About Love

Look, I'm not even going to start this post with a snarky comment justifying why I'm taking on a cheesy subject.

I did not Instagram this.

I've been thinking about love a lot lately. And by "lately," I mean over the last several years. I had a lot of time to deconstruct BE's and my relationship. It's entirely possible he and I weren't even having the same relationship. That's not unusual, I think, in people's relationships.

Problems between  BE and I were going on well before I kicked him out. I talked to my parents a lot about it, because we talk about stuff like that and there were also practical considerations involved in the possibility of ending the relationship. We needed to brainstorm, especially after LE was born. One time my mom asked me if I was still in love with BE.

The length of my hesitation before answering was probably the real answer. I was thinking about a lot of stuff at once. I answered something like that I didn't dislike him and I knew we were still okay in a way because I still liked how he smelled.

Because part of love is that, isn't it? Liking a lot how someone smells. It's maybe more on the biological or hormonal side of things, but it's still part of it. I also didn't specifically wish any ill upon BE. That was a kind of love too, feeling loyal to someone.

It's not enough, but it's not nothing.

My mom and dad were also struggling at that time, as people do when confronted with massive life changes. If they were questioning whether or not they were in love with each other, they were keeping it from us. But I bet if you asked either one of them, even after the worst fight, whether they were in love with the other, I bet neither of them would have hesitated for a second.

And my parents aren't the sort of people who give knee-jerk answers with the thing they think we want to hear.

Love and in love and biology and hormones. All of this has been gone over so much in the course of human history that there's hardly any reason to go over it here. People really do like thinking about love a lot and finding extraordinary and mundane ways of expressing it. It's one of the good things about people, good enough that they can be forgiven for all the awful poetry and music.

I remember a scene from the Jimi Hendrix movie Rainbow Bridge where a couple of hippies are making out and the girl goes, "I want you to make love to me," and the guy answers, "You can't make love. Love is." That answer is so appallingly mundane and stupid and unnecessary it's actually one of the things that makes me not want to talk about love.

It's safe to say my love life is a shambles. Or kind of great. Or a hot mess. I've always sucked at romantic love. I'm really good at falling in love. And nursing unrequited love. And finding bad love.

Aren't there ever so many names for the different types of love?

But here's the thing. No matter what happens, I keep believing in love. You know why? It's because I know what love looks like because I grew up in a house where I saw what love looked like every day. I love my parents. My parents love me. They love each other. I love both my brothers and they both love me. They both love each other. They love our parents and our parents love them. All these loves have different faces, but they're all still the good kind.

This kind of thing is rare among expats. There is a small tribe of us who have the privilege of experiencing mutual good love with family, especially parents. We know that home is people that aren't going away no matter how gross or mean or screamy we are, or how far away they are, or how much people change. We are still loved despite our greatest efforts to push it away.

And I'm so lucky to have LE, someone I can shower with love every day. Loving your kids is easy. You don't really have to think about it. But sometimes I think parent love is all the kinds of love rolled into one. It can be in love, or unrequited, or bad love, or love-hate. It can be that weird, huge outside-power love that I'm uncomfortable admitting to feeling because religious people have pretty much taken over all the words about that kind. I'm more comfortable admitting to something like romantic love for my kid, even though people's minds may jump to some sort of creepy incest thing. Don't be an idiot, if that's what you're thinking. I think about LE all the time and imagine holding him and kissing his neck and squeezing his little feet and I fret a little when he's mad at me or when we're not getting along. I take pleasure in finding new things to love about LE, and finding new ways to show him I love him, and to make love an almost-palpable thing that he'll believe in too, no matter what.

Today is my parents' anniversary. Or maybe it was yesterday. I always fuck up the day, but they once told me not to worry about it because their anniversary is their thing, not ours. I expect my parents are often dismayed with my brothers' and my love lives, and they probably think it's their fault somehow because they're parents and that's the sort of thing you blame on yourself. Perhaps also it's easy to overlook all the other really excellent relationships my brothers and I have because there's this one kind of love we're not so good at that sticks out more.

But who knows? Maybe it is their fault for creating such a high standard of love, and for showing us every day how to love well. We believe in it because it is a thing they made and we make and we all know what it is. It's perhaps what love isn't that I'm not so astute at identifying. But I figure it out eventually, and then find new ways to love and be loved and not be loved.

43 years is a damn long time to be married and still sneak kisses and butt pats when they think we aren't looking. But we were always looking.

Kid Art

I found this drawing while I was futzing around cleaning stuff yesterday. I don't know if it's LE's handiwork or some other kid's, but I think we might be due for a talk about stuff.

I love that guy's mustache.

Bookserf: A Bit Of Awesome

Yeah, yeah, I know. It seems like I've quit the blog. I haven't, really. It's just that when things are going relatively well, there's not much to write about. Not that I'm sulking around and looking for bad things to write about. More that I feel like an insufferable dick when I write about good things. It's too much like image-crafting, and it's hard work.

As though I'm not image-crafting when I write about bad things. It's just that the bad-things image comes more naturally.

One thing is the word "awesome." It's beyond back (back from the 80s, I mean) and it's sunk its claws into me. After the 80s, "awesome" became pretty much limited to the realm of skaters and surfers and tanned adventure people. But then everyone started saying it again. I resisted at first. I tried to affect curmudgeonly annoyance with the return of the word.

But then a friend from high school came to visit with his fiancee. I was kind of nervous about them staying with me because I hadn't seen this guy since around the time he graduated high school 20 years ago. People can change in unpleasant ways. They grow up into other people. The fiancee I'd never met at all.

I've known this guy since we were around 10, and I always liked him well enough even though he was more my younger brother's friend than mine. But we all hung out together in high school, and I'll tell you what, we had some serious life-learning adventures.

He undraped for the picture.

I'm getting to the Bookserf thing, I promise.

And it was great, their visit I mean, and my friend and his fiancee were also great. It was like picking up where we left off only without all the adolescent hangups to tiptoe around. They were the best houseguests ever because it was just normal having them around, like family. Even LE, who's normally pretty shy of strangers, was punching my friend's arm within a minute of meeting them at the bus stop, and already saying, "Look what I can do!" before we'd even gotten through the doors of the ice cream place I'd bribed him with for staying up really late to come meet our friends at the bus stop. The next morning I awoke to find my friend and LE on the floor watching cartoons with LE draped languidly like a cat over his shoulders.

Also they said "awesome" a lot. And it stuck. I can't stop saying it. I can't stop thinking it. But you know what? As the economy is collapsing and the world is maybe coming to an end and each day brings a new dose of uncertainty in ironic, literary proportions (you can choose your author each day-- Orwell? Kafka? Camus? Palahnuik? McCarthy?), believing everything is awesome makes the experience of being alive in Istanbul at this moment, well... awesome.

Whether it's a delusion or a coping strategy or whatever, I don't care. It's working for me.

So, speaking of awesome, I finally met the Bookserf guys. One of them contacted me on FB last year about getting the word out about them on my blog and around my university. I didn't really have time to follow up, though I wanted to, and then there was Gezi, and then I was busy again with work. I haven't had a chance till this week to finally sit down with these guys, borrow a book, and find ways to get the word out.

Bookserf is essentially a book exchange, but with some good twists. You choose the book you want from
their website and leave your contact info under it. Then you arrange to meet the owner of the book (their profiles are on the site), borrow the book, which you give back two weeks later. If you want, you can talk about the book and literature and all the other great stuff there is in the world to talk about.

Most of the books are in English, by the way. And they have for-real good books, not shitty romance novels abandoned by couch-surfers.

If the other book owners are anything like Kerem and Erbil, it's probably worth it to hang out and talk about the book or whatever else. Sometimes I'm completely awed at the people Istanbul unlocks.

Did you see how I just used "awed" there instead of "awesome?" Don't think for a second I don't know what "awesome" meant before it became an overused tool in my quest to make my life a cooler place to live. It's probably part of the reason it works, feeling awed several times a week.

Midday beers, smart guys bursting with ideas, and Kerem lent me a really good book.

I'm pretty sure I need that cool fisheye attachment.

It's things like this, books and talking and all the other good stuff that goes on that I don't write about that make me think the revolution or whatever is going to be okay so long as there are real people and these small acts of subversion. The way things are now, sharing and kindness are subversive. It's awesome.

It's also worth pointing out that these two guys are rocking the mustaches.

And anything that reminds me of this song is good.

Sucker Bet

At some point recently, I taught LE about making bets. It started off as trying to be a marvelously clever mom teaching him stuff, like, "I'll bet you I can download the 4th season of Regular Show by tomorrow. Just stop bitching." If I won, I got a massage. If I lost, he got to punch me in the arm. So it was pretty much a win-win because he doesn't punch very hard and his aim isn't good enough to hit the dead arm sweet spot. I'm screwed when he learns how to do that.

Then I started using betting as a bargaining chip, like when we were coming home late in a taxi and I knew there was no way in hell I was going to be able to carry him up the stairs if he fell asleep. He's gotten pretty big the last few months. So I'd bet, "If you can stay awake, I'll give you a massage. If you fall asleep, I get to punch you in the arm."

I wouldn't have punched him hard, even if he did fall asleep, which of course he didn't because a winning a massage in a bet is like the Holy Grail of stuff you get in our house.

But tonight, there was the issue of what to leave out for Santa. My dad sent a Santa video telling LE to go to sleep so Santa could come and advising him to leave out milk and cookies. LE was worried because we don't have cookies, so I assured him the candy-coated walnuts that came with our Chinese food would do nicely.

Even the condensation on a milk glass is unacceptable.

But then there was the issue of the milk. The thing is, I hate milk. I hate milk with the white-hot burning passion of 1,000 suns. If I think about milk for too long, I get all queasy. I don't like it when milk touches my skin. If someone were to give me a pile of dogshit and a glass of milk and told me I had to choose which one to stick my tongue into, I would hesitate and think about it for a bit.

I'd probably opt for the milk, but still.

I tried to get LE to agree to leave out a glass of rum for Santa. No dice. He wasn't having it, no matter how much I promised him Santa would like rum ever so much more than milk. So then I tried to get my parents to corroborate my story that Santa prefers a nip of something warming over milk. But they didn't play nice. I claimed to remember leaving Santa brandy or cognac or something-- two glasses at that-- at a house we lived in when I was 7 or so. They claimed I was doing revisionist history. I claimed they were.

We both had our reasons for wanting to believe our particular versions of reality.

My mom suggested something involving a funnel, knowing I would never dump perfectly good milk down the sink just to please the kid. It was a good idea, but I was afraid the funnel idea might involve too much potential contact with milk. My dad concurred because he is also appalled by milk.

So I made LE a bet. I put a glass of milk and a glass of rum side by side on a plate of candy-coated walnuts. And because he was so insistent that Santa would drink the milk, I just went ahead and made a sucker bet with him, and bet that Santa would choose the rum.

Up till now, I've never made LE a sucker bet. Even when he wants to bet something completely ridiculous, like, "We don't have to go to work and school tomorrow," or "The moon isn't going to come out tonight," I'd never abused my superior knowledge of reality to earn massages or money, and that kid keeps trying to bet me money.

All this government corruption has caused me to lose my morals.

Probably it's about the Santa lie. I find myself working a little too hard to keep the Santa lie alive. Even tonight, when he was weeping into his pillow because I wasn't going to sleep (and thus I was preventing Santa from coming), I kept the lie alive. I told him Santa only doesn't come when kids aren't sleeping, but it doesn't count for grownups. I told him I talked to Santa last year and that Santa thought it wasn't fair that LE should receive no gifts because I was being naughty and not sleeping. And the previous year, according to a story I made up right then at that moment, I was watching a movie and watching for Santa at the same time, and I looked away from the tree for just a few seconds but when I looked back, the presents were all there and I didn't even see Santa.

It didn't work. He was still upset. Christmas gets a bit intense for kids. But that didn't stop me from making a sucker bet. I told him if Santa chooses the rum, he owes me a massage. If Santa chooses the milk, I owe him a massage.

Guess which one I'm drinking right now?

Red for haram and green for halal was an unfortunate Christmas decor-related mistake.

It's not like LE gives very good massages anyway. But at least we're sorted for beverage choices for future Christmases. So that's got to be worth something.

Maybe I can teach him to mix a martini.

Awesome.

A Somewhat Stale Mix

I have lying around on my desktop a few mixes I made for the radio back when I was doing that. I don't get to do radio anymore because now that I have the boy all week, there's no time and I can't be bothered to go up to campus on weekends. I kind of miss radio, but I'll live.

Anyway, I made three mixes I never got to use. This one I did in the middle of Gezi stuff, but I never played it because the radio broke and I didn't really want to be there anyway. It's not really Gezi music because the Turks had that one covered. It was just music that I was thinking about at that time while I was worrying about people who were down there kicking ass and kicking myself because I couldn't be down there kicking ass.

I guess it's an okay mix. I was quite enamored of it at the time and for sure it has its moments.

Here you go.

Revolution from istsstranger on 8tracks Radio.

Snow

There is no specific thing to report on. There are a few things to mention. I don't even know if they're worth mentioning.

I'm avoiding the topic of infrequent blogging. I tried to post earlier in the week, but Blogger wouldn't open so I gave up. That accounts for last week.

Here's one thing that happened. It snowed. When it snows everything simultaneously goes completely crazy and completely still.  But I wasn't glad about the snow this year. Last year, when the snow was way worse and Rektör didn't cancel school, I was still kind of happy about the snow. But this year when school wasn't cancelled and I was feeling that I might be inconvenienced in some way, I was all, "Oh, what the fuck." And I wasn't happy about it.

LE was. LE was ecstatic. It was like there were rainbow unicorn sparkles exploding out of him he was so
happy about the snow.

It's hard for those kid feelings not to rub off. Little boys are strange people indeed to share one's living space with. They do stuff like rant at you for 20 minutes because you used their saved-up tooth fairy money to break a 20. Even if you let them watch the whole time, and break the whole thing down into a step-by-step process, and lead them through a series of Socratic questions involving simple counting and arithmatic to show them what you're doing, even then they still get mad. You're a thieving witch who's taking away 3 of their money and replacing it with one.

Burn, witch. Burn.

But then after dinner they nuzzle into your armpit next to you on the sofa and for a moment are still. They sigh like they've always done, through the nose with the softest hint of voice. It's so good. Then they mention for the 67th time how happy they are it's snowing, and ask if they can look inside your nose. So all in all living with a little boy is an extraordinary experience.

Throughout the snowy day, things just seemed bleaker. Everything kind of sucked. It wasn't fun. The snow was absolutely perfect, too. The exact balance of wet and dry that begs frolicking. In the morning, I rushed LE off to school and had no fun whatsoever, not even with the pink cheeks and unicorn sparkles. I started wondering if I was dead inside.

Little boys have to jump up and try to touch everything they might be able reach. They pretend they weren't dancing when it was obvious they totally were.

Has no one heard of these?

I left work early because I was so tired and pissy and in no mood to have a snowy adventure like I did last year and went home planning to do something or other, but by the time I got there all I wanted was bed. So I went to bed. LE's preschool called around 4 to let me know LE's Big Boy School had been cancelled. I'd checked several times about school closures and had seen nothing about this. That's because school was closed after the teachers all decided they didn't want to come. No one bothered to inform anyone. Fortunately the preschool had just brought LE back and all was well. But it pissed me off.

Also, does that mean teachers can just do that, decide not to come to work because it's an especially sucky day and not worth the hassle to get there? Why don't we just do that?

It was around then I realized I was sick. For real sick. Like could barely move sick. But I went and fetched LE. I warned him I was probably getting sick. I wasn't 100% sure yet because sometimes you totally think you're getting sick but then you have a gin and Tylolhot before bed and the next day you wake up fine. I powered through the pain and we made gingerbread cookies because I had promised him and there was no way I was going to unleash the wrath that would ensue if we didn't make the cookies. Also there was no way I was going to suffer the guilt for being the selfish mom who denied the cookies just because I was pretty sure I was going to die.

At some point in the night, I wondered if I had the virus that would start the Zombie Apocalypse. That's how bad I felt.

Sometimes I get regular sick, but once in awhile I get Damn Sick. Completely incapacitated. After standing for 90 seconds all I can do is crumple into a ball and shiver miserably in bone coldness and drift off to sleep. The next day I was too sick to take LE to school. He makes his own breakfast so I wasn't totally neglectful. I managed to shift to the sofa for a bit so the cleaner could do stuff in the bedroom and then I was down for the rest of the day. That night I tried to order some soup from Yemeksepeti but the restaurant cancelled the order, which I didn't notice for like an hour because they sent me a message but I'd fallen asleep again. So we ate some crap Knorr powdered soup that I think we've had since we lived in Beylikdüzü.

Well played, soup place.

It occurred to me that being super sick was revealing some sizable chinks in this whole plan of raising a kid by myself in a foreign country. I spent the night envisioning health and accident-related horror stories that I would be unable to fix. Like, for example, if LE or I were spouting blood, how would I wrap and keep pressure on it and call the ambulance at the same time? And I don't even know the number for the ambulance, or if people even call that number. I don't know my blood type or LE's blood type, though I guess they're written down somewhere. And what if I turned into a zombie? Does LE know he needs to destroy my brain before running to the neighbors'? What if I were laid up for two weeks, how could I take care of him? Stuff like that.

Maybe I've been watching Walking Dead a lot. But these are nonetheless legitimate concerns. We subsisted primarily on mandarin oranges and the gingerbread cookies LE had never gotten to take to school because I couldn't get him there. Not that he minded. He got to go play in the snow for awhile even though there weren't any other kids. He came home when he got cold. He said, "Look, my little hands are red."

At least we had cookies.

When I pick LE up from school in the afternoon, there's always a flicker of terror on his face the moment before he spots me. It's things like this that are the darkside of love, when I can't get it out of my head how his face will turn if I'm late getting there, or unable to come at all.

He doesn't use running as his primary mode of travel around the house anymore. And while we get along about most things, it's still a world of no for him. Little boys have appalling timing, like wanting to go swimming at 7.30 on a school night in November. They also have really awful ideas, like using their fingers to paint their spilled milk all over the table.

Still, I need to be better. While I was sick, I realized I'm a miserable fucking person. Completely insufferable. These are the sorts of things you realize when you're sick. I'm always telling LE no. I get snappish with him for no reason. Then he gets pissed off and sad and noisy drama ensues. I'm like the love of his life, which means he's always watching me to see whether I'm going to be cool or not. It's really easy to forget he's a person, the same way I forget students and strangers are people. It's really easy to abuse my authority. It's no wonder I have such crappy relationships if I can't live in relative peace with someone who loves me most of all.

LE's dad came and got him. Right after, LE got sick. MIL bawled me out for smoking and going on the balcony and for going around with wet hair so I took the phone off my ear and rolled my eyes for like 30 seconds. When I put it back, she was finishing up with a final bawl out for smoking on the balcony with wet hair.

I am such a strumpet.

I got BE to drop me at the doctor. Azeri Teyze leaned out her window to wish me geçmiş olsun and ask how I got sick. This is another one of those Turkish questions I understand but don't know the answer for. I'm pretty sure the answer isn't, "Because a germ got into one of my mucous membranes and maybe I was stressed or tired, or maybe it was such an especially virulent germ that it conquered my immune system and started festering."

I was lucky. That doctor who still calls me sometimes wasn't there. This new guy too, he tried to give me injectable antibiotics. What's with that? How is that ever convenient for a sick person to sort out? I talked him out of it and walked home wishing I would just die already it sucked so much being sick.

And now I'm pretty much better. Yesterday, my main accomplishment was shifting the big bottle of water
from the entryway to the kitchen and that pretty well did me in. Today, I successfully maintained my body temperature all by myself and wore real clothes and I'm still doing all right. Somewhere in there I made some really good soup.

Sometimes getting sick is like shedding a skin. I'm hoping it snows again. I'm glad I'm not turning into a bitter, dessicated, depressive old mule because I was pretty sure that's what was happening. I don't have black stinking zombie insides, which I was pretty sure I was growing. Or maybe both of those things are happening but I'm enjoying maintaining my own body temperature too much to notice it.

LE was really upset I was sick. He told everyone. He hardly bitched about being bored and sorted out his own needs, even brushing his teeth and changing his clothes without being told. He checked my throat and my temperature and told me he didn't want me to be sick. He cuddled even though I was stinky. He told me I was stinky. And he was pleased as punch to be sick with his babaanne (who's way better at the sort of insane fussing he enjoys so much when he's sick), triumphantly reporting to me that he'd instructed her as to which types of medicines she has to ask my permission before giving him.

I felt really bad I wasn't taking care of him and for all the times I was ever grouchy.

What would be the collective noun for little boys? A wriggle? A scamper? A jetpack?

A sparkle maybe.

Russell Benedict

Last weekend, I was over at a friend's house having a work day. Which really means it was part work, part him showing me how to use his Mac every five minutes, and a lot of doing other stuff, like origami. Eventually we got peckish and before we started prepping stuff for dinner, he pulled out some stinky cheese his friend had brought him from France.

The cheese was extremely stinky. Seriously stinky. Like puke and goats. And I knew, because it was so stinky, that it would also be extremely delicious, which it was.

But I wondered how people ever got themselves to eat something so stinky in order to discover how delicious it was.

I used to have this friend named Russell. When I started thinking about him the other day, and this story I was going to have to tell, I couldn't remember his last name. I could remember the name of his daughter, Tavina, who I only met in person once, briefly. But I couldn't remember Russell's last name.

Russell was also stinky, but for sure that was a quality of his worth getting around. I once arranged to meet him at the wine shop where my boyfriend and brother were working, and he promised me a surprise. When he got there, he opened a paper bag which contained a small piece of Brie wrapped in oily cellophane. "Why do Americans throw stuff like this out?" he wondered loudly, because he was a bit deaf. "It's a perfectly good piece of ripened Brie. Americans just don't know a good ripened cheese." I'd always thought Brie was a fresh cheese, one not meant to be ripened though I could see the benefits of letting it ripen a bit. Russell had lived in France for a spell and I figured he knew something about cheese that I didn't. I was about 22.

This cheese that Russell had was ripened more than a bit. He'd gotten it from the trash at Oasis, the local-ish natural market that later became a Whole Foods. The sort of place that has excellent cheese. And Russell's cheese wasn't actually from the trash. He had an agreement going with the guy who took out the trash that he could collect any good stuff before it went in the bins. Russell couldn't stand to see anything go to waste.

The cheese smelled awful. Beyond normal cheese-stink awful. Definitely getting into ringing off instinct alarm bells that say, "Do not eat that cheese" territory.

But it was Russell, so I tasted the cheese. And it was foul. Rotten-tasting. There was no taste in that cheese I could have defined as good. Russell spread a large hunk of it on one of the crackers I'd hooked up from my boyfriend, and encouraged me to dig in. It was so bad I couldn't eat anymore, even to be polite. People nearby were wrinkling their noses and looking our way. I asked Russell if he was sure he should be eating that cheese. There were parts of it that were kind of orange-colored, and parts of it that were runny.

The trash he'd collected at Oasis was the stuff they didn't even give the food bank, which I knew because I worked at the food bank. That's where I knew Russell from. He had let us know he was making this arrangement with several grocery stores we also worked with to get the perfectly good food we were leaving behind. It's also why he smelled a little bad. He stored a lot of the food in his apartment and in his car, a long black boat of a thing like they don't make anymore.

Russell had no sense of smell. It was related to the same incident that had left him with a crumpled hand and a blind eye and a slight limp. He was just around 80 when I met him. He liked strong flavors and interesting textures because his sense of taste was also affected. Red wine and dark beer and fried ice cream and ripened cheese. He could probably find the good taste in that cheese he brought to the wine shop.

When I was a newish hire at the food bank, he was coming up the walk and one the directors was all, "Oh, no. It's Russell Benedict. Anyone have an hour to spare?" He came into the office and started haranguing everyone within earshot about how we were going about it all wrong, this whole food rescue thing, and there were pounds and pounds of food we were letting go to waste.

I'd been hired for a food rescue thing (gleaning, which is collecting post-harvest produce from the fields), so the director pawned Russell off on me. He went on a bit about his thing, which was really a lot of things all together. One thing was about all the food we were wasting. Another was about how and where he was distributing the food he was collecting, and how the food bank wouldn't help him. Another was about how they were always trying to kick him out of flat because of the smell. Russell (who couldn't smell) figured any odors from his flat were perfectly justified because he had nowhere else to store the pounds and pounds of food he collected from markets around town, food that was just going to go to waste. He gave the food out to his neighbors, who were also poor and old. He has romances going on with some of the ladies. He lived in a senior citizen Section 8 house, and he tried to assuage the manager's complaints by getting rid of the spider in his kitchen. A spider he rather liked lived over the sink, and Russell left bits of rotting fruit under its web to attract fruit flies, which the spider could then eat.

Russell was really interested in the gleaning idea. He wanted to hear all about it. He had lots of ideas about to make it better. Lots of ideas. While he was talking about these, Ron the warehouse manager started to come into the room but he saw Russell and tried to get away. It was too late. Russell had seen him and he bid his farewells and went out to harangue Ron about how he could be doing his job better.

When I say food bank, I don't mean like a soup kitchen or a place where poor people came to get food. We were a collection point, one of the storage hubs for the state. We had a warehouse and an office. We did all the organizing of various food rescue and food collection programs, dealt with donors and donations, and managed the distribution of all this food, plus government subsidies, to various smaller distribution points locally and around the state. It was from those smaller places that people who needed food actually went to get it.

Anyway.

I got to like Russell, even though he could be querulous and his visits were often poorly timed, where I would be really busy with something else and not be able to give him the time he needed, because he was really interesting, as it turned out.

His fire about the food going to waste come from his 25 years of running a similar operation to ours in Washington D.C. It was called Waste Not Want Not, and they handled thousands more pounds of rescued food a day than we did. What he really wanted to do was use his years of experience and work alongside the food bank and rescue all the food we were missing from markets and restaurants. Problem was, his system of collecting food was very complicated and detailed. That, and the food he got wasn't always great. It was usually so close to going bad, and could not be legally distributed to poor people from licensed agencies.

Russell had done other stuff besides the food bank. He did some work in Alaska with the Forest Service, but I'm not sure what. I just knew that because it was in the Forest Service station in Alaska in the winter that he'd delivered his daughter Tavina. He had a few other daughters, but Tavina was the one he talked about. Her mother was his first and third wife, which was because he'd remarried her after divorcing his second wife.

He'd also worked for the State Department. One thing he worked on was the Peace Corps, at its inception. He'd harangued the government into accepting Peace Corps applicants with criminal records because it was the 60s and the kinds of people applying for the Peace Corps-- the kinds of people the Peace Corps wanted-- all had criminal records of some sort, either for minor drug infractions or protesting.

And he grew up with Richard Yates. Richard Yates is like a Mad Men era writer. I'd never heard of him but Russell told me a lot about Richard Yates' life and how it affected his writing.  His book Revutionary Road was made into a movie awhile back and it had a lot of the same angst as Mad Men. It's a good book. I never saw the movie. Russell gave me a book of short stories by Richard Yates, and told me he was a writer's writer. He knew I liked to write and he'd read some of my stories. He'd given some good feedback too, and it wasn't kindly Grandpa feedback. Mostly it was a little about my story and a lot about Richard Yates but it was still nice. He gave me the book and a few other little things in a basket he'd refurbished and re-varnished after an epoxy accident, because there was no reason the basket should go to waste.

Russell and Richard Yates fought in WWII at the same time, and Russell still hadn't forgiven him for drinking himself to death. He also never forgave his first and third wife for dying of lung cancer, and was forever on at me about smoking, which he'd given up after watching his wife die of it. He was really into health and took 2,000 mg. of vitamin C a day because of Linus Pauling's research. He ran in marathons.

The last time I saw Russell was around the time I moved here. We were to meet at a brew pub because they had a kind of dark beer with a nice consistency that he was able to taste. I got there before him and ordered a pitcher and two glasses. The waiter wouldn't give me the other glass until he'd seen the ID of the person who would be drinking from it because Oregon had ridiculous drinking laws. I told the waiter my friend was 78. When Russell arrived grumbling about car trouble, the waiter really did ask to see his ID. Russell was mad because of the car and because it took him awhile to locate his ID in his wallet full of shredded papers and small things he'd saved and because, really. Asking a 78-year-old man to prove he's over 21. The ridiculous drinking laws were strictly enforced, and waitstaff were terrified of undercover liquor commission agents catching them at not checking ID because they and restaurant could get fined.

Over beer and burgers, we talked about stuff. He told me about the incident that had so damaged his body. A few years earlier, he'd been working late and alone at his food warehouse in Washington D.C. A group of thugs came in to rob the place. Russell told them they could take whatever they wanted and told them where the small amount of money was. Nonetheless, they beat him nearly to death with an iron bar and left him there. The beating had destroyed his nose and eye and hand and legs. It scrambled his brain a bit. He almost died and after the beating, had moved across the country to live near his daughter Tavina because he couldn't take care of himself anymore. Tavina was a social activist of some sort, well known around town for her advocacy work of various people needing social justice of some sort. She didn't have a lot of time to deal with Russell, who was forever getting into tangles and didn't much like being told what to do. Tavina died in a hiking accident a few years after I moved here.

We talked about Turkey. He told me how he loved it that people from Turkey say 'Stambul instead of Istanbul, which is pretty much true. The initial "i" is little more than a whisper. We finished up and split the bill, and I went out to help him get the car started. Starting the car required a complex series of actions in a certain order and a coat hanger and took a good half hour.

We said goodbye. Russell was anxious to get going before the car died again. It couldn't go faster than about 10 mph.

A few years ago, I got to wondering what became of Russell so I started Googling him. I couldn't find anything because, as much as tried to bring computers into his life, he didn't have much success with it and was wary of the things. He never had much of an Internet presence. So I started searching his daughter Tavina, and I turned up Russell's short obituary. He'd almost made it to 90. The obituary wasn't the standard fill-in-the-form type, but it was written by someone who didn't know him very well. Tavina's name was in the obituary more than Russell's.

I once heard a short story on NPR about the afterlife. In this view of the afterlife, it's like a giant lounge, and everyone who ever died is there. You can hang out with Plato and Syd Barrett and drink and smoke all you like because you're already dead. But the thing is that sometimes you'll be talking to someone, and he'll just disappear. That's because you only stay in the lounge as long as someone alive still remembers your name. As soon as the last person who remembers your name dies, you disappear and no one in the lounge knows what happens to you after that, though they have some theories.

So for the last few days I couldn't remember Russell's last name. And I was thinking about how, after such a life, you become dependent on your grown child because of a random act of psychopathy. Your obituary is buried on page 5 of Google, and even then can only be searched by someone else's name. Almost everyone who remembers your name is also dead.

But to have lived such a life.

I was kind of upset the last few days because I couldn't remember Russell's last name. Then tonight I was having a cigarette and fretting about the story I was supposed to tell and I remembered it.

It's Benedict. Russell Benedict.

And it's a really comforting lie for me to hope that he'll still be in the afterlife lounge when I get there, because I'd really love to talk to him once more.