Have you ever. . .

In loving memory of my Father

Have you ever dreamed of someone

who no longer lives?

After the winter of denial,

disbelief, longing and tears -

in an unexpected flash of Time -

have you seen him unfold

from layers and layers of neatly folded,

safely packed away memories?

Have you tried reaching to touch

and felt your fingers brush the air?

Have you tasted the dawning anger,

and imbibed the mocking emptiness;

awakened to find yourself drenched

in the fit of frenzy

of such an etheral, cruel dream -

which, as unexpectedly as it came,

quietly, on padded paws, flees?

Have you ever tried asking "WHY?"

to the one who no longer is?

Then did you sit up crying,

wishing you could just one more time

hold him for a split second

even if in your dreams?

Copyright © F. Atalay 1997

Keyboarded and Processed

New year's eve - partial entry -2008

This entry was intended to be titled "Processed and Keyboarded". It is keyboarded, but I don’t think I have processed any of the experience yet. However, in a brief sparkle of gin and jackpot second on new year’s eve at my sister’s, I had chimed joyfully, "I have a lot to process and keyboard !" as if shouting the words themselves was the elixir to processing all that had happened since December 18th.

My sister and Gert had each interpreted my utterance differently and thus failed to understand what I had meant. Inci had imagined a musical keyboard and thought of "designing" one and "implementing" it, whereas Gert had immediately pictured a computer keyboard— which, after all, was what I had meant. The ensuing discussion and opinions stirred me to write my thoughts and perceptions, however incongruous they may have been at the time.

Looking back to my scribbled thoughts, now I too fail to understand what I meant. The words themselves don’t make sense, but I know what I meant. So, is there a difference between "knowing" and "understanding"? Do we understand everything we know, or do we have to know everything we understand? Where does intuition come into play? Is it where understanding and knowing melt into each other when their borders can no longer be clearly defined, and rather than don each other's identity they create a new one and name it intuition? The gin-jackpot-discovery feeling is still there even though the words that try to express it, obfuscate it instead. My challenge is to clear the fog and pick out the ones that speak out clearly. To do this, I must regain my passion. But for now, my intuitions lie paralyised in misty layers of understandings which I know not how to sort out and express— until I have processed each patiently and in due time.

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright ©2008

A Beautiful Friendship

Füsun Atalay Copyright ~ © 2008

I missed the three calls he attempted on my cell. What's the use of carrying one if you leave it in your coat pocket and check your coat in, at the lobby?

Fate works in strange ways. It has always for us.

His incompleted message on the answering maching at home asked my okay if December 25th was good for me. He had found a ticket at 50% off and had to book within the next 12 hours.

Yes! Yes ! You don't need to ask!

It would be 4 AM in Amsterdam but I called anyway, if only to leave a confirmation on his answering machine. Damn! He hadn't turned it on; and I know he's a heavy sleeper.

E-mail ! A quick note flew off into cyberspace before I set my alarm to 3 AM to get up and make another attempt at calling him.

When I did, it was too late. He had already missed the half-priced flight.

My heart sank.

"But," he chimed, "I did book a flight on December 23rd!"

Full price— close to 2000 Euros- because I was worth it and he did not want to leave me alone during the first anniversaries of many sad things that transpired in my life last year around this time.

"It's only money." His famous words. . . .

He has always been there for me. And I have tried to be there for him. Life has not united us ; nor has it separated us— except for a vast ocean and a continent that stands in between.

I look forward to his arrival.

I can already see the huge smile on his face and hear his voice : "Hui ! It's so good to see you again."

Then we'll embrace (oh, that familiar after shave!)— all 6 feet 2 inches of him against 5 feet 3 inches of me. Just like we've done so many times- in so many parts of the world -over so many years of our lives.

And I'll drive back home with him to continue from where we left off last February — until it's time to say say once more:

"Farewell— No tears, promise?"

Until the next time.

Copyrighted Material ~ Copyright © 2008 ~ All Rights belong to Füsun Atalay

Sketches from my Childhood

By:

Füsun Atalay Copyright © 2008

~ an excerpt~
My mother was the only child of a couple who, unlike the parents of my father, were city people. My grandfather was a decorated colonel in the Turkish Army and fought in the Turkish War of Independence alongside Mustafa Kemal Atatürk to free Turkey as a nation from the weakened and corrupt Ottoman Empire which, by then, was ready to parcel out the country to England, France, Italy and Greece. He endured weeks of hunger, malnutrition, malaria, dysentery , and sustained 18 wounds as I heard from my grandmother and mother in conversations. By the time I and my sisters were born and old enough to be cognizant of history and our grandfather’s part in it, the former was already in his very late seventies.

My most poignant - and shamefully cruel - recollection of him is one of his dozing of, one hand resting on his cane, seated on a kitchen chair, still wearing his Stetson hat. I, with the prominent naughty nature I possessed all through my life, would line up bottle caps and small sea shells on the rim of his hat and then yell out, "Dédé ! Dédé ! Wake up ! It’s time to go!"

As he jumped up startled and disoriented, the bottle caps rained down on his shoulders, legs, the floor, and I laughed gleefully. But he’d take the horrible joke in good humor, and say, "You, again! My naughty, incorrigible little Firefly! What pleasure do you get from mocking an old man?"

It’s another regrettable fact of my life that I was too unaware of my grandfather, his life and accomplishments while he was alive. He would have been my last connection to an Era- the glorious Ottoman Era of the pre modern Turkish Republic - a window for me to peek through and re-live some first-hand history through him . One of my many losses in life.

Ibrahim Ethem Demirhan and his wife, Hayriye Nezihe, my maternal grandparents lived in a modest home in Eyüp, which was apparently considered the most sought after neighborhood of Istanbul during the Ottoman times, but was neglected since its demise. The house was a two storey wooden structure with lattice trimmed windows, high ceilings and hardwood floors. My recollection of it - not so much as a structure but more as a feeling - is that it was like a gigantic doll house. The floors creaked, there was a room upstairs which my sisters and I were banned from entering (which only flared our curiosity more), there was a huge garden with hundreds of kinds of flowers, a water well with a rusty cover and a bucket attached to a pulley beside it. There was also a chicken coop with chickens, a rooster and a turkey . If we walked all the way to the end of the garden, we’d be stopped by a thick and high stone wall which prevented us from falling off the cliff into the Bosphorus, and marked the end of my grandmother’s property.

The fascinating story I heard from my mother about the origins of that old, wooden is among the most vivid memories from my childhood, probably because of its sounding so far away from the reality in which I lived.

To me her words were like a fairy tale I loved to listen to over and over, not only to let my imagination take off and recreate the characters and the places she talked about, but also to make sure that what she was telling was consistent and true- although I wasn’t conscious of my latter motive at that time.

The old house in Eyüp, Istanbul used to belong to my mother’s grandmother, or my great-grandmother. My mother herself had vague recollections of an old and sickly woman with bed sores on her back and who really did not play any significant role in her life. As a small child, all my mother remembered was images of her own mother, who was a trained mid-wife, attending to her dying mother during the last days of her life as a dutiful daughter.

Although her physical presence was insignificant in her life, her great grandmother’s accomplishment and status were very impressive factors on my mother and she never failed to talk about her "anneanne" when she was with friends, or met new people wherever we traveled because of my father’s career.

My great-grandmother was the treasurer of the Harem in Topkapi Palace during the reign of the last Ottoman Sultan. That was a very prestigious and revered position, for one had to be a trusted, forthright, dependable person. She had the keys to the treasury where the Harem jewels made of precious gems - emeralds, rubies, diamonds, gold, platinum, sapphire, topaz were stored and retrieved by official request for the use of the concubines. She had to account for what was in, what was out and make sure not a single piece went missing.

When she left her post to be married and raise a family, the Sultan gave her an exquisite set of emerald earrings and pendant as a "wedding and thank you for your service" gift. Many years later, it was that precious gift that was old and the proceeds from it paid for the house that was inherited by my grandmother. Of course, as my grandparents grew older, so did the house showing signs of wear and tear, creaking with age and aching for attention and care. Just like old people inevitably do, so had the once stately house had lost its dignity and become a burden on my grandparents.

* * * * *
At the end of my first year in elementary school which was spent in Diyarbakir (not too far from Syria and Iraq, on the south eastern part of Turkey), my father had sent his wife and three daughters to Istanbul as a respite from the intense heat of the city and a needed reunion for my mother with her parents.

That summer stands out in my memory with happy snapshots as well as unresolved mysteries. We traveled to Istanbul in a truck that was owned by a Kurdish carpet dealer. I don’t know his connection to my family, but I remember his presence a few times at dinners at our home in Diyarbakir. He was a jolly, large man whom everyone called Hüseyin Aga. He must have been trustworthy for my father to let his young, pretty wife and his three young daughters to travel with him all the way from Diyarbakir to Istanbul in his truck.

At my grandparent’s home my sisters and I felt like we were in paradise. The garden was our sanctuary and we could be anything we wanted to be there. One day we would pick red and pink and orange petals from the Dahlias and lick them to stick over our fingernails to pretend we just came out of the manicurists. Another day we tried making dolls from twigs, attaching snapdragons for heads and dressing them in alternate layers of Asters and Gerber Daisies strung through the twig to resemble full length fashion gowns.

One day, upon hearing that the turkey in the chicken coop was destined for new year’s dinner, I started viewing him as a soldier getting ready to go to battle and made him my fiancee. With my red Dahlia petalled fingers, I’d hold unto the chicken wire and carry monologues with my fiancee, the turkey, declaring to him my unwavering love, promising I’d think of him everyday and urging him to be brave.

Unfortunately, my mother overheard my declarations of love to my first love, a turkey, one evening and the next thing I remember is becoming the subject of the table conversation. I would never hear the end of my secret self engagement to my grandmother’s turkey. I was only seven years old then, and by the time I was seventeen my mother, who -much to my relief had discovered that capon was a lot more tender and juicy- had switched to baking a stuffed capon for new year’s dinners.

We enjoyed a freedom at our grandparents that our mother denied us, whether it was in the way we expressed ourselves, or how much or what we ate, or if we refused the compulsory afternoon naps. In Diyarbakir, because of the intense heat, all businesses closed between noon and 3 pm; and my mother obliged us to take a nap after lunch. Our reward : home-made fruit ice which she had learned to make and prided herself in offering to her guests.

My sisters and I, however, hated sleeping after lunch- if only because it was something we simply couldn’t do.

Instead, we loved drawing pictures. So under our pillows we’d sneak sharpened pencils and straightened wrapping paper with a Walt Disney Golden Book as a hard support. My sisters and I shared the same room and as soon as all was quiet, we’d take out our drawing paraphernalia and start drawing semi stick forms of ladies wearing the latest fashions and high heels with huge bows. Our drawings always had stories to them and the women had names and glamorous careers.

"Okay, now they’re going to a party," I’d whisper. And all of us would start drawing our disproportionate ladies in their latest and most outrageous party attire while our ears were fixed on sound of footsteps that might signal mother’s approaching to check in on us.

Having been so close in age and sharing the same strict, bitter-sweet upbringing has bonded my sisters and me in a very unique way. Many siblings share a close bond among themselves, and I would never maintain that we are the only ones or the most unique ones with such a bond. However, our bond has been put through some very tough tests and at one point it was almost severed. But it survived and revived stronger than before.

I see that as the biggest legacy of my father among the many he left us.

I believe my mother did not enjoy the relaxed discipline her parents bestowed on their granddaughters. But, having seen in raising their own offspring that a little leeway will not lead to any serious and irreversible harm in the youngsters, aren’t most grandparents usually more easy going with their grandchildren? If anything, the love and the generosity of my grandparents made us long for them more and cherish the few times we spent with them in Istanbul, Edirne and Ankara.

My mother was an only child and her parents were blessed with her at a much later age in their lives due to wars and other circumstances that delayed parenthood.. Consequently they doted over her and raised her as if she were a princess - keeping her away from the commoners. She could associate with selected friends- older daughters of military colleagues to whom she looked up and with whom she had little in common. If she resented this, she hid it well for she had learned being submissive at a very early age. So she never acknowledged her resentment, but rather let it germinate to seek revenge later in her life.

In her summer breaks, she would not be seen with her peers playing hop-scotch or hide and seek in the neighborhood. This was something my sisters and I were not allowed to do either during our childhood. Children of the neighborhood were called "sokak çocugu" - street children, and they would teach my mother bad things so she was kept away, protected from them by her overly protective mother.

Instead, my mother, like a kitten, curled up by her mother’s side and learned how to embroider and do petit-point and produced intricate doilies and blouses with embroidered bodices for herself. Such skills were looked upon favorably for a young girl in her circles. Her natural talent in this area led her to pursue an education at the Kiz Sanat Enstitüsü - Girls’ Crafts Institute - an institute of fine couture where she mastered how to make by hand fine lingerie, man’s shirts, silk flowers, women’s hats and baby clothes which came in handy later on in her life. However, pursuing this line of education clashed with her mother’s goals for her to study law and become a judge.

"I never felt I had the patience to read through all the volumes of those law books," I recall her confessing once when I was thirteen and wondering to myself what I should be.

A happy, fulfilled life, according to my mother, comprised of making an enviable marriage, having babies and raising them as the perfect children who’d be the envy of everyone- a testament to her ultimate success in life.Her fair, blonde, blue-eyed looks, proper upbringing and respectable family background would not present any obstacles in securing a desirable marriage and a suitable social station in life. However, her prospective husband had to be approved by her parents. My grandfather, with his connections in the military had the means to investigate the background of any hopeful suitor and decide whether he was worthy of his precious young girl.

My mother had many suitors.

On May 23, 1949, she married the most unlikely one. She had just turned twenty, two weeks earlier..

My father had little in common with her in his background, upbringing or family status. According to my mother, he wasn’t even handsome. "But he had a golden bracelet," she would say.

Having a golden bracelet, in my culture, is used as a metaphor for possessing a good, solid education to ensure a gainful employment, a respectable career and a secure future. It doesn’t refer to those whose wives support dozens of 24 karat golden wire bracelets on their arms as a sign of their affluence. Although, in time, my father was able to buy my mother at least half a dozen of such trinkets whose jingle always warned me of her whereabouts, just like the little bell on my cat’s collar lets me know that of his.

But more importantly my father, who had only a mother for a dependent, was the candidate my grandparents believed would make her happy.

My mother agreed.

She selected him over the dashing young medical doctor, who could possibly flirt with nurses and be unfaithful; or the tall, dark architect who had a lenience towards drinking; or the lieutenant; or the wealthy carpet trader.

Even as a young girl, my mother was practical and pragmatic in her choice of a mate and selected the skinny, dark haired, olive complexioned engineer who had just graduated from the Istanbul Technical University, whom she knew would be devoted to her.

Her parents could see a happy future for their daughter with this honest, shy, polite, young man untainted by big city life and gave them both their blessings.

Copyrighted Material ~ Copyright © 20068 ~ All Rights belong to Füsun Atalay

Dreaming of the Cyclamens

by

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright©

The city has become a ghost town

lined by houses with icicle beards.

A million diamonds flash in the

headlights of a solitary car.

Tires trapped in a treadmill

spin on ice-embedded roads

in the bone-naked chill

A candle flickers on a windowsill . . .

a remote sign of life — a fragile breath

suspended in the balance of a wick.

Streets have become ice tunnels

as branches surrender to their fate

with a heartbreaking bow

of ice-imprisoned limbs.

A sadness permeates this place,
a muteness floods my ears
and muffles the laughter of the past —
When trees stood tall

and

their branches were alive

we dreamt of softly awakening

to a velvet, chartreuse spring.

The wounds are deep;

and the gashes weep

for the child — untimely torn

from its mother's womb.

To the Ice Storm of 1998

Copyrighted Material ~ Copyright © 1998 All Rights belong to Füsun Atalay

The Nu Nollej
By:

Derek Pethik
News item: "A Saskatchewan educationalist asserts that producing rounded personalities is even more important than learning the niceties of grammar."

The Schoolman of course they all praised to the skies;
He was clearly the man for the task
Of bringing the best, whether thought or expressed,
To the earnest young people of Sask.

His learning was wide, and he pointed with pride
To the fact that his pupils were grounded
Not in cruel repression, but in Free Self Expression,
Which, of course, made them very well rounded.

"What’s the use of such fetters as capital letters,
Punctuation, grammar or similar crimes?"
So the Schoolman would cry, and the class would reply
"They are a quote out of tune with the times !"

"Other schools are such shams, with their tests and exams:
But we’ve got our brave Schoolman to bless;
He has kept our minds free of such fiddle-dee-dee,
—Or of anything else, we confess."

But at college embarked, where they had to be marked,
At exam time, just what was their rank?
To say it was zero might slender our hero,

So we’ll call it a (well-rounded) blank.

Respectfully dedicated to The Riverside School Board, its exalted administrators and educational consultants who have lost touch with the reality of the classroom, the daily struggles of their teachers' and the real needs of their students.

Romancing Romeo

Story and Photos

by:

Füsun Atalay

Copyright © 2005

For John Spencer, who operates a successful B&B in Hawkesbury, NS, as his livelihood, flying is a passion and a dream he wanted to realize ever since he was a boy of six when he saw a Cessna 185-9 float on the beach in his native Marystown. He never forgot how fascinated he was by the high plane with the large wings, and ever since then he promised to fly one day himself.

It would take several decades for John to come close to his dream of even owning his own plane. When he remembers Wabash, Labrador in 1982, and the major downsizing in Iron Ore that caused his lay off, he believes that many things in his life happened by chance towards making his dream come true.

Unemployed and with a young family, he decided to seek his fortune outside of Newfoundland and decided to go to Cape Breton where his parents had settled earlier. But as fate would have it, John's fortune was already waiting for him in the form of an advertising sing for a gas station for lease at the Big Harbour turn off, ten kilometres off Bedeck, Nova Scotia.

A man of man talents, John had taken an automotive trade in Happy Valley, Goose Bay in ‘81-82. So, within a week of leaving Newfoundland, he was operating Spencers' Irving and working hard to make it a success. Seven years later, having added a towing service and an auto selvage yard to his station, he felt it was time to move unto other ventures.

Before settling on their B&B, he operated several other businesses, but it was the B&B that afforded him the leisure of time and attention he can devote for his Piper Tomahawk on wheels, the object of his childhood dreams.

"Running a B&B is not a round the clock,365 days a year job," admits Spencer in his affable, gregarious manner. "It allows me time to fly whenever there’s good whether."

C-GRVK is the name given at the time of its registration, but to Spencer, the single engine Piper Tomahawk is better known as Romeo Victor Kilo, the call sign by which it can be identified anywhere in the world.

Romeo Victor Kilo had been operated by the Moncton Flight Centre since1979 as a new plane among one of their fleet of twenty. But even after it was put out of commission, it was kept as a certified airplane which meant that it was inspected and maintained in the same way as the others that were in use.

"They kept them all for their parts," says Spencer. "They had a fleet of twenty and stayed with a few, using the parts from the others to maintain the planes until they got just down to five."

"When I bought it in 1991, it really looked bad in the interior and the exterior. Un-matching doors, lots of trim, plastic and paint missing. I had to think of it as a winter’s project."

The plane was kept in an Airmax Hangar at Hawkesbury Airport, and it was Al McDonald, who assisted John with the repairs needed to get Romeo back into the skies with pride again.

McDonald is not only the director of the flight instruction school in Port Hawkesbury, but he is also the qualified AME (Airplane Mechanical Engineer) who performs the annual inspections before planes can be certified to fly.

Having received his private pilot’s licence in 1957, McDonald has been around for a while, and he’s used to flying around the sea in bush planes.

"I used to fly bush planes in winter when boats couldn’t come ‘round because of ice on the north side. So stuff used to be delivered by planes," he recalls, "even to Bull Island (?) and Ungava Bay."

Unfortunately no one in his family shares Spencer’s enthusiasm for flying, except for his seventy year old father who loves to accompany his son but cannot do so often because of the distance that sets them apart.

That does not deter Spencer from going up by himself every chance he gets.

"I’ve never been so much interested in the flying activity itself," he says, "but it was the ability to get way up there and see everything from above. I used to think how wonderful that would be to see everything like you were a bird."

Flight depends mostly on weather conditions, but he manages to average about one hundred hours a year.

"Flying provides an opportunity to meet interesting people- it’s like a brotherhood of pilots," he says. "All of us, from different walks of life, share an interest in flying and get together to organize activities."

He and wife Sharon like to attend fly-in breakfasts held every Saturday morning at various locales such as

Stanley between Windsor, NS, or Debert, an old military base. Although these fly-in breakfasts are held between May and December, because of their commitment to the B&B, the Spencers cannot participate until the end of tourist season in October.

"A lot of fly-ins promote flight safety," admits Spencer. Usually a qualified speaker from Transport Canada gives a seminar on safety, based on a recent flight-related accident and how it could have been avoided. With the audience from the fly-in breakfast and other listeners trickling in from the area these seminars, according to him, can be well-attended packing in a few hundred at times

Spencer, himself, is a reliable and seasoned pilot. His training includes dual and single hours required for a pilot’s licence as well as additional training for night rating.

He goes through an intense check list before even setting foot into the plane.

"If you don’t read the check list, you often forget something," he says jokingly as he goes through the pre flight check of all control surfaces, hinges, lights, control pads, hinge pins, oil, fuel, lose belts and properly secured wires, making sure nothing will fall.

Then he checks for water in the fuel, pointing that there are two fuel tanks on each part of the wing. "Each tank has a water drain- if there’s water, it’ll collect in the drain. Then you drain all the drain cocks and you’re fine," his voice carries the assurance of someone who knows what he is doing.

He checks the tail lights as he admits that he doesn’t go far. "Usually to places where there’s no landing fees like Summerside or Cable Head, PEI."

Once the pre flight check is complete and we are safely strapped in the two-seater that has been heating like an inferno under the afternoon sun, Spencer communicates by radio with the airport to establish the altimeter setting, strength and direction of the winds, whether there’s any other aircraft in the area, and asks to be notified of local traffic.

Finally he informs the airport authority: "Port Hawkesbury traffic, Romeo Victor Kilo is taxying into position runway two-nine."

There’s no response from the other end. This means there’s no conflict and we can take off. Within minutes we’re airborne and, at an altitude of 1200 feet above Cape Breton, taking in the beauty of the small island from a bird’s eye view.

I glance sideways at Spencer. He is in control of his destiny and looks like he is in heaven doing what he wanted to do ever since he was a six-year-old boy growing up in Marystown. And one of these days, he will complete that dream by flying his Piper Tomahawk back home to the very same beach where he succumbed to the passion of flying.

"It’s just a matter of time now," he says. "And some continued good weather."

Copyrighted Material ~ Copyright © 2005 All Rights belong to Füsun Atalay