Sparks and Darkness

My friend Jillian laughed at the sight of my grand jeté, which was slightly less than grand. In case you didn’t know, wearing ballet flats doesn’t grant you the ability to leap gracefully over puddles like a ballerina. I landed smack dab in the middle of a puddle, but in my defense, it was more of a lake. We had just come from seeing the movie, Lala Land, at our neighborhood cinema, but after two power outages, all moviegoers were promised a refund. Jillian and I made our way through the sea of frustrated people crowding the dark lobby, deciding not to bother the theater employees who looked ready to tear their hair out.

The choreography had colored my imagination so it appeared that all the other people attempting to leap over puddles were part of a real-life musical. Even the bus that drove past and splashed Jillian and me with a torrent of sleet was just following the routine. My ballet flats have had their final performance. (That’s the second pair I’ve ruined in the past two months.) But that’s okay. All the great dancers have worn their shoes to shreds: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Isadora Duncan, Meriwether Falk.

Electricity has been unpredictable, but I have candles and a kindle, so that’s all I need to survive. The weather has been challenging, and I partly regret not accepting my friend Kelley’s offer to celebrate New Year’s in Athens with her, but with a trip to Macedonia in January and Bavaria in April, I have whittled away my travel fund for the time being and I should try to be responsible.

I thought of Kelley yesterday, not just because she is having fun in Athens without me, but because a storm blew open my back door, which had been firmly closed. I remembered that the gutter on Kelley’s balcony is being held up by a bungee cord. That was the best the maintenance guys who look after our apartments could do after the gutter fell three weeks ago and flooded Kelley’s apartment. I had answered Kelley’s plea for help and swiftly came over, hauling an Ikea bag full of towels. It seems every teacher who has lived in my apartment before me has bought new towels, so I have a closet full of them. Not wanting Kelley to come home to another flood of biblical proportions and not wanting to spend hours cleaning up all the water again, I texted one of our maintenance guys that he should check on her apartment to make sure it doesn’t flood again. “The problem is fixed,” he insisted, but I insisted he check. I would do it myself but Kelley came by the other night to get her spare keys after locking herself out. It seems that these disruptions, scaling from mishaps to mayhem, have become so ingrained in our lives that we start to expect them.

When the power went off during the movie, which was meant to be our happy escape from the miserable weather, I told Jillian I thought it was 2016 giving us one last middle finger. Our jazz-enthused, singing, dancing, playing-among-the-stars lovers seemed destined for a happy ending when all the lights in the theater came on, breaking my reverie and awkwardly reminding everyone that we were just common people sitting in a movie theater. Then all the lights and the screen went dark. Jillian took that opportunity to breathe heavily and produce villainous laughter, just to creep everyone out. Thankfully, people laughed. We all waited. Some inventive people behind us used the flashlight on their phone to make dog shadow puppets on the screen. When some people got impatient and walked down the stairs to leave the theater, Jillian yelled after them, “Don’t leave! All is forgiven!” Jillian and I waited in the dark because we really wanted to see the characters live happily ever after. The movie came back briefly, and even though all the lights came on too, we watched in the well-lit theater until everything went dark again and it appeared less likely that our characters were going to have the kind of ending we hoped for them. Seeing as how the movie was cut short, I don’t really know how it ended and I can remain blissfully unaware, hopeful that artists really can have it all: the love of their art and each other. 

Truth and Beauty

                      

The friendship between Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy, as laid out in Patchet’s memoir, Truth &Beauty, presents a code that can be deciphered only if someone has been through the same kind of trying friendship, one in which the give and take seem so lopsided that the friendship is like a flower constantly vacillating between decay and full bloom. Both writers, Ann and Lucy met at Syracuse University and went on to become roommates and writing buddies at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Their determination to climb up the rank of published, successful authors is inspiring, especially since they both did it. They helped each other by believing in the other’s talent and also by stoking their own cordial competitiveness. Lucy in the early days exhibited great neediness. She always wanted positive affirmation from Ann, asking, “Do you love me?” and even becoming possessive and acting as a self-appointed traffic controller, holding up a “Slow” sign whenever Ann’s other friends posed a threat of crashing into the special bond that she and Ann possessed. Lucy was a battered warrior, having overcome a rare cancer that resulted in the removal of her jaw bone. Surgery became the norm as she tried all her life to reconstruct her face. The abnormality of her appearance was the foundation of her loneliness, the reason why she believed she failed at love, and was fated for a lifetime of romantic rebuff.  She had lots of friends and she always wanted to be the center of attention, the center of everything, but Ann saw her at her most raw and vulnerable. Poignant scenes in the memoir included a time Ann visited Lucy while she was living in Scotland, and wildly attacked a group of drunken fools on the street who ridiculed Lucy’s appearance. Then there was another scene in which Ann and Lucy went to see a fortune teller. The prediction for Ann’s future was bright, and Lucy’s was bleak. I enjoyed this book because I could sweetly recall friendship with someone, who like Lucy, was very needy, and also like Lucy, died too soon. As the person who gave and gave and gave, I felt a kinship with Ann Patchett. No matter how trying the friendship may be, when you lose someone so magnificent, there’s a feeling that you would do it all again, just to have that person back in your life. 

Where am I?

Sundays are always the same, despite the fact that 38 people were killed in explosions, audible from my apartment, the night before. [An obscure group called the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons has taken credit for the carnage.] This morning, I woke up at 7:30, made a pot of coffee, turned on Camera Obscura (for this moment in my life, Camera Obscura offers the right dreamy allure to get my creative momentum in full swing and help me focus on my work),  and then I drew all morning until my friend Kelley invited me to lunch. She told me that when she heard the explosions, she thought they were thunder. Maybe because I am from Oregon, where it rains all the time, I knew it couldn’t have been thunder. Thunder makes a cracking noise, and these explosions left a resounding rumble. After the eruptions, one right after the other, my neighborhood quieted down, as if everyone outside had looked up at the sky, hoping to see lightning, hoping to feel just one rain drop that might convince them the noise was just thunder, but deep down knowing exactly what it was.

Later that afternoon I filmed a protest from my window. Crowds of people marched down the street and chanted, decrying the attacks on police, I assume. People in Turkey are pitted against each other, and in my experience, some will cast a suspicious eye if they think my views do not align 100% with theirs. Recently, the chief adviser to President Erdogan claimed foreign chefs on Turkish cooking shows were spies. I figure it’s just a matter of time before foreign teachers face the same accusations. People are so quick to point fingers these days, it wouldn’t surprise me. Last week I ate lunch with some Turkish friends and another American who stated that Selahattin Demirtaş, the co-leader of the HDP Kurdish party, was being tortured in jail. The response from our Turkish friends was basically, “Let him be tortured. He’s a traitor.”

It makes me sad to hear anybody condone torture, which is partly why my night on Friday wasn’t as festive as the traditional Turkish dancing, Middle Eastern music, and tambourine playing may have suggested. The only communal synchronized dance I wish to join is the one from the movie “Living Out Loud,” starring Holly Hunter. Oh, and I’d like to have the same backless dress she wore and have the same lithe back with jutting shoulder blades. I worry that with such a polarizing leader soon to take office in the US, Americans will be quick to label each other as traitors and approve of any discrimination and harassment they suffer just because our president-elect insults them on Twitter. Oh wait, that’s already happening.

America and Turkey are becoming more and more alike, merging together like Sunday mornings. Sometimes I can’t tell where I am.