Category Archives: A Woman’s Project

Maestro Moment

I opened Facebook the day after I watched Maestro and saw that a friend must have watched it the night before as well.  Her response surprised me.

“There is no soul,” she wrote. “No pulse to it. What woman in her right mind would concede her life to a gay man?”

I had to laugh. Besides the music, particularly the Mahler, what I loved most about Maestro was its deeply honest, layered look at a relationship I recognize from my own life. A relationship that saved me from self-loathing and taught me true love.

 Back in the olden days when I was young, misogyny was unguarded, and discrimination against women was prevalent – it was everywhere and out in the open. Straight men and women alike extincted the Ugly Girl, ignored the misfit, discarded the nonconforming woman. If we were not Helen Gurley Brown emaciated and/or Gymnastics Barbie adorable, we had difficulty making friends, attracting lovers, finding jobs.  Our fellow women could not afford to like those of us who were less than perfectly feminine, attractive to men, passive in accepting our rightful place.  Women were motivated by the need to bag their men; to be the friend of the Ugly Girl was to risk the stigma of association.  No woman wanted to be ignored by the men she sought to impress.

In that distant pre-Stonewall 60’s past, gay men, too, found themselves too often alone and friendless. Many sought beards, female partners who would protect them from the prying sensibilities of those who would out them. Being outed could put gay men in the same position as the non-standard issue female: at odds with the ability to find suitable jobs, housing, friends. Relationships with strong women – women who could stand beside them and anchor their respectability. – were a way to buffer the implied slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. They may not have offered sex to the women they courted, but they often gave more valuable gifts in abundance.  Gifts of attentiveness, admiration, validation, companionship. Many of us who were on the outside of social acceptability in the straight world found comfort and peace among the homosexual or bisexual men who needed us as much as we needed them.

As a naive As a naïve innocent from upstate New York, I arrived on the dating scene with at best a tentative self-image, and I soon saw that I had been identified as one who would do very nicely as a doting beard.  I was clever, nonjudgmental, erudite, and empathetic. I knew I was needy as hell, but I sublimated by giving until I was empty, and I was easily sated.  I got the affection I craved but never demanded, and my needs were met.

Maestro took me back to the year I was 17 and my very first real boyfriend Mark, a lovely gay Native American from outside Santa Fe. A boy who was, in every way that counted then, my perfect match.

We met in the scene shop at the University of New Mexico, where we both majored in drama. 

Stagecraft and scene design were required freshman classes, and on that first day, because I had never ever held any kind of a construction tool in my hands, and because I was without a single acquaintance in the class, I was feeling out of my depth and alone. Then a slightly chubby, deeply tanned young man asked me why I was wearing a key on a chain around my neck.  The nonsequitur startled me a bit but made me smile.

“I lose things,” I answered frankly.  “I’ll get locked out of the dorm if I can’t find my room key.”

The boy laughed and looked through me before he said, “You know, in Mexico, if you wear a key like that, you are letting the world know you are for sale.” He grinned.

I blushed.  “Oh. I guess that would assume anyone would be interested to buy this,” I indicated my bulky body and stifled a self-deprecating giggle.

Mark laughed. Then he aimed his dark brown cow eyes directly into my soul. “You would undoubtedly attract only the best of buyers,” he said.  “No sleazy airheads who are looking for a kewpie doll but anyone looking for a real woman.”

I was instantly smitten.  Remember, it was a different time!

For the next nearly two years, Mark and I were inseparable. Being with him made me infinitely happy.  Partly because of the superficial ways in which he satisfied my fantasies. Squiring me around in his fancy sports car – we even ran away together over spring break to escape the boredom and would have landed in NY if the car had not thrown a rod. Taking me to plays and films. Teaching me how to order alcohol. Introducing me to the kinds of excitement I could not have found in my insular hometown, like state fair rides and huevos ranchero and group peyote trips.  But it also made me happy that I made him just as happy as he made me.

Like the Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegro that Bradley Cooper and Carrie Mulligan portrayed, Mark and I finished one another’s sentences, guessed what each other was thinking, provided a blanket of support, love and acceptance neither of us had experienced before.

Even Mark’s mother adored me, invited me often to visit their large reservation home outside Santa Fe, where she was a tribal elder. She introduced me to Georgia O’Keefe.  Not O’Keefe’s work.  O’Keefe.  She would sit up with us late into the nights I was there, laughing at our stories, entertaining us with her own.  We were family.

Mark and I were melded.  We were the reconstructed humans in Plato’s Symposium, reconstituted as two halves of a single being. The fact that we didn’t have a lot of sexual intimacy was reassuring to both of us then.  I still believed that good girls didn’t, and he was grateful that I had no expectations. At the time, I was naïve enough to be unbothered when he took lovers and disappeared for days at a time.  He always returned to me. To our idyll. 

Knowing what I know now, I am sure I would have been jealous had Mark fallen in love with the men he bedded.  But I also know that I would have learned to live with the pain, would have found a way to sublimate my anxiety about it.  Our relationship was worth it to me.  If Mark had been bisexual, I might have proposed that we marry and start a family just like the idealized Lenny and Felicia.  He was not.  And in the end, his inability to commit for life was what ended our relationship.

In our second year together, Mark fell in love.  With a wonderful man. Our relationship would not fit in with the kind of arrangement they necessarily made with one another.  Mark never said as much, but I knew. I moved on.  We lost touch.

That was fifty+ years ago. . . .

I recently searched for Mark on Ancestry and found his obituary. I was overcome with a sadness I hardly expected.  And I realized that the fact that I searched for him at all was proof he still lives in the deepest corner of my heart, where I hold my parents and others I have lost.  He remains my first and deepest love. 

My Maestro.

So Long, Frank Gehry

When I was young, Reader’s Digest, a subscription to which my 9th Grade English teacher included in her yearly syllabus, ran a feature called “My Most Unforgettable Character.”  It was the monthly’s most popular feature, and I wrote a few character sketches and thought one day I would submit one to the magazine.  I never did.   Truth be told, I don’t think I ever really met my MOST unforgettable character until 2005, when I took a job as a guide on a New York City tour bus.

In that job, every day was a new adventure.  I was lucky.  Everyone I met was reasonably personable. Well, almost everyone. One time a pair of gang kids tried to hijack the bus I was on, but finding a police person was easy back in the days when crime was still against the law.  In a trice, the cops took the interlopers into custody, and our tour commenced without further incident.  The event stands out in memory because it was unique.  I came to hate the working conditions and the attitudes of the owners, my bosses, but the people I worked with, like the people I entertained, were, for the most part, people I enjoyed being around.  Some were, of course, more colorful than others, and none was as remarkable as Sarabeth.    

Sarahbeth was my favorite person in the bus world. She was saving up for gender reassignment – her birth name was Stanley — but divorce from a greedy wife, mental illness in a daughter whom neither Stanley nor Sarabeth would ever abandon, and frequent gender transgressions that led to Stanley’s being fired, which left Sarabeth with no money for the surgeries.

Instead,  Sarahbeth made powerful self-assertions by wearing, in all weather, Bermuda shorts fashioned in bright orange sweatshirt fabric, frowzy blouses and tops that plunged below the prominent and rapidly graying chest hairline, and neon-colored sneakers.  Her hair and mouth were a whirling forest of bright tangerine curls and a soft, pillowy hot pink triangle.

“I’m a lesbian,” Sarahbeth explained to me the first time she asked me out to dinner. I was flattered.  No one I had ever met was smarter or funnier than this person, both qualities I have always found irresistible in a man.  I had no interest in being romantically involved with a woman, even a woman who was, anatomically at least, still a man.  I didn’t want to hurt Sarahbeth’s feelings, and though I turned down the invitations to dinner, to movies, to theater, we often sat together as we waited between buses, and I never tired of listening to the stories she told. 

The personal stories were harrowing, beginning with a lower East Side childhood, and the professional stories were infuriating.  This person had tolerated more than anyone’s fair share of abuse by the system over the years, and if I had had more imagination or a better apartment, I would have invited her over for sleepovers. 

My touring repertoire grew astronomically, thanks to Sarabeth’s knowledge of the city.  Having studied architecture, she was conversant with the nuances of styles of the eclectic buildings of the city. As an astute political observer,  she understood underpinnings of Tammany, why Robert Moses was more tyrant than savior.  She explained to me why the Breslin-Mailer campaign to create the great city-state, a movement I enthusiastically worked for, was basically moronic.  Having studied labor law, leaned heavily on her when we had labor disputes. When the company abused us, it was Sarabeth who spoke most eloquently and with the most erudition. She knew the score.  She understood what we were entitled to and what was being kept from us with malicious, greedy fury.

There was no bathroom for our relief.  For a while we were allowed to use the rest rooms in the Hilton Garden Inn, which was less than a block from our post, and the management there even encouraged us to buy goods in their gift store and food mart by giving us a twenty percent discount. 

One day Sarabeth farted and sighed loudly in a stall in the women’s room at the Hilton, and a tourist seated next to her, the woman in the next stall, securely separated by a metal wall and a locked door, freaked out at the sound of a male voice sighing on the tail of a roaring fart. She complained to the Hilton management.  After that, all guides were banned from the place.  No more comfy lounge seats, no more cheap candy bars, no more toilet. 

I left the buses to edit a book for the friend of a friend. The book was set in our City, but the author knew little about NY and wrote locations that were amiss, and a protagonist, who was supposed to be from Iowa but was more accurately an Englishman in New York.  To do the work, I went to London for a few months, and when I returned, Sarabeth was gone. 

Consistently, Sarabeth had argued that the conditions atop the buses were unfit for guides.  We had no place to sit.  We were required at times to perform chores – like helping the elderly up the stairs or carrying baby paraphernalia or lugging luggage up the stairs – that put undue strain on all our muscle groups.  We stood for long periods of time, jostled mercilessly about.

Sarabeth’s back and health could not take it.  She suffered pneumonia and bronchitis and then was injured and re-injured until she finally had no choice but to undergo surgery.  Like many back surgery patients, Sarabeth did not survive. The company, which never appreciated what an asset Sarabeth was, was relieved. Tethered by Sarabeth’s knowledge of the law, they had felt forced to retain her. Further, her illnesses and back troubles cost them money by way of pay they were impelled to dole out and by insurance rate hikes her claims inflicted.   The blood suckers were free at last. 

We tour guides, who loved Sarabeth, lost a precious friend.  New York City lost a champion.

Gender Confusion

Ever wonder why Baby Boomer women are not all hip to gender dysphoria and its complex new requirements? Most of us have had our own bouts of confusion. Being female had so many pitfalls. What Freud called Penis Envy came from varied experiences, most of which proved that we would never be equal to the men who orchestrated our worlds. . . .

There we were, stuffed into Mark’s MGB – Mark in the driver’s seat, Michael in the passenger’s, and I curled onto the shelf in front of the back windshield – headed east across Route 40.

Somewhere between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Iowa City, Iowa, I got my period. . . . and my first glimpse of what might have been a moment of mild gender dysphoria.

It was April 1966; I was nearly 18.  My boyfriend Mark and I were on our way to celebrate in NYC.  Our plan was to drive to the city, spend a day, and drive back to Albuquerque in time for the last months of our second semester at the University of New Mexico. 

In many ways, the trip was more like an acid trip than real life.

It came about late one Friday night. We were at Mark’s with another friend, a guy named Michael, who had a mad crush on Mark.  I was just beginning to catch onto the vibe that Mark was actually more interested in Michael than in me, but I was still a virgin in every possible sense of the word, and while the information processing through me induced anxiety, I didn’t acknowledge its significance.

Mark and Michael were probably stoned, definitely mellow, They had either eaten small portions of shrooms or drunk large draughts of Romilar CF.  As one who hated feeling high, I was the designated straight man, so to speak, listening to a staticky jazz station on a transistor radio.  A woman’s voice covering Sinatra’s New York anthem caught my ear, and I dissolved into homesickness tears.

Mark and Michael stopped ogling each other to ask why I was crying, and the next thing I knew, we were stuffed into Mark’s MGB – Mark in the driver’s seat, Michael in the passenger’s, and I curled onto the shelf in front of the back windshield – headed east across Route 40.

“ First stop: Iowa City,” Mark announced. “Robin’ll be happy to see us.”

Robin, my counterpart in Iowa City,  had been Mark’s girlfriend when he was a freshman at the University of Iowa before his mother tugged him back to UNM, where, thanks to his Zuni ancestry, tuition was free.

A small fact that Mark failed to disclose was that his little car wasn’t actually his.  It was registered in both his and his twin brother Kent’s names.  He hadn’t told Kent what we were planning, so technically we were committing Grand Theft Auto. But had that occurred to any of us that night, we would not have cared.  We were on our way to New York City.

I desperately needed to get away. Spring Break gave me extreme agita, too much time to think. I didn’t know what to do with my growing awareness that Mark was not just a polite young man who respected me too much to ask for you know what.  I had no idea what my feelings were and no clue what I should do if I figured them out.  

If only, I thought, I were a boy.  Or better yet, a man.

I had often felt that I’d have been better off as a guy. I was a big girl – 5’7  “, 185 pounds. When I did dress up, my friends called me a beautiful drag queen, and I took that as a compliment, but I usually dressed as androgynously as my size and shape would allow. For this trip, I had brought my manliest outfits – baggy khakis, oversized sweatshirts, a huge trench coat borrowed from a friend.  I could have been my own brother, a linebacker or a shot putter out of uniform.

So there I was in Kansas – or some proximity thereto – without anything feminine.  I had entered a time in my life when denial was the only state I could bear to be in, so I was able to disavow any connection to womanhood.  How I could have ignored the fact that I’d eventually need feminine napkins and tampons eludes me now, but I was shocked when we made a pit stop, and the mess in my drawers reminded me I actually had an assigned gender. 

“I need to get to a drug store.  Pronto,” I told the boys as I climbed back onto my perch. 

Mark winced.  He was inordinately close to his mom and recognized the urgency in my tone. 

“Fuck,” he whined.  “We’ll. Have to detour off the highway.”

I felt the same rush of humiliation I’d been feeling since my cycles began when I was 9.  I muttered an apology before I closed my eyes and wished fervently for a Deus ex machina to swoop in and free me from the bonds of female fecundity.  Being a woman was embarrassing.  Nothing but trouble.  Worst of all, already undesirable to the boy I loved, I had become downright repugnant.

Had I ever liked being a girl?  Probably not.  My parents punished me for everything my brother got away with. I hated dolls and wanted to be a race car driver.  All the male cousins in our family made my mother and her sisters smile; when the boys were around, the tone in my grandmother’s voice turned dulcet.  When they left, she reverted to her shrewish self.  I was not pretty or delicate, and I could not relate to flirting.  No. I hated being a girl.

We stopped at the drugstore in some small hamlet near the highway. 

“Get me a pack of smokes while you’re in there,” Mark ordered.  “Montclairs.”

“Yeah,” barked Mike.  “And a Snickers bar for me.”

I roamed the store for a few minutes before I found what I needed.  Then, at the checkout, I pointed to the cigarettes, grabbed the chocolate bar. 

“Anything else?” the clerk asked me.

I shook my head.

“That’ll be $5 even.”

I put the money on the counter and, as I turned to leave, I heard him say without any irony in his voice, “Thank you, sir.  Come again.”

Every prickle in my uneasy personality stood up in my craw.  It startled me that I was angry.  How dare he?  Didn’t he get . . . .

I opened the door and turned around.

“Thanks, ma’am,” I said in my softest, most feminine purr.  “See ya.”

Sixteen hours after we left Albuquerque, we arrived at sweet Robin’s, where she gave us blankets and pillows so we could sack out on the floor of her living room.  In the morning, she let Mark use the phone to call his mom long distance. 

“Make it short though,” she pleaded.  “My parents’ll have a cow if the bill’s too big.”

Mark went into her bedroom to use the baby blue princess phone on the floor next to her mattress.  He closed the door behind him, hoping for some privacy.

A female voice shrieking epithets crossed all state lines and burst through the phone into the living room.  Then we heard Mark sobbing.

“He is such a little girl,” Michael sneered.  “He should ’a’ let you make that call.”

When Mark joined us, he said, “She told me if I’m not back by day after tomorrow, she’ll put out an APB.  She already told the tribal cops. She’s not kidding.  We gotta go back.”

Michael snorted.  “You are such a little girl.  What could the cops do anyhow?”

“Arrest us.  For stealing the car.  You know.  Kent can file a complaint. It’s as much his as it is mine.”

“Screw it then,” I said.  “Let’s go back.”

We folded ourselves back into the little toy vehicle and buzzed on over to Route I-80. 

“No stops except for gas, water, pee,” Mark proclaimed. Everything else would have to wait till we got to Albuquerque. 

Only we never did.

Michael was driving.  It was well past midnight, and we were a few miles out of Fort Morgan, Colorado on a deserted stretch of highway.  It was Mark’s turn to sleep on the ledge, and I was soundly snoring in the passenger seat when a deafening clunk, followed by a throbbing grind woke us up.  The car shimmied, then convulsed.  Michael pulled over as smoke began to pour out of the engine. 

“We gotta get outta this thing,” Mchael screamed, and we all jumped out and pulled as far away from the snorting machine as we could. 

“Shit,” Mark said, laying his head on my shoulder. “My mother’s gonna kill me.  And she’ll blame you.”

“Me? Why me?”

“You’re a girl.”

He was right.  Our escapade ended that night.  Mark called his brother.

“You asshole,” Kent said. “Just leave the car where it is. Greg ‘n’ I’ll drive over ‘n’ get it.”

Kent was a certified mechanic.  He’d know what to do with it.

Mark, Michael and I hitched a ride into town and found a room that Mark’s mother paid for, and we slept till it was time to catch the morning’s first Trailways back to Albuquerque. 

Mark’s mother never invited me back to their ranch.  She never spoke to me again.

“That’s what you get,” she told Mark, “for loving a girl.”

Elegy

It’s an odd thing to be a sister whose little brother has died.

The sister is not the wife who tended to him for 42 years, who devoted her existence to making sure he lived longer than anyone could have predicted.  The sister is not responsible for orchestrating his diabetes care, his two kidney transplants, his quintuple by-pass, or for guarding his limbs with her life so that he would die with most of himself intact.

The sister is not the adopted son, the boy-now-man who needed a father and found in the brother a gently adamant hand that guided him through the tumult of adolescence and into an altruistic career.

Nor is the sister the granddaughter he took in at her birth, whom he nurtured, fed, coddled, and adored while his wife, her grandmother, worked to support them all when he had been forced into early retirement.  The granddaughter who ran to her Poppi whenever her feelings were hurt or her path confused her.

Or the 9-year-old niece who came to visit and stayed till she graduated from college, married a surgeon, attended law school, and settled in the heartland.

The sister is peripheral.  She has no rights to the mourning.  She knows that the wife, the son, the granddaughter, and the niece own the wailing rights.  And who is this sister to suffer from his loss?

After all, all this sister is is the grown-up child into whose hands her grandmother placed this brother when he arrived home from the hospital on his fourth day of life.  She is the person who hardly remembers life before there was this brother, whom she didn’t always like but never failed to love.

It was she who caught him when he fell off the neighbor’s garage roof pretending to be Davy Crockett on the trail of Big Bad Mike Fink. She is the one who ran to get Daddy when little brother climbed a telephone pole in the aftermath of a hurricane and tried to use his new tool kit to fix a live electric wire.  It was she who walked him to school on his first day of Kindergarten, when his hearing was still returning from near-deafness. She stood guard over him while he played with gusto, alone and jubilant, on the playground. When the principal called them in, and he didn’t hear, the principal grabbed his ear to pull him inside.  It was the sister who pushed the woman’s hand away.  “Don’t you dare touch my little brother,” she screamed.  “He didn’t hear you.”

No. She didn’t always like him.  At times she hated him. He could be a tyrant, barging in on her bathroom time, teasing her about her appearance, robbing her of time alone when she wanted to write. Then there was her abject jealousy. He was more popular.  He had a broader grin.  He was cute and funny.  Which she was not.  And he got sick.  A lot. Which meant people took care of him.  That’s why she crawled into bed with him and licked his breakfast fork when he had the Asian flu. It was her turn, and though she nearly died for her trouble, she was never sorry.  For once the brother tended to her and brought her soup and news from the schoolyard.  He found her shivering and brought a cover from his own bed. 

She coaxed him to read, to write, to expound his wisdom.  In his last year in high school, he spent a week with her in her New York apartment working on an essay and a speech he was to give in a competition.  He won the contest and got an A on the paper, and she was not the least bit surprised.  She always knew he was smarter than he thought he was.

The sister’s life did not depend on his, but then she always thought he’d be somewhere she could reach him. He could be a great comfort . . . and he could be a painful cyst. Either way, he was there. She always knew he might precede her into the void. She just never believed it.

So odd to be the sister whose little brother has died. 

Travels With Grandma . . . Winter 2019-20 Edition

New Normal

In 2003, I left my home, my marriage, my comfortable suburban life and set out to work hard, to experience setbacks, and to carve out a modicum of comfort that included the freedom to roam the world. Predictably, it took a while for me to achieve mobility. For the first seven years, I did all my roaming in the city of New York, guiding bus tours around the city I loved. The job nearly killed me.

I daydreamed my escape.

I’d envision myself venturing out to places I knew from my mother’s childhood stories – her birthplace in Austria and home in Croatia, her parents’ hometowns in Ukraine – and those I’d imagined my father’s people left behind in the 1600s.  Places like Utrecht, The Netherlands, Somerset, UK, Scotland.

But when my daughter relocated abroad, she coopted my travel plans.

In 2012, I reached the age my generation had targeted for retirement, and my child invited me to visit her world. At the time she was living in Thailand, a place I had never even considered for my bucket list. But it’s where she was, and I was keen to see what it was that held her there.  So off I went. First to Bangkok, a side trip to Bali, and then to Samui, the Edenic island where she lived and worked. In the intervening years since then, I have visited her three times in Thailand, once in Hong Kong, twice in Taiwan, and most recently twice in Turkey.

None of these were places I’d have sought. But each has mesmerized me in one way or another. Each has equally repelled me.

The people of Thailand are the gentlest, most personable people I’ve ever met, and the scenery in most of the places I’ve been is breathtaking. But the climate is far too hot far too much of the time for my taste. Poisonous snakes and soi dogs are never far from my consciousness. And the cities are antithetical to my desire to walk in that they have obstructed or nonexistent sidewalks and street vendors that impede all movement.

 

Hong Kong is – and I speak here as a New Yorker! – far too crowded, too overrun with teeming flesh and filthy refuse. Conversely, I find Taiwan too orderly, too polluted, too rules-driven; finding food there is a challenge, as it is expensive as well as often inedible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Turkey, well Turkey . . .

Is a confusing assortment of dichotomies and paradoxes.  I find myself excited to go there and aching to leave the minute I arrive. The people are warm, friendly. Or they are aggressive, willing to shove your car off the road in order to gain a few seconds of driving time or to avoid braking.  The food is delicious, but the spices can be shockingly voracious. Islam is the primary religion of the country, but stores, especially pharmacies, are closed on Sundays, and the liquor is as destructive to weekend calm as it is anywhere else. Gorgeous landscapes abound, punctuated by spectacular sunrises and sunsets. But they lie in the omnipresent, foreboding shadow of Musa Dagh.

Since my daughter and her family live in Turkey much of the year, and because I am absolutely addicted to the pleasure of my grandson’s company, I shall continue to return often.  I’ll learn to love being there.  Especially if I can learn more of the language.

Does it matter that I doubt I will ever feel entirely at home?

——————————————–

Fear Displacement

I get a real kick out of watching people’s faces when I say I’m off to Turkey. Again. Brows wrinkle, cheeks migrate upward, eyes show their pain by squinting.

“Well, then,” they’ll say in husky tones of genuine concern, “You be safe now.  Be careful.”

It’s never clear to me of what they feel the need to warn me. The same people, should I bid farewell and head to the subway or embark on a cross-park sojourn, would smile and wave without a moment’s dismay. Yet multiple dangers like armed druggies, hungry coyotes, angry raccoons lurk in the city’s parks and construction sites. These same folk would simply wish me a lovely good time were I to tell them I was heading for Walmart or the movies or, say, Houston or Orlando. Is it not true that mass murderers lie in wait in such hinterlands?

I have no fear of Turkey. I do admit to holding a bit of a grudge – I want the country to own up to the Armenian genocide. And there are cultural norms that I don’t understand. Yet I feel far safer in greater Istanbul or in the coastal villages near Izmir or Antalya I have visited than I do anywhere in America these days.

Well-armed, vigilant police patrol the cities, parks, public places. I’m a savvy city kid, and I know enough to be conscious of my surroundings to keep my valuables close. At least in Turkey, it is unlikely that suddenly, without warning, some enraged young man will jump from the shadows and aim an AK-47 at those of us unlucky enough to be in his line of fire.  Turkish roads are scary because drivers are impatient, reckless. But the kind of violent road rage I see on the streets and roadways of my country every day doesn’t exist in Turkey.  No guns sit on racks over windshields there. The military and the police are the only ones who can get away with packing.

When I go to the Istanbul Airport, I know that everyone who enters the huge open space must go through a metal detector, must withstand the scrutiny of a no-nonsense security check before they enter. When I’m at JFK or LaGuardia or Newark, I am always struck by how vastly unprotected the areas are, how easily the myriad people wandering in and out could get away with annihilations.

Ironically, the officials maintaining my safety in Turkey are far less intimidating than those at the gates in the US.  My prosthetic hip inevitably sets off the alarms, and the TSA folk at JFK and Newark too often treat me as though I purposely require that they pat me down, and they pat me down with a vengeance. It’s humiliating and often painful. I have never once been assaulted by a security person in Turkey. They apologize. They treat me respectfully. They are gentle.

A friend recently marveled at my willingness to travel to Turkey.  “It’s so far,” he said. “So foreign.”

“You’re going on an equally distant journey,” I posited. “I mean, Alaska . . . it’s far, and it can be pretty creepy, no?” I was thinking about the high crime rate in Anchorage, the recent shootings in Seattle, where my friend must catch a connecting flight. I envisioned airports open and vulnerable.

“Nah,” he said.  “It’s in the US.”

My point exactly.

 

——————————————-

Yemek (Eat)!               

In December, when I had booked my flight, I told my students that I would be flying to Istanbul the day after our final exam.  I expected them to be shocked or fearful. College freshmen are singularly self-concerned, and I thought they would worry that I might not get their grades in on time. Instead, they surprised me.

“That’s so rad,” said one boy.

“Lucky,” said another.

“Omigod.  You’re gonna get fat,” exclaimed a girl in the back row who had not spoken once all semester.  Everyone stared at her,  “I mean,” she stammered, “The Food.  It’s so incredible. You’ll be eating nonstop.”

Her mother, it turned out, is Turkish, and she visits her babaanne (grandmother) every year.

I smiled. Having summered there already, I was well familiar. The food is exceptionally delicious. At the same time, it can be a culinary adventure.

In the first place, the food is ipso-facto organic. Turkey is one of the few remaining countries in the world that is entirely self-sufficient when it comes to food production – if Turkey allows a foreign label to distribute food in Turkey, the product must be grown and processed in Turkey; farming is a major occupation country-wide, the life’s blood in more ways than one.

Industrial farming does not exist. Farms are owned, operated, maintained by close-knit extended families, who share clusters of multi-story living quarters at the farms. They eschew the use of pesticides and appearance enhancers, and they are opposed to genetic engineering.

As a longtime vegetarian –a vegan but for the use of honey and an occasional eggwhite – I especially appreciate the multivarious textures of flavor in the vegetables, flavors that titillate my taste buds. The distinctiveness in every bite is singularly unmistakable. Cucumbers are melony, tomatoes have a robust richness I remember from my mother’s long-ago garden. At the same time, however, I am constantly aware that there is likely to be a kick delivered from some sector of any given dish. Spices insist on surprising the palate. Eating is like riding in a car behind a seemingly mild-mannered hanim (woman) in a delicate hijab. Watch out lest she suddenly swerve or stop or make a turn in front of you. Likewise, peppercorns or a dried biber (pepper) show up on the tongue without warning to remind you not to be fooled by the prevailing air of relative calm.

While no restaurant has any dearth of vegetarian options in Turkey, it is clear that the people here love their meats, and I am told their meats are delicious. Like the vegetables, the animal protein sources are nurtured and maintained with loving pride. Farmers take care to provide humane and uncrowded conditions for the animals that sacrifice their lives. No chemical enhancements or antibiotics spoil the purity of the flesh or the integrity of the dairy products.

What saves me from the fate of which my student forewarned is that I am essentially not a sweets lover. If I were, then Turkey would indeed be dangerous. Especially at the sumptuous buffets that are laid out for brunches every weekend.  So many desserts, so little room to spread them out. Puddings and pies, Baklava, Tavuk gögsü (chicken breast pudding, which is often made without the chicken breast), cakes and sugary fruits, chocolate pistachios, Turkish delight (enormously popular rose- or orange-infused jellied candies),and the one thing I can be a sucker for: halvah(a thick, honeyed sesame paste), et al., present themselves for over-indulgence.

Luckily for me, I’m not easily seduced.  Even halvah repels when I remember the discomfort of the sugar rush it inevitably delivers. I am not fooled by the melt-in-my-mouth sweetness.  I know it will never really like me.

Then, too, too much of a good thing can be disenchanting. One week during my stay in Turkey, we went to a resort in Antalya, a hotel that operates like a giant, stationary cruise ship. Once checked in, a visitor need not want for anything.  Snacks and light foods are served 24/7 at various stations about the massive place. Drinks of all kinds flow endlessly. And three times a day, double doors swing open to a ballroom bursting with tables laden with food.

There are stations for every kind of culinary experience.  Hot foods – stews, casseroles, roasts, fried foods, side dishes – sequestered from the cold foods such as bean pastes, salads, myriad pickle options, olives, dolma, a panoply of fresh fruits and vegetables, and the endless tables of colorful desserts.  The first day we arrived, we marveled. We ate. We enjoyed. But the array never changed. And we found that the food was likely to be recycled, reused the next day; there was a staleness about it that made even the fresh rocket seem dull and tasteless by the time we’d been there a while.

It was a relief to get back to Istanbul, to the fresh produce in the markets, to our own home cooking, to the brunch buffets in the restaurants along the shore.

 

——————–

 

Toddler in Ephesus

Late December

My little grandson cannot wait to go to Kusadasi. He’s not terribly impressed by the fact that it’s the closest I’ll ever get to experiencing ancient Greece or with the notion of seeing the Aegean Sea or remnants of archaic worlds.  He loves to fly.  Airport? We’re going to the airport? “Let’s go!”

And a taxi.  We’ll ride to the airport in a taxi. “C’mon, Mommy.  Are you ready?  Hurry up, Gran’maw.”

In the taxi, he watches the road. His father is a pilot, and he has flown more often in his three years than most people fly in a fifty. Traveling to an airport in a taxi is as natural as breathing.

“Look out,” he warns our non-English speaking driver, who is blissfully unaware. “Red light.  You have to S T O P. . . . Oh, no, do you go that way, or that way?”

I remind him that the driver knows what he’s doing and deserves to be trusted.  He settles back and contents himself with counting buses, assessing cranes, watching for airplanes in the sky.  Then he falls asleep.  It’s an hour-long ride. His nap will serve us well.

At the airport, he climbs dutifully into his stroller.  “I can have a squeezie (a squeezable fruit treat he favors over candy) while we check in?”

At the gate, he counts the airplanes taking off, landing.  When our plane arrives at our gate, he jumps up and down.  “That’s our airplane.  We can get on.”

The flight reaches Izmir in forty-five minutes flat, and another cab takes us the remaining 80 km to our hotel, a lovely inn nestled in a tightly knit complex of shops, restaurants, hotels, fish markets, and bazaars on the Aegean Sea. The windmills and trucks, stoplights and birds along the way have kept the boy busy, and when we arrive at the hotel, he proclaims, “Here’s my home.”

The name Kusadasi means Pidgeon Island in English, and it’s not clear whether the name derives from the shape of the island on which its protective fortress lies or from the flocks of foraging birds that dominate the sandy beaches.  It hardly matters.

The town sits on a sandy lip of a beach that smiles wanly at the lapping waves shimmering teal-to-turquoise as the sun ambles along.  Fishing boats and yachts, kayaks and sailboats bob about beyond the breakers, and tourists meander the streets with no apparent imperative except soak in the warmth. It’s a peaceful place. Like a fantasy. For me, the perfect respite from current events that perseverate.  For my little buddy, it’s the perfect place to explore.

Each morning we set out on a mini-constitutional. Glee overcomes him the minute he sees a slide in one of the several playgrounds that dot the sea walk, and he dashes up the stairs chanting “Up the stairs. Down the slide” and makes himself giggle as his tush hits the ground.

Sailing insouciantly through the air in a swing, he makes up songs about flying and sailing that he combines with those he’s learned.  “Sing a song of sixpence pocket full of rye, I zoom to Bangkok (or Singapore or Timbuktu) on a bicycle built for two. . . “

Innumerable feral cats amuse him endlessly as they strut about the streets.  He crouches to touch each one that comes close enough, and he squeals with delight at the softness of their fur, the strength in their tails. The cats are remarkably well fed, with shiny, fluffy, healthy-looking coats. He offers the possibility of affection with the back of his unopened hand, and they oblige him by purring contentedly as he strokes the tops of their heads, tickles them beneath their lower jaws.

At an amphitheater on the main street, we watch as a bevy of homeless felines cavorts about, eating the food local people have left them, napping in the make-shift shelters someone’s built them. My boy is delighted but refuses to walk with me when I say we must back to the hotel. He wants to stay and watch his “friends.”

“Remember?” I prod him. “We saw a few cats living at the Chinese restaurant.  Let’s go say hello to them.”

“Stop for a muffin?” He asks.

“Of course.”

At Starbuck’s (Yes, Starbucks.  Sorry!) I lift him so his head is higher than the counter, and he tells the barrista that he’d like a chocolate muffin.  We sit while he eats it, and we discuss our plans for the day.

“First the cats at the Chinese Restaurant! Second my home!”

At first, he is testy. Why is the promised land not right ahead of us. I tell him to be patient, and he slyly invents a game. At every building, at every street sign his eyes dance with mischief. “Is this the Chinese Restaurant?” He laughs at his own cleverness, sufficiently amused until we reach the restaurant. It does not disappoint. Several large cats and a trio of kittens are there to entertain him, and he breaks into a symphony of laughter that takes us all the way “home”

After we return to Istanbul, he insists on visiting and revisiting the photographs. “Look at me – I following a duck. Hear me, Gran’maw? ‘Quack, quack.’” The video of at him riding a carousel dolphin in the indoor playground makes him thoughtful after his fifth viewing. “It was raining. Remember, Gran’maw?”

And then, “Oh, and look at this, Grandmaw. . . The cannon!” He is standing guard at the Kusadasi fortress. “ Look at me. A pirate – Hear me? ‘Ahoy, mateys, fire in the hole!’“ Gales of guffaws telegraph his pleasure.

His favorite photos are the ones we took the day we walked through centuries-old ruins. “Look ‘t grandmaw. ‘s Ephesus,” he crows. I wonder if he’ll remember that day when he’s my age. How we climbed stairways built by the Greeks in the 10th Century BC. How delighted he was to sit, giggling,  on a stone toilet in a communal outhouse dug first by the Romans and then modernized by the Roman Christians. As I marveled at the thought that Constantine might have defecated there, my grandson exclaimed, “Look!! People made poopie here!!!”

As though for his personal pleasure, regal cats adorn the remains of the 2nd C Library of Celsus. In the photos, they perch on pedestals like Egyptian gods, silky felines deigning to allow human contact. Power resides in their graciousness.

Clearly, that little boy in the photos is aware of his own potency as they respond to his touch by gently pressing their heads against his hand.”Haha. That tickles, gran’maw.”

In the photos, I am clearly breathless in the great amphitheater.

Imagining Dionysian competitions, Plautus comedies, Roman Olympic games. My grandboy cares only that I hold his hand so he can use the narrow stone walls as his balance beam. In my head there’s a joke about finding a seat – nearly 40,000 await here – but he distracts me, so enthralled he is by the colors in the masonry. Someday perhaps he’ll be impressed that he visited a theater that drew audiences from all over Europe and Asia for over 2,000 years. But at this moment he has his sights set on a hillside nearby, where a herd of sheep descends. Their collar bells clang in unison with their guide dogs’ barking. “I can barely see them,” he says, mimicking a phrase he’s heard far too often in his favorite video. “I hear them.  Hear them, Gran’maw?”

Just before he falls asleep in the taxi headed back to Kusadasi, he snuggles close and exclaims, “I like Ephesus. We have fun there!”

————————

Paradise Lost/Paradise Regained

Do people in the States go to private doctors these days? I mean, do the majority of the population, who are minimally insured at best, have a personal pediatrician on speed dial or a family GP at beck and call? I wonder if people more often look to Urgent Care facilities and HMO Clinics for sage advice.

I was fortunate as a young mom. I raised my little ones in two very different communities, and in each I relied on a wise pediatrician for counsel and guidance.  Each of those physicians was level-headed. Neither proclaimed a diagnosis without asking my opinion, and both were thorough and sensitive to the children’s concerns and fears. We all endured some harrowing health moments, through which these gentle heroes held my trembling hands and steered us out of danger.

In Turkey last month, I found myself wondering what most Turkish parents do when their children are ill  As outsiders, my daughter and I found ourselves in a position to wish either one or both those medical angels was alive. We most assuredly would have called him the second night we were in Antalya.

Let me backtrack and say that going to Antalya turned out to be a great choice.  But not for the reasons we expected it would be.  My daughter had booked a week in a luxury hotel, a kind of stationary cruise ship on the Mediterranean coast.  Though their massive water park and beach activities were shut down for the winter, the hotel offered a week of total relaxation, replete with three meals a day and a perpetually stocked minibar, for less than I might have paid for a room in the Tulsa, OK, Motel 6.

From our balcony, we had a spectacular view of the dormant water slides and the graygreenroyalblue Mediterranean just beyond them. If we looked left, beyond the hotel flanking ours, we could watch the snow accumulate on the tops of the several the Taurus Mountain peaks that tower over the region. On the first floor of the hotel, there was a children’s playroom with a small garden of colorful balls and a fast wooden slide designed to entertain a child if there should be rain. At the bar, wine, beer, and whiskey flowed freely . . . and at no extra charge.  An on-site spa with Thai masseuses stood at the ready from early morning till well after the dinner rush, and a footbath stocked with flesh-eating, skin smoothing garra rufa fish required no reservation. There were even family films screened nightly in the hotel cinema. Theoretically, a heavenly place for a true vacation.

What it turned out to be was the perfect place to wait out the flu.

On our second day in Antalya, my grandson seemed listless.  He wasn’t hungry.  The multiple tables spread with enticing confections that he’d found irresistible the day before were entirely uninteresting. All he wanted to do was lie in his mother’s or grandmother’s protective arms and watch videos or sleep.  Clearly not himself.

Overnight, he spiked a fever.  I knew it was not a dangerous fever, but it was high enough to send a clear signal that he was ill. The hotel, aware of its responsibility to be the compleat home away from home, advertised a doctor on board, in an office that opened at 9AM. We called at 9:01.

There was no doctor.  There was, however, a matronly nurse, who arrived in our room with the English-speaking guest relations representative(a person to whom we owe enormous gratitude). The “nurse” was very sweet, but I doubted immediately that she had any real medical training.  She took his temperature and immediately told us through our interpreter not to panic. She would, she assured us, prevent his having convulsions by wrapping him in cold, wet towels to reduce his temperature.  His temperature was not quite 103. He was in no danger. We eschewed the towel treatment and asked to be directed to a doctor.

They gave us the address of a private hospital that would accept my daughter’s ex-pat insurance plan, and we called a cab to take us there.  The hospital was nearly a half-hour away, and much to our relief, the cab driver waited to take us back.  A valiant gesture that turned out to be!

In the hospital, we waited endlessly in an open area, where coughing, vomiting  and the injured hordes came and waited or were directed to the triage room.  It was a cold day, and there was no heat in the building; attendants, nurses, doctors, and maintenance people were indistinguishable from one another as they all wore their outdoor street clothes.

When we were finally taken into a treatment room, our little boy was prodded and poked by several people, none of whom washed their hands or wore gloves.  I was embarrassed by my inability to speak Turkish and worried that we would know nothing about what ailed him.

Fortunately, the Attending Physician, who came to have a look, spoke English. She suggested we admit him for an overnight stay. In his room, she told us, they would strap him down, take his blood, and take him to a lab for a series of x-rays.

I know that, as adults, my kids are invariably embarrassed by my forthrightness, my unwillingness to do as I am told, my reluctance to accept advice I do not trust. But I wasn’t about to worry about whether I’d make my daughter blush.  I was unconvinced. “Why not do a culture first?” I inquired.

The doctor moved closer to examine my face before she replied. “Oh, yes, we could do a swab. But blood and x-ray would tell us more.”

“No,” I said firmly. “Let’s find out whether he’s got something bacterial or viral, and then you can prescribe medication. If, after a day or two he is no better, we’ll think about blood tests and x-rays and overnight stays in hospital.”

She agreed.  Reluctantly.  She wrote of my impudence in her report. Then we waited.

And waited. While we waited, we defended our screaming child from an attendant intent on forcing alcohol rubs on him. His fever was already responding to the ibuprofen we’d administered earlier and had dipped to below 101. There was no possible reason for any such treatment.

Another doctor entered. She repeated every step of the exam performed earlier. She, too, suggested a hospital stay, x-rays, blood.  Again I opened my NY Jewish mouth and said no, explained our agreement with the previous doctor. This doctor, a very young woman, was less skeptical. She smiled and nodded.

And sent us back to the outer corridor to the reception desk to pay for the swab. Then we waited and waited until a teenager – well, he looked like a teenager – wearing hat, coat, and mucklucks suddenly materialized in front of us.

Before we could ask who he was or what he wanted, the youngster timidly and awkwardly thrust a q-tip into the baby’s nose, pulled it out and smeared the wet cotton across a petri dish.  Then, in a scene that seemed ripped from my own 1960s childhood, he closed the dish, placed it in a plastic bag, put the culture into a glass cylinder, and popped it into a pneumatic tube. Off it went to some diagnostic lab in the sky, and off we went to find a warmer, less exposed place to wait.

Again we waited. An hour passed while we sat on a narrow bench in another wing of the hospital that was no less public but was slightly less crowded. We saw the doctor returning from her lunch break and asked her if she had the results yet. She promised to get them and, good to her word, brought them to us almost immediately.

“It’s flu,” she said.  “Influenza A.  I’ll prescribe an anti-viral. If he does not improve or if he has trouble breathing or if he does not get his appetite back in 48 hours, please bring him back.”

“Thank you,” my daughter said. “We’ll be sure to have him see a doctor if he’s not better by then.” She is very tactful. She never said what we were both thinking, that we would NEVER bring him back here.

We thanked the doctor, and then she warned that we still had a problem.  It was Sunday. The pharmacies – eczanes – were closed. Nationwide, in this predominantly Muslim country, for reasons we were unable to ascertain, pharmacies are closed on Sundays, even though most businesses operate as usual. “The receptionist will give you a list of those that are open,” our resident explained. “There you might fill the prescription.”

“You mean,” I asked, well aware that anti-virals only work if they are ingested in the earliest stages of the virus. “That there is no pharmacy here at the hospital, no dispensary where we might get a day’s supply to tide us over?”

“Unfortunately, no. Only in the stores on our list.”

The list lied. Not one was open. We returned to the hotel, and because our guest relations Godsend-of-a-staff-member was still there, she was able to pinpoint two eczanes that were possibilities. She called them. Only one was actually open, and they did not have the anti-viral in stock. Another pharmacy, closer to our hotel, opened early the next morning, and there we found the magical elixir.

Shortly after taking his first dose, our little patient was fever-free and hungry albeit still listless and weak. That’s when his mommy fell ill.

The rest of our week in Antalya was all about convalescence for everyone but me. I had a flu shot back in NYC.

[I later learned that people don’t tend to get flu shots in Turkey. Doctors don’t prescribe them. To have a vaccination, it is necessary to buy the inoculation from a pharmacist – not on a Sunday! – and take it back to a hospital, where a doctor administers it.  The H1N1 virus has made a decided comeback in Turkey, and there are myriad strains of flu circulating the country, but prevention seems undesirable.]

As the designated well person, I was truly able to appreciate our Antalya retreat. Being in that hotel made life easy for all of us.  The minibar attendant delivered water, juice, and seltzer every morning. The wait staff carried trays of food to our room three times a day. The maids kept our sheets clean, our towels fresh, our room spotless. The sunrises and sunsets enthralled us, relieved us of any reluctance to stay put in the room. Each day we opened the balcony door, and in rushed the wintergorgeous smell of the sea, the delicious reminder that we were on vacation.

On the Seventh Day, renewed and re-energized, we flew back to Istanbul.