Happy Birthday, Neighbor!

March 20 is Mr. Rogers' birthday. The other day I read this Cracked.com article about him and I kind of started crying a little.






Go ahead. Read the article. It's hyperlinked. And go ahead and watch all the videos, too. It's well worth it.

So I got to thinking about Mr. Rogers, who exists in my pre-conscious memory and so as far as I'm concerned, there has always been Mr. Rogers. Apparently, I used to call him Mr. Go-Rogers and also I had a lisp so my parents will assure you this was adorable. Probably Mr. Rogers would have thought so, too.

Also booze.

Did you read the part in the Cracked.com article where it says he answered every single fan letter he ever got? No? Just read the goddamned article already. I've hyperlinked it again so you don't have to scroll up. Get on the same page with me here, even if you're not Gen X, or one of our parents. If you're one of our kids, run and go check with your parents if it's okay to read stuff that says "fuck" in it, because for sure I will say "fuck" after this. I'll also refer to sex and drugs, and I might make them seem cool.

Loser.

Look, in the 70s and 80s, there was a lot of stuff for kids that was bullshit. At my school, we had IALAC week. IALAC stands for I Am Lovable And Capable, and it's one of those well-intentioned things grown-ups come up with that kids can see through in a second. We had races and special pins and there was even a song, but the only advantage any of us could see to it was that it was a break in the usual routine because of the races and the song.

It was bullshit and we knew it was bullshit. Kind of like Officer McGruff and Users are Losers...

Only users lose drugs.

and Just Say No...

The 80s were rad because people offered you drugs all the time.

 and Free To Be, You And Me.

A star-studded cast of cameos!

Okay, Free To Be was catchy, but wasn't it all just to tell us there's no shame in girliness and girls are as good as boys? Because some of us knew that already and didn't get why we needed to sing songs about it.

Since the olden days.

As for drugs, weed is a slippery slope to what now? Masters degrees and living in Turkey and being mama to a gorgeous little boy. Plus a bunch of other cool stuff?

Come to think of it, my gorgeous little boy informed me yesterday that women can't be professors. Doctors, lawyers, soldiers, cops-- fine. But professors? I'd show him Free to Be, but I'm pretty sure he'd be right onto that bullshit and never trust me again.

But Mr. Rogers? Maybe you wanted to believe it was bullshit, that he loved you and that you were special and that there was no one else in the world like you, but you never could quite make yourself believe it was bullshit, could you? That's because no one on TV was sincere-for-real like Mr. Rogers. Sure, the pre-Internet urban legends went around that he was a pedophile and a tattooed Marine sniper who had killed men with his bare hands (okay, I admit I *really* wanted to believe the second one, because that throws some good old-fashioned Redemption into the story and also it would be fucking cool if it were true), and even though we didn't have Snopes in the olden days, I couldn't quite believe it.

And I'll bet I'm not the only one who, deep down in my real heart of hearts, felt kind of bad for slagging off Mr. Rogers just because it seemed like the cool thing to do. Hating Mr. Rogers is a lot like puppy-kicking because, like the puppy, you know he loves you no matter what. And it's in part because of Mr. Rogers, and my parents, and some other relatives, and Sesame Street, that I believe I have a real heart of hearts.

As for Mr. McFeely, well, I'm still kind of suspicious about that guy, though on some level I'm sure he's actually very nice.

Photo courtesy of Lee Leplaw Deichmann

An aside about the kind of childhood I had: I once asked my parents why Mr. Rogers kept telling me I was special and wonderful when it was obvious that was already true. He did go on about that an awful lot. My mom told me he said that for kids whose parents didn't tell them as much as mine did how much they loved me and how special I was. I felt really sad for those kids.

The other day when I read the Cracked.com article, I felt sad for LE that he doesn't have Mr. Rogers. So I showed him some Mr. Rogers on You Tube, which he was all set to hate because there's no fighting, but within seconds he'd gone limp and he loved it. Except for the singing.

When I was a kid, I always thought Mr. Rogers was a businessman who'd come home for lunch to hang out with me and maybe some other kids who might have been watching TV, but mostly it was for me. He changed out of his business coat into his cardigan and he had all the time in the world. When it came time for the field trip to see cool stuff, I started to get worried that he'd stayed away from work far too long, and there was no way he'd be able to stay for the whole thing about the baby goats or whatever.

Isn't that such a kid thing? When we were little, my dad came home from work for lunch sometimes, to hang out with us. Or maybe it was for some other reason, but when you're a kid, it's all about you. It was super-great. But then he had to go back to work. Except sometimes he wouldn't go back to work, and that dreaded moment of him putting on his business coat and going back to work never came. Mr. Rogers held that delicious tension every day.

My life is fucking great. Just like this.

The grown-up version is watching the guy you're sleeping with get dressed, how he carelessly strings his belt around his waist with the elastic of his boxers showing crookedly as he gets dressed to go off and do whatever it is he does when he's not with you. You think for those few moments maybe it would be nice if he stayed for an hour, or maybe for the day, even though you know in your head it's better if he doesn't stay at all. It's a delicious tension of a different sort.

Is that too psycho-sexual? Probably. And I learned this past summer my parents blame themselves for many of my life-failures, relationships especially, so that last paragraph and its placement probably didn't help. Also I learned I have a world of mama-guilt to look forward to that I can't even conceive of. Why is it so easy to know my own fucking problems are my own and so hard to not blame myself for everything I've done wrong with my kid?

See Stranger. See Stranger write things away. Oh, oh, oh. Away, away, away. Writing things away.

For a long time, I was mad at Mr. Rogers for being such a Christian. But then I thought, "Fuck it." If more Christians or other religious folks adhered to their religion like Mr. Rogers, we'd be a whole hell of a lot better off. Hell, I'm ready to adhere to Mr. Rogers' religion, except for the God part. For the last few days when LE goes on one of his adolescent trips, I've been trying to think, "What would Mr. Rogers do?" It's kind of like "What would Jesus do?" but it makes a lot more concrete sense because who the fuck knows what Jesus would do? He lived two millennia ago in an entirely different culture, and clearly a lot of people are doing the opposite of what they supposedly believe he might have done. Would Jesus have tattooed how much he hates faggots across his back? I think not. If Jesus' kid were kicking up a fuss because he wanted to take toys to school when it wasn't Toy Day, I'll bet you anything Jesus would have made that the kid's mother's problem.

I dole out punishments now.

By the way, I'm cezalı (being punished) right now for singing in the street (I'm only allowed to sing and dance in the kitchen, though I've been working on pushing that boundary to the entry hall, at least for mornings when I have dream-songs stuck in my head), and I'm not supposed to use the computer for 10 days. So please don't tell LE I broke my punishment after he was asleep. I warned him this might happen, but still.

Anyway, it's Mr. Rogers' birthday. He would have been 85 today. And for sure he made the world a better place.

Thanks for that, Neighbor.

Dead Rotten Kitten

So for several weeks now, there has been this dead rotten kitten in one of the gardens we pass on the way to work and school. I was going to take a picture of the dead rotten kitten for you, but to be honest, I'm really squeamish about dead things, and this dead thing is particularly gross, so I couldn't stand to engage with the dead rotten kitten enough to take a picture of it.

Just try and look away.

Until today, the dead rotten kitten has been kind of wet and slimy-looking, much like a newborn kitten, but I'd guess this kitten was six or eight weeks old. Every day when I pass by it, I try to make myself look away. But every day, I look for the dead rotten kitten. It just keeps being there.

The garden is more like a strip of garden at street level, with a fence around it. The rest of the garden is about half a floor down, overlooked by the ground-level flat. This fact becomes significant later in the post, which is why I mention it here. Let's call it foreshadowing, only it's not for something bad.

LE stays with his dad for half of the week. Which means that half of the week I walk with him to school, and the other half of the week, I walk to work on my own. Most of the time, the conversation I have in my head about the dead rotten kitten stays in my head. Don't look for the kitten, don't look for the kitten, don't look for the kitten, oops, there's the kitten and it's gross and wet and now it has some holes in it. Or whatever development-- holes, bones, its teeth-- is occurring that day, because as much as I'm grossed about by dead things, I've never gotten to observe the stages of putrefaction this closely. It's been happening nice and slow because the weather, until recently, has been cool.

One thing I'm really glad about the dead rotten kitten is that it's never been stinky.

About a week ago when I was walking to school with LE, the in-my-head conversation about the dead rotten kitten got out. It's not unusual that this happened. When LE is around I am still in the habit of saying all the stuff I'm thinking, just as when he was a baby. Only when he was a baby it didn't matter so much what I said because it was only a conversation I used to cling to my sanity.

No, wait. I mean the conversation was to teach him how to talk and stuff. Anyway.

Home is where you can say whatever you want. If it isn't, maybe you need to find a new home.

Now, LE's a person who cares an awful lot about what I say some of the time. Most times, he doesn't give a shit what I have to say because he has something to say, often at the same time I do, and I listen because he's talking about stuff and that's cool and also because I want him to think he's the most important person on earth and also because the things he has to say are increasingly interesting for real. I pretend to be interested way less than I used to.

Naturally, when I mentioned the dead rotten kitten his radar went up. That's my boy.

I only mentioned it to LE because I'd mistaken the dead rotten kitten's garden for the garden next door. They look a lot alike from the street. This whole time I've been wondering why no one has cleaned the dead rotten kitten out of the garden, because the garden is otherwise well looked-after and the looking-after has begun now that the weather has warmed up. So I mentioned how the dead rotten kitten was finally gone because I thought the dead rotten kitten was finally gone. In fact it was still there in the garden next door.

It's not always like this, kid.

Mostly LE is too busy skipping and walking backwards and spinning around and tying his backpack over his face to be very interested in the dead rotten kitten. But he often remembers about it.

Some days he feels sorry about the kitten because it died. One wants to make a kid's world be the sort of place where kittens never die, but fuck it. There are way worse things than dead rotten kittens.


"Mama," he said one day, "Why don't they clean that gross kitten out of the garden?"

Some other days, we speculated about how the kitten ended up there, and how it got dead in the first place.

"Mama," he said lot of other days, "That kitten is iğrenç. Poor kitten."

Modals maybe can be subversive?

This week at work, I'm teaching modal verbs. Modal verbs suck for students because the form of them is difficult and the shades of meaning are difficult because the meaning keeps changing whether modals are affirmative or negative or past or present and you can't skip them because they're fairly crucial to understanding the whole of English.

Modal verbs suck for teachers because they come as one section of any textbook and you teach them all at once as though they were a silly thing like tag questions or inversions or subjunctive, so students forget them as soon as you're done with the unit because English is a series of units. Modal verbs also suck for teachers because they're grammar and teaching grammar sucks. I love teaching grammar, actually, but I kind of think the whole thing needs to be mostly abandoned. Whatever.

Anyway, grammar teaching. I've never really been successful at teaching people to use modal verbs productively. Has anyone? Probably not. Please refer to my earlier sentence where I say grammar teaching sucks. It's fun, but it's a big fat waste of time.

We've been doing modals of probability and possibility. When we got to the past tense ones ("No! you can't use 'mustn't' as a contraction to mean past probability! Come on, you guys, care!"), it was for my 8.30 lesson that I forgot to plan and I couldn't manage to get to work before 8.15. When I got there, I needed coffee.

But the night before, LE had blown my mind. "Mama!" he exclaimed, because he tends to exclaim most things. "That kitten couldn't have been hit by a car, because how did it get in the garden?"

Creepy super-genius

Was that a super smart thing to say? Because I'm pretty sure it was super smart.



He was right. There's a fence around the garden and it's about 6 feet between the street and the garden. Well done, Mr. Forensics-Face. I threw out a couple of scenarios in which the dead rotten kitten, having been hit by a car, might have ended up in the garden. They weren't very plausible, but they were possible. I used lots of past tense modals.

So at 8.15 the following morning, with my coffee and waiting for my computer to decide to come to life, I decided the dead rotten kitten story was a good way to teach past tense modals of possibility. It's hard to say if it was a good idea or not because most students went to sleep as soon as they'd understood the phrase "dead rotten kitten."

That evening, LE wondered what I did at work, and I tried to explain to him again what grammar is. I created a complicated sentence with modal verbs and he looked at me for a long time and said slowly, "I don't know what you're talking about." I complimented him on the embedded noun phrase.

"Mama!" he exclaimed. "That yucky kitten couldn't have been killed by a dog, because how could it have gotten in the garden? The dog, like, what. Killed it and then carried to the garden? No. What the hell?" Here is why I mentioned the fenced strip of garden earlier in the post. There's no way a dog could have been walking in the garden because of the fence on one side and the narrowness and the six-foot drop on the other side. The fence and gate would prevent most dogs from entering the garden.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was a super smart thing for a six year old to think of, though obviously I'm biased. I suggested maybe the kitten had just decided to curl up and die there for whatever reason, but even that was lame because cats don't usually choose such places to curl up and die. The carcass isn't even all that curled-up anyway.

One or two students seem to be on the verge of getting past tense modal verbs of possibility. Others are intent on explaining why Fatih Terim's English is wrong, though "What can I do sometimes?" has made it into today's lexicon of one-liners I can manage at apt moments. The rest are ever so keen on some race-car game in their phones.

They're falling okay so far.

The weather has warmed up the last few days (the first cemre has fallen, of course! Maybe it's late, but maybe it's okay), and I noticed tonight that the dead rotten kitten was looking a little drier. This morning, it was still slick with wet. So the dryness is a much more interesting change than when its shoulder blade became exposed.

The mystery of how it died and how it got where it is remains.

And I'm forever thankful that home is where you can say anything.

How I Make My Life Look Cool

Everyone is a fucking artist because of apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic. I'm no different in harboring this self-deception that every photo I take is bloody amazing. I like my self- deceptions. They keep me warm at night. Sometimes anyway. Not quite enough but that's probably for the best.

My obsession with Hipstamatic continues. It helps that Turkey lends itself to groovy low-tech photos. Or maybe groovy low-tech photos lend themselves to Turkey. It's hard to say which.

In any case, I went about sneaking as many photos as I could of every second of my excruciating life for the past couple of days. I'm completely amazed with myself. You should pretend to be amazed with me because being amazing is one of my favorite pet self-deceptions. I call this one Dorothy. We fancy martinis and wear glasses and our witty zingers are always impeccably timed.

Anyway, Hipstamatic is super-fun and it makes my life look way cooler than it really is.

The high school behind the ambulance is next door to the primary school LE will go to next year. It has a 3D Atatürk face floating out of the wall above the door, but it was too far away for me to catch from the minibus. In the morning, the high school kids mill around inside the windows apparently doing nothing. When it's cold, you can see the girls are congregated at the radiators while the boys do whatever it is boys do.

These large bags of salt appeared along the side of the road shortly after the second big snowstorm. Someone told me they were there because of the ice in the morning. They've never been used. I wonder if it was up to the wherewithal of the citizenry to start shoveling salt if it snowed again, because salt trucks are few and far between when they're needed around here.

The road that goes up the hill to work cuts through the middle of the cemetery. I assume this means they built the road over the cemetery. You can tell how things have been built up over time, since the cemetery is lower than the road. Near here, next to the municipal vet where I took the cats for worming and where I once saw some guys who'd brought their sheep in the back of a small hatchback, there is an old çeşme that's a good 6 feet down in a pit with a fence around it. A çeşme is like a street faucet, but in a nice marble setting with an inscription of some sort. The çeşme in the pit doesn't look like it works anymore. But there are other çeşme around. They're where you get your water when the water gets cut off. Or when you need a lot of water for something but don't want to pay for the water and don't mind hauling it home in plastic bottles. Or you can just wash your hands there and splash your face there. Sometimes people use them for washing their cars.

All the old parts of Istanbul have their own cemeteries. They're crowded and overgrown and wonderfully simple and creepy.

Yay! The minibus!

This minibus "No Smoking" sign doesn't have the fine written on it. The fine for smoking is different on every minibus. Drivers, apparently, are immune to the fine.

This is a gorgeously falling-down abandoned house. There are a lot around here. When I lived in the States, I'd read about abandoned houses like in Steinbeck or whatever, but I never thought I'd see one for real.

Other houses and buildings are a little dilapidated, but lovingly so.

This shop used to sell house-decoration stuff, like curtains and paint. Then it sold organic olive oil and associated products. Now it sells pool supplies and water filtering equipment. The location of it, business-wise, is complete crap. The only nearby thing is the nursery across the street, and the sheep-killing place in the valley. I don't know what they have in the sheep-killing place the rest of the year. There are a lot of outbuildings and no house and sometimes there are people doing some sort of work or other. In the spring and fall, flocks of cranes come to hang out in the valley. The first time I saw them, I thought they were small sheep or big white dogs. But then I saw the feathers flapping in the wind and was all, "What the fuck is that?"  The cranes are huge and white with some black on the bottom and I totally get why everyone flips out when they fly overhead. It's an easy bit of free happiness to get in on.

Nurseries dot the road up the hill. I'm thinking I need to hit one of them pretty soon. This one has a selection of garden gnomes. 

 

This is close to the entrance of the Tea Garden of the fateful Unpleasant Breakfast. A year or so ago, LE and I went to breakfast here with some of our favorite friends we never see anymore since we moved out here. We had a Groupon deal and it was a fine breakfast and a good day. They have a playground. The Unpleasant Breakfast took place a week or two later, I took the in-laws up there. Either it was an off day or the business was in the process of failing. It was understaffed and the food wasn't great and the tables weren't super clean and then, horror of horrors, the water ran out of our tea urn. New water was never forthcoming. As you might guess, this all sent the MIL into a relentless tizzy and the tea thing just sealed the irrevocable disaster.

Every time we drive by the fateful Tea Garden with MIL on the way Kilyos, she goes, "Hey, that's the place where Stranger took us for the Unpleasant Breakfast." She doesn't say it exactly like that, but close enough. Then she recounts the bad food and dirty table. The story climaxes with not having water for tea. I've given up pointing out it was a good tea garden the first time I went there. LE used to point out how it's a good tea garden because they have a playground.

Now we just snicker in the back of car. We can tell each other secrets in English. As we near the tea garden, I say, "She's gonna tell about that time we had an Unpleasant Breakfast there, " and LE says gravely, "There was no water for tea. Mama, she always tells this!"

"Wait for it... Wait for it... Ah, there she goes!"

He waits for her to finish, and then reminds her about the playground.

This is the top of the hill.

This driver was drawing pictures in the dust on his minibus for much of the day, which I know because the same driver who took me to the office brought me home several hours later, and the fish were there around noon when I started up the hill. There were fish all along the sides, too. You can't see the submarine on this back window because of the glare. Here, the driver is working on a picture of a minibus. He has a face like a Red Skelton hobo clown, and he draws slowly and carefully, standing back for long, serious periods to consider the work.

Seriously, this guy drawing on his minibus was one of the best things I've seen in a long time.

Sometimes in the morning when I'm about to go into work, I feel like work is gonna eat me.

You have to go in this door.

Up the stairs goes to work. Down the stairs goes here to this terrifying place. I've never actually gone down the stairs. The red pipes are dusty and the door just has a You're Not Welcome Here feel. I've never seen anyone go down there, not even a worker.

Wait. I should totally just go down there and just see what there is. I don't even know if that downstairs door is locked.

I love this class. No, seriously. I really do. Last week on Friday, the sun came out for the first time in weeks and they were all batshit and adorable and I let them boil the lesson. "Boil the lesson" is a Turkish expression that means something like "Distract the teacher with other stuff so we don't have to learn anything." They started asking me questions about other stuff, like my life and Turkey and school. I tried a few times to get them back to their book and finally one of them said, "Teacher, just give up." So I did. The cool thing about boiling the lesson in an English class is that you trick them into learning English while letting them think they've won. At one point, we talked about why 8.30 classes suck so much. I told them I have to get up at 5.45 or 6 for an 8.30 class. They were horrified and wondered why. So I explained about getting up and sorting breakfast for me and the kid, and getting us both dressed and the arguments about what to watch on You Tube and brushing teeth and putting on jackets and dropping him off at school. The same student who'd told me to give up earlier was all, "So wait. You do all that, you're a mother and you have a job and take care of the house..." Only he didn't say it exactly like that.

Still, it was a good answer.

The Halk Müsiği Külübü concert. I was sitting way in the back. One of my co-workers sang Uzun İnce Bir Yoldayım with his saz and he did it justice and I was thrilled to bits because it was so good and I know most of the words. I knew a lot of the songs they did.

 

I got up closer when the show was finished.

 

I went to this particular dönerci in Taksim for old time's sake. I used to come here all the time. I don't know why I ended up choosing this dönerci over all the other ones in the Taksim meydan, but I swear this one's the best. There's still the same döner-cutting guy as there was 10 years ago.

 

 

The International Women's Day march. I didn't go on purpose. It was just already happening.

These guys had to knock off whatever work they were doing so the march could pass by.

There were tons of cops there, plainclothes and uniformed.

Some nights, there is a live band car attached to the end of the Beyoğlu cable car. They got held up by the march. I also got held up by the march, and joined a pushy crowd in Çiçek Pasaj to try to skip the march crowds. It hardly made a difference but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Inside, a waiter asked another what all the commotion and crowds were about. The other waiter told him it was because of the Galatasaray match. A third waiter contradicted him that it was about Women's Day and how we shouldn't beat them. The first two waiters took this in with serious nods.

The International Women's Day march got kind of gay at the end. After the gays were the trans folk.

I was on my way to a tattoo appointment. I'd planned to stop off along the way and buy some boots I don't need. Except the shop was pretty well blocked by the march. By the time I was done at the tattoo place, the boots place had closed. So International Women's Day prevented me from buying boots. Also hanging out at the tattoo place and having a rakı and going over half of the world's problems and mysteries with the tattoo guy and his friend. That prevented me from buying the boots too, but it was totally worth it talking to those guys.

The stairway to the tattoo shop is daunting, but the shop is fine and anyway, I fucking love these old buildings.

 This should probably be another post.