CHAPTER THREE
After my parents split up, I usually saw my father on the weekends. After living in Izmir for many years, in the early ’80s he moved to a town called Akhisar, about sixty miles to the northeast of Izmir, where he had relatives. But he still had family (besides me and my mom) and a lot of friends in Izmir. His new wife’s family also lived in Izmir. So he’d come back just about every week, and two or three times a year I would make the trip to Akhisar. I have many memories of taking the hour-and-a-half bus ride to Akhisar from Izmir, excited and eager to be around my adventurous and free-spirited father.
I remember my father saying that his uncle was a big influence on him deciding to become a physician, although he didn’t go straight into the field. Despite having the highest entrance score the year he was accepted into Ege University’s medical school, he took a long break in the middle, pursuing a career in journalism for a while, and didn’t graduate until he was almost forty.
I recall my father often waking up at two or three in the morning to drive to nearby villages to treat sick people in Akhisar. He got a loan and borrowed money from relatives and was able to open a private practice, but he was also the doctor for Akhisar municipality for a few years, where he cared for the general population who had government health insurance.
He had tremendous empathy and compassion for the poor, the disabled, and the unfortunate. As a kid I often witnessed my father embracing the weird and the different rather than ridiculing them. I will never forget the tears on some of his patients’ faces when he refused to take any money from them after treating them. He would tell them that they could pay him “next time,” although we all knew that “next time” would never come. He was a good-hearted man who surprised people often with unexpected acts of kindness and generosity.
He was very social and liked his alcohol throughout his life, but at his core he was a peaceful man: philosophical, good-humored, and not at all materialistic. His friends came from every stratum of Turkish society: fellow doctors, but also authors, poets, journalists, playwrights both male and female, and actors, as well as doormen, security guards, and waiters. As much as my father enjoyed practicing medicine and caring for the sick, his true passion was poetry, literature, and journalism.
His love of words was probably how he was able to win my mom’s heart in the first place, although she eventually grew tired of him bringing his friends home at all hours and being gone so often.
Not me. I would sit next to him at tavern tables, enthralled by the deep, funny adult conversations I felt privileged to witness. He and his friends would share poems and fiction and discuss soccer and politics with equal avidity, swerving frequently into more philosophical territory. The philosophies of Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many more were among the common topics discussed those days.
In these modest places, some of the most intelligent and philosophical conversations took place among people who an average person might have not recognized on the street. But many of these people were the ones behind books, poetry, and songs written and composed that were played regularly on the radio or performed on TV. These modest and good-hearted humans never shied away from criticizing any wrongdoing, whether domestic or international, that posed a threat to human life.
My father was a great storyteller, a man who knew how to draw comedy from drama. He faced life with unbelievable courage, and humor was always a big part of his life, even until his last days. He was serious when the moment called for it but always made light of anything that seemed unimportant. To my father, most things were small stuff. He was a brave man with a huge respect for human life and the laws of nature, science, and the universe.
To this day I have never met anyone who read as much as my father — except my mother. He read all the time, especially Dostoevsky, Kafka, Yasar Kemal, Aziz Nesin, Attila Ilhan, and Nazim Hikmet, and he had a large library of books. My dad read most of the world classics and kept up with current domestic and world affairs by reading the daily newspapers, usually Cumhuriyet. I don't recall a time when my father was not reading some new book, a newspaper, or an article in a magazine. He was a highly intelligent man but very modest and friendly. He had extensive knowledge about a variety of topics and loved all human beings with no regard for their social or financial status or their background.
Once I became a nurse and finally achieved some kind of financial stability after many years of struggle, a few people who had heard that my dad was a doctor spread a rumor that I came from a wealthy family, which was the farthest thing from the truth. These people didn’t know anything about my father nor anything about the difficult path I had been on. My father was never rich. He failed at selling eggs, along with trying many other mediocre jobs, when I was a baby, and had his share of being unemployed and broke. Being a family doctor in 1980s Turkey meant earning the equivalent of about $2,500 a month in today’s US economy. I remember as a young boy many times when I would ask him for spending money, he would often take out his last few Turkish liras and say, “Let’s split this in half; you get ten and I get ten.”
For a while, my dad gave my mother the equivalent of around $300 a month, and sometimes he would give me a little spending money or buy me clothes. My childhood years weren’t spent in extreme poverty, but I remember our family always struggling financially and living on a month-to-month basis.
My childhood was spent in a succession of small apartments, without a lot of money for repairs. The window in our living room was broken for months. We had to cover the hole with newspaper because we didn’t have money to replace the glass. Broken items sometimes did not get fixed for a long time.
Besides cooking, my grandmother spent most of her time sewing and patching up torn clothes for us. Relatives and friends would loan each other money when they had it, because life was not easy and the one lending might be the one borrowing in a month. It was common in our community for small grocery stores called “bakkal” to let customers owe them and settle up when payday arrived. The owners all had books where they kept people’s names and the amounts they owed.
I was close with two of my cousins growing up: Oya, a girl a bit younger than me, and Kaya, a boy two years older than me. Some of my best childhood memories were of time spent with them and other cousins from my dad’s side. Kaya and I played hide-and-seek, soccer, backgammon, and, when we could afford it, miniature golf. We listened to pop music together and went to the movies. I have vivid memories of us watching The Blues Brothers and Smokey and the Bandit together in the ’80s at a theater in Bornova.
I spent a lot of time hanging out at the apartment of their mother, my Aunt Gulay; her husband, Ozturan, had boxed as a younger man. When we were teenagers, he would give us boxing tips and show us how to drive. My cousin Kaya and I spent a lot of time in that car, a black Murat 124. We lost him a few years ago, and those childhood memories return to my mind often.
My paternal grandfather had a strict routine of shaving every morning and wearing pressed trousers, a crisply ironed shirt, a tie, and a jacket. I remember my cousin Kaya and I walking to Bornova Park on each side of him while he held his cane. Although he had a small frame, my cousins and I were very afraid of him because of how he carried himself. Though he never raised his voice, one look he gave us was enough to stop our loudness or bouncing around.
Life in Turkey was not easy; most people in Izmir, and other big Turkish cities, lived in small apartments in five- to eight-story buildings with no elevators. Looking back, I can’t help thinking about how many of the older people who lived in those apartments had to walk a mile or more to buy groceries from the farmers’ markets, taking out their handkerchiefs to wipe the sweat from their faces as they took multiple breaks along the way. When we saw them on the streets we would stop playing and run to grab their bags, which often weighed thirty to forty pounds, carrying them to their homes. When they got home, they had to climb up the stairs, too, so if we saw them in the stairs, we always carried their bags to their apartments for them.
I know all too well how difficult and inconvenient life can be in so many countries that are not as advanced as most parts of the US.
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