection of someone. I certainly do not mean to imply that the Boyfriend is an overlord. He doesn’t boss me around or attempt to control my life on some sort of sick power trip. Indeed, he simply looks out for me in a way that no man in my life ever has. I think the fact that I am a foreigner living here only magnifies his chivalrous intent towards me. He knows I am hardly a delicate flower. But he also knows I can be a little naive, and knowing his countrymen all too well, knows I can easily be taken advantage of.

As I say, however, mostly a blessing. I get frustrated when I think of the parts of Turkey that I would like to visit, but have not yet had the chance.
I dream about Mardin, an ancient city on the Syrian border that has a distict Middle Eastern flavor (not that I would know personally). I so want to go there, but the Boyfriend is lukewarm about the idea at best. He’s been there, of course, has been through the whole region and his feelings about it are less than romantic.

It’s not that I can’t relate. Years ago, when I took my Turkish room mate home with me to Ohio, I had a hard time understanding his excitement. He ran around the incredibly flat yard taking endless photos of a grain silo on the horizon, fields of weeds, that kind of thing. To him, it was exotic and to me, well, it was flat. So I try to get it because I do, and yet I still can’t help but feel like I am missing out by not seeing places like Mardin for myself.

But then are the times when I realize that I am really benefiting from the Boyfriend’s native knowledge. Admittedly, I don’t always trust him on it, which I know must frustrate him, but I try not to be stubborn for merely sport.

This past Saturday night, he offered to take me out for a nice dinner. I am on holiday from work, but seeing as we are still on the financial rebound from the Christmas blow-out visit back home, we are laying relatively low. To combat my cabin fever and scratch an itch, he suggested an excuse for me to get all dolled up and I took the bait.

We decided to dine at the restaurant of a major hotel. After all, that is usually at least a consistent dining experience; something not to be taken for granted in a country like Turkey. We randomly selected the “Major Hotel” after looking at the very promising menu on their website.

When we finally pulled up in front of the hotel, I was very confused. There was no signage indicating that this was the “Major Hotel”. Everywhere I looked the signs said, “*%+ Plaza”. Immediately, the Boyfriend seemed to sense our doom. He probably wanted to do an abrupt about-face and find another restaurant, but seeing as I was already on the verge of a hypoglycemic coma, we went inside.

The first disappointing sign was the fact that the restaurant was just off the lobby. That’s fine for a cafe, but not for a fine dining experience. The boyfriend made some amusing comment about hotel guests shuffling down in their pajamas and slippers and our waitress suppressed a giggle. She did so again when some hotel guests from the Middle East asked where the Arabic menus were.

The boyfriend asked why there was not a restaurant on the roof. This building probably commands one of the more spectacular views of the city, after all. The answer he received made him blanch. Somehow, the waiter told him everything he needed to know.
He had said that the hotel actually occupied only the first fourteen floors of the building and that the rest were offices and residences.

The boyfriend then gave me the low down. Most likely this *%+ family has gotten a serious amount of cash in some nefarious capacity, either mafia connections or scamming the government perhaps. And they bought not only the building, but the brand name of “Major Hotel”. I innocently assumed that if you were running a “Major Hotel” anywhere in the world, you should be subject to the systems and checks of that chain. That surely a regional manager of some sort who worked for the corporate office would occasionally drop in to see that everything was ship shape. How very naive of me.
It seems that if one offers enough money, they can buy themselves the “Major Hotel” brand name and then proceed to run it like a kebap shop.

He then broke it down for me further. The owner of the building obviously saw a much greater profit for himself by selling the top portions of the building, the ones with the commanding views, as luxury apartments, maybe even to the likes of Turkish pop stars.

All of a sudden, the tacky brick-a-brac on the tables made so much sense. The lackluster overcooked, over salted food that followed was an obvious conclusion. We had been scammed.

The Boyfriend is not one to gloat. He’s a humble sort. But I honestly can’t understand how he manages time and time again to not say to me, “I told you so!”

I have picked a random selection of some of the many, many movie disappointments I have suffered in recent months. There really have been too many to mention, unfortunately. I have chosen a few for which my immediate objections spring to mind.

One of the biggest recent let-downs was our viewing of Funny People. Never before has a movie title been so inappropriate. This is one of those movies that proves that even if you like the director and the cast seems promising, you can still be led astray. Not only was this movie prfoundly UNfunny, but it was also ridiculously long. It seemed not to have been edited at all, with so many long-winded scenes stretching endlessly to no avail.
It also seemed to have been highjacked, a trend that has become all too common. This is when the tone of the movie completely switches midstream. The first half is often an inventive storyline that pulls you in. But halfway through, the mood completely shifts and it drifts into a mundane Hollywood ending. You can almost hear the gnashing of the writer’s teeth when his interesting plot is ransacked by hack writers hired by the producers.

The Lovely Bones is a perfect example of another problematic issue in Hollywood. Just because the book was great doesn’t mean you can make a movie out of it. This poor film was a heap of meandering trash that squandered not just good actors doing their best with what they had, but gorgeous CI effects, as well. Why Peter Jackson was chosen to direct this is anyone’s guess. His lack of passion about the material is apparent to the end. I heard that Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt bought the rights to this movie before they were released to the public. Shouldn’t that have been reason enough not to have made this?

Sometime’s you’re just in the mood for something delightfully cheery and formulaic. So was my inclination when I popped in Four Christmases just before the holidays. I wasn’t expecting movie magic here. I just wanted some mindless entertainment. Again, the cast seemed promising (Reese Witherspoon, Vince Vaughn, Sissy Spacek, Robert Duval, Jon Favreau, John Voigt and Mary Steenbergen). And true, there were immensely entertaining moments, but the overall message was what steamed me. You see, Reese and Vince’s characters are young yuppies who lie to their families about where they are every Christmas to avoid spending time with them. Eventually we learn that their seemingly perfect relationship is actually quite shallow and that after living together for three years, they barely know each other. What really annoyed me was the fact that all of that got tied up neatly when the couple got married and had a baby, even though Vince’s character made it clear he never wanted to get married or start a family. This was another movie that seemed highjacked into telling the audience what it wanted to hear: getting married and having babies makes it all better. How original!

Invictus was a perfect example of how I am forever being suckered by reviews. The Boyfriend tries to tell me all the time that which seems quite transparent: that movie reviews have been bought up like every other commodity in this world. Try to find an honest one these days. There is no greater example of my embarrassment spawned by this trick as when I hauled The Boyfriend to see Australia (I don’t even have the strength to go there!). “They’re saying it’s the next Gone with the Wind!” Oh, Tara! Shame on you!
You’d think I would have learned my lesson, but no! Once again, I forced my boyfriend to watch a movie because it was receiving “Oscar buzz”.
Not only was this movie rather bland, but if either Morgan Freeman or Matt Damon receive Oscar nominations out of this, I will stage some sort of protest on principle. Morgan Freeman couldn’t even be stuffed to use a South African accent consistently. Just because you are black and have freckles does NOT mean you can convince me you are Nelson Mandela. This movie may be rife with moments you are supposed to find uplifting, accompanied by a soaring soundtrack, but it feels very manipulative. We have been down that road many a time.

The Hangover was the movie that made me wonder if The Boyfriend and I had 1) gone crazy or 2) become movie snobs, or 3) both.
We wanted so much to like this movie. We had spent big money to see it at the outdoor cinema this summer. Not even getting to watch it in a chaise lounge under the stars redeemed this flick. I really thought it was preposterous and juvenile. You cannot win me over with just a tiger in the bathroom, a Mike Tyson cameo. And the Hooker with the Heart of Gold bit played by none other than Heather Graham! Really, Hollywood? Seriously?
This movie was so bad that I had to run out and buy Old School just to remind myself that Todd Phillips once made a great movie and that frat humor can be done well.

After the cashier gave me the total, I passed her the money, which included coins. She then said something back to me and I didn’t quite get it. I was working and with the little lass and she offered a free translation. “She is asking you if you have any new money. She can’t take the old ones.” Well, even after having had the benefit of translation, I was still at a loss. “New money?”, I asked. The little lass then rolled her eyes and sighed wearily at my ignorance. “Yes, Tara! It’s 2010. You had until 2010 to use the old money. You have to trade it in at Ziraat Bankası. Where have you been?”

Where had I been indeed?

I knew that the money had changed yet again, of course. I remember when the new bills came out. I got paid and I looked at each new bill and exclaimed, “Ooooh! Look at the hundred! Is that Yunus Emre? ”, and “Ooooh, the fifty is so pretty now!” Yes. Isn’t it pretty? (sigh)

When I first moved here, the Turkish currency was absurd. There were all of these superfluous zeros. One lira was actually one million. So when I went to the grocery store, a bottle of olive oil was 13,000,000.00 lira. You can imagine how mind-boggling that was. Everyone said, “Just cut off the zeros in your mind.” And I thought, “Why can’t they just cut off the zeros at the Treasury?”

I finally got my wish the following year when they rolled out the YTL, or Yeni Türk Lirası (new Turkish lira). Gone was the bir milyon (one million) note which looked like fake Monopoly money. I cherished the new zeroless landscape on the store shelves. I became annoyed when people still quoted me prices with the million attached. Amusingly, to this day, some old timers insist on keeping with the tradition. At the pazar, it is not unusual to hear someone shouting, “Bir milyon! Bir milyon!”, announcing that their goods are a mere lira. I do admit that “bir milyon” does have a nice lyrical ring, but I digress.

Just when we were getting used to the zeroless YTL, they switched it up on us again. They redesigned the money, giving it a rather Euro appearance. Rumor had it that in anticipation of Turkey possibly entering the European Union, the money was changed accordingly. Only that theory had a serious plot hole. If Turkey were to become a member, our currency would almost certainly be rendered obsolete and replaced by the Euro, anyway, right? I mean, I suppose we could be one of those lucky countries that gets to keep their currency, and as bull-headed as Turks are, they probably will insist on it. After all, no one is going to be putting Atatürk on the Euro, are they?

After the embarrassing incident at the bookstore, I came home and repeated the story to the Boyfriend. He was also unaware of the whole bank trade-in situation. His thoughts then turned to the treasure chest and what was to be done about it.

We have a little chest on the counter where we chuck all of our loose change. It’s very handy for paying the delivery people that ferry wordly goods to our doorstep. Just as an experiment, the boyfriend attempted to pay the water delivery guy with old money. He was denied outright. Dang! It seemed that someone was going to have to deal with this issue and tonight, that person was me.

I was in a mood. I was even annoying myself, perhaps even mostly myself. The Boyfriend has endless patience and finds even my bitchiness charming. I decided to engage myself in a mindless task so as to minimize the annoying I could do for awhile. I turned my attention to the treasure chest.

When the boyfriend became curious about the clinking of metal coming from the living room, he found me industriously sorting piles. I had old money over there, foreign money over here, and new money on the other side. New money would go back into the chest. Old money would go to the bank. And I haven’t yet figured out what to do with all of the foreign money, but we both enjoyed the trip down travel memory lane by looking at it, anyway.

Then came the part when I transitioned from enduring a mindless sorting to relishing my task. The boyfriend announced that the old money was mine to keep. In other words, I was free to take the spoils! Oh, boy! I suddenly felt like a kid counting out her piggy bank; fantasizing about what I was going to buy at the mall this weekend. And because I am horrible about doing adult things like saving money, I did begin fantasizing about how to blow it, so I guess not much has changed in that department.

When I finally finished the job, my hands were ash grey and I had made 167.50! Not bad for an hour’s worth of zombie-like activity. I was not only satisfied that the job was finally done, but that I was the one who had done it. And I would be lying if I didn’t add that suddenly finding myself flush didn’t perk up my mood, as well.

So I did what I had to do and learned how to navigate the pazar. That wasn’t an easy task, either. Not knowing the metric system, I had no idea how much to ask for and struggled to find the Turkish words to ask for much of anything at all. It was no use imitating the other women around me. They seemed to be buying for a small restaurant for the most part. No, I was completely on my own and would have to sort it out somehow. Eventually, I figured it out and now I can walk through a pazar like an old hand. In fact, pazars are even a guilty pleasure to me now. Just try to get me out of one!

I should be grateful, I suppose, that I did not move to Japan. I have seen the shelves of Japanese grocery stores. Hundreds of bags with Japanese characters and sometimes not so much as a picture to guide the language ignorant. Add to that the fact that they eat all sorts of odd things that it would never occur to me to eat at all, let alone buy at a grocery store.

No, at least in Turkey, it’s easy enough to get the lay of the land. The aisles are arranged logically and items you would expext to go together are grouped as such here: flour and sugar are lined up together with general goods for baking, which is entirely logical. You can safely pick up a bag of flour without knowing the Turkish name for it because, well, a bag of flour is easily identifiable and almost always has a little wheat symbol featured somewhere.

The hard part was getting those things home and figuring out what to do with them. I mean, I was a career gal back home; not a homemaker. I am sure I used actual flour to roll out a crust for something at one point or another in my life, but more often than not, I’d settle for a ready made crust. I was into convenience food like that. But now I lived in a country with no ready made crust, so I could either forgo or make do. To my credit, I chose to make do, often with comical results.

I eventually got brave and started buying little packet meals, like rice dishes. I wanted so desperately to return to the freedom of convenience food. I was tired of soaking lentils overnight and cleaning up my kitchen after what appeared to be a flour explosion.
But even those packets were a new form of hell. I would look at the directions on the back and just sigh. Just try to painstakingly translate those directions word for word. Not only is it thanklessly laborious, but it is practically impossible. Add to that the general confusion regarding measurements.

Now I know how spoiled we are in America, what with our Pampered Chef parties and our Williams Sonoma stores. But I just assumed that all civilized cultures would use measuring cups and spoons, right? I mean, at the very least. Oh, how wrong I was!

Let’s set aside for a moment the fact that I come from one of the only countries on earth that still clings tirelessly to the Imperial System. No doubt having knowledge of the Metric System would really have come in handy. (and yes, I am aware that I can teach myself!) But only a Turkish housewife could save me from the measuring predicament I found myself in.

You see, Turkish recipes are actually tailored towards a housewife that has come from the village. It is assumed that she has no fancy modern-day devices or appliances. What is assumed is that she has cutlery.

When cooking from a recipe here, you will find the following forms of measurement: tea glass (which is a little tulip-shaped vessel that tea is served in), water glass (which is a glass that holds about 6 ounces), tea spoon (which is actually a tiny little spoon used to stir sugar in tea), dessert spoon (which is actually our teaspoon), and soup spoon (which is actually our tablespoon). I can’t tell you how many recipes I warped by thinking a teaspoon was a dessert spoon. I believe it all came crashing down on me one day when I was putting the dishes away. “We don’t have a lot of………(wheels turning)tea….spoons.” (light bulb burning brightly)

These days, I’ve got it all worked out. I can just as easily make dolma (stuffed grape leaves) as I can pad thai in my Turkish kitchen. Learning a new language is something that can wait. Learning how to cook and eat? That is an entirely different story to this gal!

Signed,

A Perfectly Innocent Resident

I have ranted in these missives in the past about the appalling lack of physical education in this country. In fact, here in Turkey, it can even be said that exercise is just another socio-economic divide. To wit, the well or better-to-do exercise; the lesser fortunate just gawp. Here, only the finanically stable can join gyms. And I would guess that most of the people with gym memberships enjoy at least an undergrad degree if not also a Masters. It seems also to be people in their late twenties and early thirties. Those who recognize that their metabolisms are slowing down and that they live in a country where three or four carbohydrates are routinely served at least once a day in a single meal.

I know it may strike one as ironic that an American is ranting about fitness. After all, my countrymen are among the fattest in the world and diabetes in children is rising at an alarming rate. Maybe I was just lucky having grown up at a time when the school systems valued and took physical education quite seriously. It probably also helps that I was a natural at sports and took part in as many as I could growing up. Many Turkish children will never know the benefit of either. The little lass goes to a very exclusive private school, one modeled after Western schools, and even they do not have sports teams. I say that I was fortunate because I know that even in America, now that states are in such financial straits, physical education and extra-cirricular activities are being slashed from the budgets. And at a time when our children have grown fatter and lazier, that’s just plain dangerous.

I fear I may have run off the rails here a bit, so allow me to come back to the point:

Exercise is great, people; not only for your body, but for your brain. I was sitting here, feeling somewhat despondent, when I heeded the call to get outside in the fresh air. Guess what? The resulting endorphin rush dissipated the storm clouds in my mind.

I would also like to add that I got sweaty and that that felt great. And I don’t fear for a moment that I will now get sick because of it. Superstitious pseudo-science has no place here.

We started our trip back with a weekend in New York City. A weekend is hardly long enough for such a place, but our visit was especially short and sweet. Some cherished friends took trains from Connecticut, Maryland and DC to come and see us. We only passed a few hours together, but the huggin’ and the gigglin’ and the drinkin’ was just the restorative tonic my heart had been in need of.

Walking the streets of Soho, I had a thought, “I feel at home here.” True, it had a lot to do with being back on American soil after another year had gone by, and being in such an iconic city at that. But I also had a sense of how effortlessly I move through big crazy cities and it made me feel proud of myself. For such a small town girl, I have managed to acquire some city smarts over the years, and mostly, I just feel comfier in my own skin, thus at home wherever I happen to find myself. I paused to give myself some kudos for that.

Coming Home, Part Two: arriving at the airport in Ohio to the welcoming arms of my dear Mumsy. In fact, I think one of the best things about having moved so far away is how damn good it feels to be reunited with those I love the most after a year’s seperation. The emails, the pictures, the Skype calls are great for trying to bridge the gap, but nothing can take the place of her happy eyes and her warm embrace.

Ohio is my birth home and I feel a lot of love for the place. But home would be wherever my family happened to be. For awhile now, that’s been Ohio and it has tied me to that place.
But I don’t feel that Ohio is the place where I belong necessarily. I have no doubt that were I to move back there, I could make myself a little nest and begin to build my happiness up twig by twig. After all, I am just an adaptable creature that way.
But on my last day, I had a very strong feeling. We were over at my sister’s house watching the Buckeyes play in the Rose Bowl. My sister and her hubby are huge Bucks fans (as is my family in general) and they loves them a football party.
In a scene that felt eerily Turkish, the party was segregated by sex. The men were out in the garage with the deep friers, the beer coolers and the space heater. The women were in the living room with all the crazy kids zipping around. And the matriarchs (my mother and my sister’s mother in law) were in the kitchen; dishing out food, doing the dishes.
As I sat on the couch between these two suburban mommies sipping my margarita and trying to ignore the queso dip, my mind wandered. I felt like I should feel out of place and yet I didn’t. I mean, if my sister and I were not related by blood, we wouldn’t even be friends. She and I are entirely different people. And though suburban mommies are perfectly nice people, we often don’t have much in common. It may be in part due to the easy going ways of Mid -Western folk. They may think I am a total oddball living on the other side of the world in a country they have never even thought about, but they don’t let on. In their presence, I was just another woman and that felt nice.

At the same time, I could never live the life my sister lives. Her universe makes so much sense to her and it sustains her. But if I lived in a little subdivision with a parcel of kids and a small dog, his and hers Toyotas and a raging Starbuck’s habit, I would probably heat up the oven and pull a Sylvia Plath. Not to judge, but it just ain’t for me, that whole scenario. Yet seeing my sister so settled, so loved, fills me with joy somehow.

Waking up at my parents’ house, looking out the window at the fresh snow and deer tracks on the peaceful landscape filled my soul with wonder. The house was never quiet for long, as it is chock full of an endless stream of visitors and party-goers, little people and animals of all varieties. It’s kind of a mad house, which is exactly how my parents like it.
But being able to go back into the woods on New Year’s Eve and just sit around a campfire with my Dad, my man, my brother and random folks was a truly priceless experience. The simple childish pleasure of roasting a hotdog on a stick. Watching nails from a pallet shoot green flames through the fire. Enjoying a fine Kentucky bourbon in a snugly sweater on a bright warm moonlit night in one of my heart’s homes. Ahhhh!

And coming home today was another revelation. When we pushed open the door and turned on the light, my eyes lit up at the sight of our place. I love our cozy home and I missed it. There’s just something so precious about having your own little space filled with familiar things, just waiting patiently to be filled with your joy, your sorrow, your energy. I wouldn’t trade that feeling for the world.

2009 was a very rough year for me. I came out of an emotional tailspin and tried desperately to right myself before I crashed headlong into the side of a mountain. I believe I succeeded. And yet, there are still some mighty big questions left for me to explore as a result of this dismantling/healing/dismantling.

I am not sure what it is I really want. I am not sure where it is I truly belong. And those feel like weighty questions at my age.

Anyhow, I may not know where I am headed in the big picture, but in the meantime, I intend to enjoy the heck out of wherever I am!

I have kind of come to the position that Turkish mothers, for the most part, are over-bearing. They are very draconian, have extremely particular beliefs about how children should be raised. Working for them and adapting to these regulations has been no garden party.

I also think as a result, Turkish kids are just not having as much fun as I had growing up and that makes me sad. When the little lass’s parents go out of town, we do unspeakably forbidden things, which is why I am “the coolest nanny ever”. We climb trees, run around in the grass with no shoes on, jump in puddles when it rains. And whenever we do these things, the little lass has to remind me, “Don’t tell my Mom!” She also instructs the staff not to tell on us. Sad, sad, sad.

Turkish mothers are also incredibly strict about the body temperature of their children. “Don’t let her get cold!”, and “Don’t let her get sweaty!” are spoken with an implied vehemence akin to, “Don’t sell her to the gypsies!” or, “Don’t ride on the roof of the car!”
When we go to birthday parties, I always have a change of clothes for her lest she become sweaty while having fun. When we go swimming, I take about three bathing suits so she can immediately change upon getting out of the water. This is especially crucial when she is wearing a one piece. Should she remain too long in a wet one piece, her stomach can get cold, which can lead to digestive problems. Granted I never went to medical school, but that pretty much sounds insane to me. The little lass once said to me, “What did you guys do when you were little?” “Um, laid out in the sun and then jumped back in.” She was astonished by this.

Once I said to the mother, “You know in Scandinavia, they throw babies into the snow.” The look I received and the accompanying gasp told to me that what she actually heard was, “You know in Scandinavia, they feed babies to the wolves.”

The reason all of this has come to mind is because Mumsy has joined me on the nostalgia wagon that has been hitched up for my birthday. She sent me an email reminding me of goofy things she let us do as kids. I couldn’t help thinking how fired I would be if I ever let the little lass do any of these things. Such as:

Being pulled behind our Dad’s riding lawnmower on a big snow shovel at mach 5;snow or no snow. The little lass could never know this kind of fun. The gardener would never allow it.

Getting the baby crib mattress out of my brother’s bed and using it to slide down the stairs even though we slammed into the front door at the end of the ride. The little lass has marble stairs in her house. Her sister once slipped and broke her tailbone. There is no playing on those stairs.

Putting just a tad of liquid dish detergent on a big roll of plastic garbage bags and letting us slide down the hill. This is pretty much a ghetto Slip’n’Slide. Nothing like this is ever happening on the manicured grounds where I work. Ever.

Letting my brother Nick build the world’s most powerful potato guns and letting us blow everything from trees to the garden up with potatoes that traveled at supersonic speed.

Letting us drag each other through mud puddles on our bellies with just a garbage can lid for protection…usually in some new clothes we just got for school. As I mentioned before, rain puddles are forbidden. You can forget about mud puddles. Mud isn’t even permitted on the manicured grounds.

Using a giant sling shot to hurl water balloons at each other even though it felt like being hit with an AK47 and bruising ensued as a result.

Letting us make huge forts using the sofa cushions and the dining room table and anything else we chose to tear apart to make the fort complete. We made veritable fort cities all over the house and Mumsy never complained. She just vacuumed around them. The little lass has a whole wing of the house that is forbidden to us, unless her parents are entertaining and we are invited. We could probably make a fort in her room, but the maids would probably mumble about it.

Swimming during a rainstorm: the only rule was that once we heard thunder, everybody had to get out. We sometimes waited until we saw lightning like true rebels.

Letting us jump from the top bunk onto the mattress from the bottom bunk with our eyes closed so we could pretend we were flying. I’m pretty sure one of us even chipped a tooth this way. Man, that was good times! The little lass is not even allowed to jump on her bed, which is very close to the ground. So, guess who lets her jump on the bed when her parents are out of town? That’s right: the coolest nanny ever.

2) I am afraid of the Amish. I know it is an irrational fear. After all, they are just people, too. But I fear them all the same. Where I finished high school, there was an Amish community not too far from where we lived. My senior year, my friends and I would sometimes skip school and eat at a restaurant called The Flying Dutchman. They had the most amazing pancakes and waffles. But there were more horse-drawn buggies than cars in the parking lot. I had to sit there with blinders on. If I looked up and spied a woman in a black bonnet, or a solemn-looking man with a long beard, I had a mini panic attack. It’s a cross to bear, this ridiculous fear.

3) I have an inordinate love of goats. There is no explanation for it. I was not raised on a goat farm. I have never fed a baby goat a bottle. I have always been an animal lover by nature. I even once owned a Burmese python; one of the more ill-advised decisions of my youth. But for some reason, goats tug my heart strings to the point of excess. Turkey has done much to cultivate this love affair. One of my favorite things in the world is to hear the approaching sound of tinkling bells. This is usually followed by the sighting of a kangal (Turkish sheepherding dogs), a shepherd and a whole lotta’ goats a’ prancin’. In fact, my dream in life is to one day have a herd of my own. I want six alpines goats who I will happily milk for making goat cheese. I already have their names picked out.

4) I am obsessed with abandoned buildings. As a kid, I was always finding my way through fences to reach buildings that were clear safety hazards. I would walk across rotten beams, sit on moldy furniture, look for lost treasure. When I was fourteen, my friend Typhanie and I found an old cabin in the woods near her house. It obviously belonged to an old man that had died long ago. The house was like a ramshackle museum. His name was Henry Higgins and he had served in World War II. Every day after school, we went back to Henry’s house and poured through his personal things. Everything was moldy and rusty and dank, but we felt at home there. We read love letters that his wife had sent him during the war. We looked at photos of his family in what looked like Ireland. We re-constructed his life on those afternoons. I still have several keepsakes of Henry’s in that hopechest, including an old pipe, a silk scarf and a perfectly rusted Chock Full O’Nuts coffee can.

5) I am petrified of drowning. Don’t get me wrong: I am certainly not shy about the water. I am part mermaid. I am a very strong swimmer and could probably drag a grown-man to shore if I had to. But for some reason, the idea of death by drowning is one of my greatest fears. I simply cannot bear underwater scenes in movies. I automatically hold my breath and my chest tightens. I especially cannot deal with scenes where people attempt to swim through underwater caverns and misjudge how deep they are. Or how about when people fall through a hole in an iced over lake, and they rise up only to be greeted by solid ice? Seriously. I die a little.

6) I am a schitzophrenic magnet. I don’t know what it is about my energy, but schitzophrenic people gravitate towards me wherever I go. They befriend me and let me into their muddled worlds. They enter into deep conversations with me, sometimes getting totally lost and frantic before resurfacing. And the sense of calm I feel when that happens is inexplicable to me. I have not had any sort of psychological training. There have even been times when I could have been physically harmed. Years ago, a very lost soul named Charles took me to his camp. It was in the ruins of an old paper mill. We would wander around looking at glittering piles of partially melted glass and wild vines choking out the sunlight. Sometimes he was there with me; sometimes not. But we always left together.

7) I really, really love being on mushrooms. In fact, every time I ingest mushrooms, it takes about forty minutes for me to exclaim the following, “I wish I could always be on mushrooms!”. And I think I mean it. I am sure that it wouldn’t take too long to adjust my center of gravity to the constant hallucinations. There is just something so pure about the way I feel about the world under the influence of the fungi. All of my inhibitions melt away, all of my baggage completely disappears, and I just open up so willingly. The beautiful simplicity of everyday objects is magnified. I remember having a very significant conversation with my brother about our love of drinking water; the necessity and the pleasure thereof. Of course, ten of those minutes were spent trying to locate and open the refrigerator, find a glass and manage to pour the liquid inside. But no matter the fun that has transpired, at around Hour Eight, I get a little weary. Then I remember why I can’t really be on mushrooms every day.

As a child, my prized possession was my Hot Wheels collection. I obsessively collected them from about age 3. Forget dolls. Stuffed animals? No thank you. All I wanted were those tiny cars! I think I was actually given my first one by my teenaged uncle when I was 2 and a half. But I ended up swallowing it. My mother frantically pulled it out of my throat, saving my life, but scratching the back of my throat with her nails. My absolute favorite car was my fire engine red Pontiac Firebird with the black phoenix across the hood; a replica of the car my uncle owned. I kept them safe in a Hot Wheels carrying case that resembled a tire with a shiny spoked rim. My relationship with Hot Wheels was the first step in my process of becoming a gear head. I soon moved on to the King Cobra bigwheel (which was king of the playground) and later my Evel Knievel hot rod. My poor mother thought she gave birth to a girl!