questions: what was the first thing you did in turkey? the last?

I was just a baby when we moved to Turkey-- my memories are very few. I have no idea what the first or the last thing I did was, but it probably wasn't all that exciting. How much does a baby know about traveling? I probably didn't even understant what it meant to be in another country.

Here's what I do remember about Turkey: I remember standing on the edge of a curb and looking down, and thinking that the curb was frighteningly high, so I must have been very small. The whole memory is sort of yellow like an old photograph. I remember the sound of prayer calls-- not anything specific, but when I hear them or something like them (like Cheb Mami in that song Desert Rose), they have that deep and comforting sense of familiarity that only things from childhood ever really have. We heard them five times a day, every day for two years, so it's bound to be ingrained. I sort of remember the food-smells; I went to a Turkish restaurant once in London, and no matter how weird it sounded on the menu, none of it seemed strange in person.

Here's what I know from later conversations: We lived in Istanbul first, and later moved to Ankara before Lin was born. Most of mom's nurses didn't speak English, and Lin was the only blonde baby in the hospital. The smog was bad enough that in the winter, the cloth diapers would come in off the line dirtier than they went out, and sometimes it'd creep in like something from a horror movie and fill up buildings with fumes. Coal was the source of most fires at the time. Dad liked the bread, and sometimes a liquor that changed color when poured over ice (I think that was in Turkey). We lived not far from the Libyan Embassy, and near a market where mom shopped and people would give her a seat and feed us while she learned to haggle. The rug she got at one of the markets stayed in our livingroom until we came back to the states, and the prayer rug still hangs on the wall in their house. Mom used to have a set of shiny black prayer beads from there, and when it broke, all the beads were left in a drawer of the hutch; I used to open the drawer and play with them. Dad learned a little Turkish, and mom knew the words that helped with shopping and child-rearing at least. Our landlord was named Zeki-bey, and his wife Nerhan used to babysit us and would let me watch Bewitched on her little TV. On the holy days, people in the neighborhood would sacrifice animals on their front steps, and mom tried to stop us from seeing it, but we'd sneak to the window and ask questions anyway.

breaking my foot

I wish I had more pictures of when I was a kid; maybe I can save up some money and ask my mom to copy a bunch of them for me. Maybe not having them is why my memories are getting so faded?

Anyway.

When I was six, I broke my foot.

It was a gorgeous day. That, I remember, like it was bruned into my memory by the pain that followed. The sky was perfectly blue, it was sunny out, but not too hot, and I was in the playground of the complex across the street from ours with my friend Yuka who lived there. We were on the seesaw, one of the heavy, metal, old fashioned ones that were like flying. When I went up, I could see over the wall around her complex, and over the wall across the street to mine, where our mint-green building, the only one in the whole of Base Housing on Kadena Airbase, was. We lived in the second townhouse from the outside wall, next to Toko and Charlie Brown (I don't remember the husband / father's name. Mr Brown?), and on the other side of us was Heather and Mariah. My brother had a crush on Heather; she was a Bluebird Scout (or something like that-- a different sort of Girl Scout who wore blue), and I was jealous because I wanted a sash.

I'd been up a few times, and I kept getting distracted by the distance I could see. I always liked looking far off, being high up. I was the sort of kid who climbed walls and then jumped off them to see if I could fly if I kicked hard enough when I pushed off. Maybe Yuka was bored with the seesaw. Maybe she tried to warn me. I don't know; all I know is that I blamed her afterward, and thougt I saw her laughing, but now I'm not so sure of that part.

She jumped off, when I was up, and I fell like a sack of rocks, like a pile of bricks. I landed on my own foot under the seat-- it was the kind of seesaw that went all the way to the ground-- and crushed my own foot. My memory goes deaf here; there was probably a crushing, crunching sound, and I certainly felt it, but I didn't hear it. I got up, and pain shot through my leg, and I couldn't put any weight on my foot at all, and part of me separated off and floated a little to the side of the rest of me, watching as I floundered around, trying to go home, only wanting to go home, and not able to put any weight on my foot at all, not even able to hop becuse that shook it so that it felt like all my bones in my body were separated. I was screaming. I'd started as soon as I came down, and I screamed hard enough that my mom heard me in the kitchen a block away. The gate into the complex wasn't on that side, and I was terrified that mom would leave, but she was trapped on the other side of the wall, and I couldn't get to the gate. Then someone picked me up-- a father from one of the houses around the playground, someone I don't think I'd ever met before, but maybe he recognized me, or just recognized a kid in pain-- and lifted me over the wall into my mom's arms. The wall seemed so high; it was amazing that I was over it. That option hadn't even occured to me, and it was like some giant had picked me up and put me back into the world I came from.

Things get sort of choppy and strange after that; I was probably about to pass out either from the pain or the screaming / lack of oxygen.

I remember dad coming home, and it was the middle of the afternoon, so mom must've called him. Dad was a coach, so when he took my shoe off and held onto my ankle, and tried to bend my foot, that separate part of me was relieved; dad knew what to do with injuries. My shoe looked so small, and his voice was so calm, and it hurt worse once the pressure was off.

I don't remember going to the hospital, but I remember the hallway like it was too bright, and the x-ray room like it was too dark, and I remember the lady trying to get my foot into the right angle and not being able to get it to do what she wanted. That was scary; I thought it was ruined. They were talking about growth plates and stunted development, and I thought I'd have a six-year-old foot forever, no matter how big the other foot got.

I remember the half cast going on as sort of the same memory as remembering the full cast going on-- but the full cast came two weeks later, after the swelling had gone down and the crack in the bone above my big toe was revealed. At first, they thought it was just a sprain of the ankle, even though I remember telling them it was my foot.

I remember the first night the way someone might remember being tortured in a foreign prison; I had the top bunk, and there was no way I could reach it, so my mom pulled the matress off and I slept on the floor, and it felt wrong, being so close to the ground, and it was cold, but it hurt so bad that no matter how cold I got, I kept getting hot again, and no matter how tired I was, I couldn't sleep. Kiddy painkillers just aren't up to the feel of a broken bone.

Then there's a scattering of memories about the nine weeks I had that cast on-- which felt like a year or three to my six-year-old self. I remember climbing trees. I remember trying to climb the bars at the playground on our side (I don't think I went back to Yuka's side again; at least, not for a long time), and getting mad because the cast kept my ankle from gripping the pole. I figured it out anyway. I remember getting in trouble because I kept getting things inside the cast, and I remember mom vaccuuming the sand out after a trip to the playground's sand pit. I remember how much it itched, and sticking pencils and cold pennies and wire hangers down in it, trying to get the itching to stop. I remember bathing with my foot out of the tub, which meant I was almost laying down in the water, or I was half-out of the shower, and finally figuring out how to tie a bag around my leg so I could put my foot down because it was so awkward and painful otherwise. I remember learning how to use crutches when they gave me the full cast, and really loving how fast I could go, so much faster than my own short legs-- I felt like a landstrider from the Dark Crystal and sometimes pretended I was one. I remember the little rubber heel being walked off, and them having to give me a new cast; this was before fiberglass casts, and it was all plaster; sometimes I'd write on the sidewalk with my heel like it was chalk. At my checkups, mom and dad would take me to the giftshop and let me pick up a toy; I got a stuffed potato, because they were my favorite vegetables, and a stuffed pea pod because it was cute, and a little red bird that chortled when I shook it. I remember mom trying to clip my nails, and failing because two of my toes were lost behind the plaster so that they had to remove ingrown nails when they traded out the cast later. I remember not wanting to talk to Yuka, but I think the parents made us get over it. She was my friend again later on.

And I remember the day the took the cast off, how soft and squishy and small my foot felt, how the ground was too far away without several inches of cast under my foot, and how the foot brace they gave me was worse than the cast was. My leg was pale like a grub, and wrinkled, and smaller than my other leg, and it freaked me out becaue it felt like it belonged to someone else, not me.

I found out long after that just before that day of screaming, my mom had filled in one eye of the Daruma she'd gotten somewhere, and wished for a healthy and happy family, and since I'd broken my foot, the Daruma never got his other eye filled in. I used to look at it and wonder why it only had one eye, and then when I found out, I felt guilty that it was my fault; if I hadn't broken my foot, it'd have two eyes and could see properly.

I remember...

Well, I remember alot of stuff, and I really want to keep remembering it, but as I ease into the Golden Years of my thirties, I've had this revelation: All the best things I did (well, most of them), and most of the really interesting things I've seen and places I've been to, all the really wonderful parts of what combined to make me who I am, all that happened more than half my life ago, and it's starting to get chopped down to images, lists of plot points, solid little framed ideas of what I used to remember. My brain's getting full-up, and I want to keep hold of all the good and bad and me things that are stored there.

So I'm going to write it all down. And you can't stop me. So there.

Some of it will just be me describing those images, the early memories, the eroded parts that remain of things I haven't thought about in ages. Some of it will be much more detailed, better understood and more recent memories. Some of it's probably going to be almost entirely made up as I replace lost memories with better things that make better stories, or rearrange facts without realizing it. Dude, I'm a writer. It's what I do.

And one day, this is going to be a book, because one day, everything I ever think is going to be a book, and it'll be awesome. Probably, I'll get feedback from the family about it all-- I've already sent an envelope of something like a hundred and fifty questions to my mom to get her writing her own memoirs, and my sister and brother and sometimes even my dad are answering them, too, when they can, and I'll be doing that, eventually, and that will be a book, too. This is just how I remember things pertaining to me, and I won't even pretend that it's not slanted. It's entirely slanted. It's slanted so much it's practically a flat line that leads all the way back to my brith, when my first memories started forming, and I'm pretty sure I opened my eyes for the first time and went, "Damn, I wish I knew how to write so I could document this moment", except everyone mistook it for a first wail. I have pictures my dad took; it's obvious that I was looking forward to knowing how to write.

So tune in for the inside of my head!