A few weeks ago, the ducks were dressed for the pandemic, with white masks stretched adorably, but poignantly, across their bills.

Now however, they have changed into gardening outfits. One carries a tiny rake and bag of leaves, the other a bough of wisteria.

The ducks are moving on, and soon we will be, too.

My pandemic job has been to stay home. While others have been treating the afflicted and providing essential services, I’ve faced the diaphanous challenge of filling long hours at home. It’s been odd and irritating, but I’ve learned to cope–and to change.

My husband and I have been running errands together, something we previously considered inefficient. Every week, we deliver supplies to my mother in her new care center (thankfully, residents are virus-free) north of the city. Then we loop back to our neighborhood grocery store and adjacent bakery, returning home in less than an hour, thanks to incredibly light traffic. I will miss that, but this week, my husband has been busier and I’ve begun venturing out on my own. It feels good.

I take walks with two neighborhood friends several times each week. Like ducks, we proceed in V formation, six feet apart. Each week is both warmer and greener, and that hour or so of activity anchors my day.

As shelter-in-place rules were coming down, an immigrant friend twenty-five years my junior texted, “I can make your grocery shopping for you.” I was touched, but have felt comfortable going to the store. Seven weeks in, I am still exhilarated—penne! paper towels! shower cleaner!—when I find something I didn’t expect. Our food supply chain is amazing!

When our house arrest began, I was due for a haircut, but that appointment was cancelled and I wondered what I was going to do. In my twenties, I used to cut my husband’s hair, and now we’ve decided to be each other’s barbers. We’ve been through two rounds and are still speaking to each other. A subtle blessing, but I’ll be relieved to see my usual stylist, hopefully sometime soon.

I am apparently not alone in enjoying the lack of social pressure. In the New York Times, Larry David commented, “I will say that the lack of invitations, OK, that’s been fantastic.”  A confirmed introvert, I no longer fret that someone hasn’t gotten in touch, or wonder if I’m being remiss in not seeing a particular friend. I don’t feel like a loser on Friday and Saturday nights if I don’t have plans. And the “share the peace” handshake in church, which I’ve never liked, is probably gone forever.

I’m also grateful for gratefulness. The brilliant work of nurses, doctors and other health care workers has been an overdue revelation. And a bright contrast to pandemic wreckage is the Minnesota spring, early this year. It is surely the most colorful and fragrant ever—or am I simply noticing it more fully? Whatever, it fills me with hope.

Inspiration characterizes almost every quiet day. It is a joy to observe the leadership of governors from Washington to California to Ohio. Tim Walz has been calm and competent. And Andrew Cuomo’s hard-hitting, heartfelt updates are a crucial, reassuring part of my day.

I’ve discovered that extra time, even when it’s bundled with boredom, brings forth new ideas. Well-rested, I generate new writing, sketch out future trips, and plan possible home improvements. Like many others, I am trying new recipes (Turkish poğacas recently), and I even started taking an online class: Renaissance Art History!

Every day I check pandemic happenings in other states. How is California doing? What about Louisiana? New Jersey? Reading about acts of selflessness around the nation makes me realize how much we all have in common, and I’m daring to hope we might finally appreciate the role government plays in our quality of life.

As I write this, I look out my window and see folks walking and riding bikes. My neighbor is carrying a leaf bag, just like one of those iron ducks. I’m glad change is coming, but don’t want to forget the subtle blessings this quarantine, these forty or so quiet days, has provided.

For more reading, go to:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/opinion/covid-gratitude.html

The post As the Shutdown Starts to Fade, Recalling its Subtle Blessings appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.

I recalled our own look-see visit in January, 2010, sixteen months ago. It seemed like years ago, the city wintry and strange and both of us tentative, intimidated. Now Istanbul was in full spring bloom—and increasingly it felt like home.

Before I answered Sankar, I hesitated. I’d gotten used to spending my evenings doing two seemingly contradictory activities: resting and obsessing about the next day’s teaching. But I knew this wasn’t really making me a better teacher. On the few occasions when I hadn’t given the next day much thought, my lessons had turned out just fine. I decided I could go out to dinner, carry on a conversation, and perhaps even get home after my bedtime without professional disaster.

I didn’t hold out much hope, however, that we would become friends with this new couple. I had rarely found 3Mers kindred spirits. In Sankar’s thirty years with the company, we had been to an array of Christmas parties, anniversary dinners, and marketing and technical banquets. The events always featured cocktail hours in which I made small talk with accompanying spouses, mostly female. Then we sat down to eat and made more small talk. I don’t know if others began friendships at these events, but I generally found the conversations strained.

Sankar ‘s colleagues liked him, and he spoke positively about nearly everyone at the office, but he was focused and highly competitive, and rarely thought to ask a colleague to do something outside the office. Except for taking an occasional international visitor out for dinner, the two of us did not have a 3M social life.

Now I told myself to expect an evening of light chitchat, with the exception that I might have to answer a few questions about how to settle in and adjust to Turkey.

The next Tuesday evening, Waverley and Ray Eby arrived at our house for hors d’oeuvres. They were both tall and thin, Ray with dark hair and Waverley with pale blond hair and skin, wearing stylish pink glasses. We sat on the balcony with glasses of merlot and bowls of pistachios. They exclaimed at the view—Judas trees were in full flower and dotted the forested coastline in purple—and started to talk. Before I knew it, an hour had passed and we were late for our dinner reservation down on the Sea Road.

The pair described interesting, unusual lives. Both hailed from Mississippi, yet surprisingly had no trace of Southern accents. They had spent a year in their twenties trailing the Grateful Dead around the U.S.; had both obtained law degrees; and then had moved to Washington, D.C, Waverley to teach at Georgetown Law School, and Ray to study in the Great Books program at St. John’s College. They now lived in St. Paul with five children ranging in age from six to eighteen, the youngest three adopted and African American. Waverley, now a stay-at-home mother, talked about the varied personalities of her kids and the challenges of relocating a large family overseas, but mostly expressed enthusiasm about the transfer.

The four of us sat for hours that evening—next day’s teaching be damned. With the setting sun’s rays glancing off the water and onto the old seaside houses of Asia, we discussed the merits of various Istanbul neighborhoods, the best strategies to get to work, and the multitude of must-see Turkish attractions.

When the topic of what I did in Turkey came up, Sankar broke in, to my surprise, telling them about my job, and announcing that “Sue works harder than I do.” I wasn’t sure that was true, but it was gratifying to hear the pride in his voice. And it was also gratifying to hear myself produce confident information about grocery stores, newcomer groups, farmer’s markets, and expatriate outings. This pair seemed to be bringing out the best in us. How lucky we were that they would soon be our neighbors.

In any move to a new place the adjustments—to climate, work, friendships, getting around—all take place concurrently. When the move is overseas and language and culture are thrown in, this can be overwhelming. Everything is new, everything demands extra attention at the same time. But then all of the adjustments start to wane—also concurrently—and there comes a point at which not much is new anymore. I was just arriving at that point, discovering that I finally possessed some understanding of what had been, up until recently, a completely foreign place.

When had I arrived at this new level of competence? Had the new knowledge come in gradually, dripping in with each new experience, as if through an IV? Or had it rushed in one night when I slept, relaxed and unaware?

The feeling—not entirely unfamiliar, as I’d also experienced it in Yemen and Costa Rica—was pure exhilaration. It was as if I had extra space in my lungs or enhanced vision to see all the color and beauty around me. And this exhilaration had a physical component as well, a loosening in my shoulders and a decrease in the amount of muscle strain I habitually felt. I wasn’t as tense every time I went out; often I was barely tense at all. I caught myself smiling instead of frowning in concentration, and I was now able to step back calmly and patiently when a situation looked to be challenging.

From here on, new adjustments would pop up, but they would no longer be the norm; they would occur against a background of relative ease. Now I could finally put myself into a Turkish context and see, instead of a middle-aged, struggling expatriate, a woman with some competence, kind of like the woman I had been back home. I wasn’t yet a pro here; I had misses in addition to hits, but the wider brushstrokes of the culture now made sense. Perhaps best of all, this newfound confidence freed up emotional energy, making space for flexibility toward new situations Sankar and I were bound to face, and changes in routine that were ahead.

At Özyeğin, big Nergis announced a different schedule for summer. We teachers would teach fifteen, not twenty hours each week: five hours on each of three days. A few months before, the idea of standing in front of a class for five hours would have thrown me. But now it didn’t. I grimaced, but knew that I could do it. Besides, the up-side was two days off each week.

And summer would bring visitors. In early June, just as the school year was ending, Laurie, my mainstay in the months before I moved to Turkey, and her husband, John, were planning to arrive from the States.

I was looking forward to our friends’ visit, and to being a more skillful hostess than I’d been earlier. At the beginning, with our earliest guests, we had simply been clueless. With Jonathan we’d walked the long way through hot streets to catch a cab. We had piled in the car to take Jean and Mary to the Old City, only to sit in fierce traffic as the tram glided past us toward the attractions. We visited the Hagia Sophia at peak hours, and showed up at the scenic Hamdi restaurant with no reservations, annoying the staff. Now we knew better. In fact we had already identified and then paid a visit to the hotel in the Old City where Laurie and John wanted to spend their anniversary night, to make sure it was a suitable choice.

Laurie and John had almost cancelled their visit. The media frenzy over the recent news of Osama bin Laden’s capture and death had unnerved them, convincing them that a Muslim country would be unfriendly to visiting Americans.

I knew there was no need to be afraid; I knew our visitors wouldn’t be in any danger. How did I know this? Well, first of all, I’d observed the Turkish reaction. At ÖzU, just hours after the news came (we found out early on Monday, May 2; it was evening on Sunday, May 1 in the U.S.), a Turkish colleague mentioned it at a staff meeting, commenting that she was pleased, but that it was never good news when someone died. Another Turk expressed disbelief, and yet another shook her head and remarked, “he’s been dead for years.” After less than a minute, the conversation turned to other topics. At 3M, Sankar heard no comment at all, and neither of us had heard anything after that day.

And beyond that, I had simply taken in enough that I could now surmise that, unless one of their own was harmed, Turks were generally blasé about Middle Eastern mayhem. I also knew, however, that it is difficult to counter fear, to soothe people with the unconvincing sounding, “Don’t worry, nothing is going to happen.” I waited a few days to reply to the message Laurie had sent, and during those days, coverage in the U.S. dropped, and they decided to go ahead with their trip.

Our plans were to show Laurie and John around Istanbul and then, since my spring teaching module would be over, accompany them southwest to Ephesus and environs. I knew ÖzU was going to give us teachers a weeklong break before its summer session began, but our department was on a different schedule from the rest of the university and, typically, big Nergis hadn’t announced when our week off would begin.

As the module and exams finished, she sent a memo saying, “teachers must stay at school all day Wednesday to finalize grading.” Drat. We had planned to leave town with Laurie and John that morning.

What to do? We decided Sankar would drive Laurie and John down to Ephesus early on Wednesday, as planned. Then, at some expense, I would catch an evening flight from Istanbul to Izmir and hire a car to drive me to Ephesus.

SELI had scheduled a potluck for Wednesday noon, and had posted a food and beverage signup sheet in the conference room. Nearly half of the teachers had scribbled “beer” or “wine” on the sheet. I found this surprising—I still expected Muslims to eschew alcohol—but I missed the larger clue about the actual length of our workday.

On Wednesday morning, we entered our students’ scores into the ÖzU system and discussed close cases individually with Big Nergis. Then lunch—and ample tippling—began. After that, to my surprise, everybody packed up and left for home. They had all known the workday would end after lunch. But since my flight didn’t leave until 6 pm, I remained, sitting alone in a strangely silent office. When, inevitably, Nergis came by and peered in, asking, “What are you doing here, Susan?” I could only laugh ruefully: another learning experience.

Sankar and I spent a day touring Ephesus with Laurie and John. Then we headed to the coastal resort town of Çesme (fountain). It was Friday afternoon and the weather was perfect, but the roads and beaches were nearly deserted. We even had the hotel pool to ourselves. Standing outside a carpet shop where Sankar was helping Laurie and John negotiate for a kilim, I figured out the reason.

First, although it was mid-June, schools were still in session, so families with children were not yet free for vacation travel. And second, a national election was scheduled for Sunday, just two days hence. I was pretty sure Turks who wished to vote—and current Prime Minister Erdoğan, running for his third term, inspired strong feelings, both positive and negative—needed to remain in their home precincts. Ha! It was our beginner’s luck to have picked the best possible summer weekend to visit the Aegean coast.

I stood, preening over my deduction skills. Looking at the shops nearby, the Turks walking past, and even the ocean peeking from behind the streets of shops, I realized they no longer looked so foreign. They looked like places I could figure out, places where I could, with just a bit of effort, understand and be understood.

We had planned to return to Istanbul from Çesme Saturday afternoon after some sunbathing. But in Turkey, historical sites always beckon, and there on our map, less than fifty miles out of our way, were the ruins of Pergamon, an ancient Greek city perched on a hilltop outside the town of Bergama. The four of us decided to take off from Çesme early to squeeze in the ruins, and Sankar and I felt confident enough to follow a new route and still make our late afternoon ferry reservations.

After briefly getting lost driving through modern Izmir, we arrived in Bergama. To our surprise, traffic was heavy. What was going on? As we inched along Ataturk Bulvari, I noticed a plethora of temporary-looking street signs and, with a little help from my pocket dictionary, was able to determine that the town was expecting a campaign stop that day from Kemal Kiliçdaroğlu the main opposition party’s candidate for prime minister. We managed to turn off the main road, circle the town, and locate the gondola up to the majestic ruins, serenely perched high above the commotion.

The next morning, as we dropped Laurie and John off at the airport, we learned that Mr. Erdoğan had won, with 49.8 percent of the vote.

The summer module—fifty talkative Intermediate students, all of whom managed to fail the course—ended in late July, and I packed up and headed back to Minnesota for the month of August. Sankar would follow. This routine was the same as it had been when we lived in Costa Rica, except now the back-to-school items I was looking for (mainly better whiteboard markers, which I planned to hoard) were for me, not for Angela and Greg.

I carried a list of household items to buy at Target—ziplock bags, ranch dressing mix, canned pumpkin—that due to their unavailability had become almost talismanic. I was sure I’d be a much happier person when I had these things with me in Istanbul.

In mid-August, Sankar arrived, and we attended a near-daily round of get-togethers with friends and family. We had been home just seven months earlier, but this time something was different: neither of us could stop talking about Turkey. About the friendly, hard-working people. About Turkish cuisine, bursting with fresh vegetables. About municipal services—roads, buses, subways, boats—that were in excellent repair—what a contrast to our own recession-neglected infrastructure. Sankar wanted people to know that, although Turks were Muslim, they tended to keep their religion to themselves. And with India’s chaotic crowds in mind, he sang praises about the orderliness of Turkish public spaces. Finally, we both raved about the historical sites we’d seen. All of this may have bored our listeners, but at least the two of us were thinking along the same lines.

While we were in Minnesota, Waverley and Ray and their brood arrived in Istanbul and begun settling in. Since we were away, Umit was assigned to drive them around. It was Ramazan, however—and this meant he was refraining from eating and drinking during the daytime hours. It was a sign that we had emerged from our newcomer self-centeredness that we worried about him sitting, thirsty, in a hot car day after day, waiting for the Eby’s to complete myriads of newcomer errands.

In late August, Sankar and I flew back to Istanbul. We noticed that the construction across the street from our apartment had progressed, and that our apartment swimming pool—in full operation this year—was now surrounded by colorful patio furniture. Our upstairs neighbors, Sema and Pinar, greeted us like long-lost friends. It was a delight to put our new items away and to skillfully restock our apartment with groceries, and I reflected on how busy and happy the last few months had been.

“I’m going to the yarn bazaar tomorrow,” said the voice on the phone. I had answered it in surprise; my Turkish cell phone rarely rang. It was Waverley, calling to see if I wanted to join her and perhaps take in a historic mosque or two.

The yarn bazaar? I had never heard of a yarn bazaar, even though I enjoyed knitting. How had Waverley found out about a place like this so soon? It looked like I was going to have to be quick to keep up with her! The outing sounded like great fun, but alas, I had to say no. The next day, in fact most of the remaining days of 2011, I would be in the classroom.

The post In The Know appeared first on Sue's Turkish Adventures.

A weekday afternoon in late October. I’d spent much of it sitting in the green armchair next to our east window, reading and watching ripples on the Bosphorus. The temperature was in the sixties, but the stiff breeze wafting in from the balcony seemed a portent of upcoming winter.

We had finished buying what we needed to furnish our apartment, our final purchase a couple of 6 x 9 kilims for the living and dining rooms. I had just started a new Turkish class, this time with helpful teacher Ferda. Monica was in my class again, along with four Japanese matrons and a young Polish woman. My book group had settled into its new reading list. My life here was still a thin broth, but it was gradually getting richer.

I put my book down and stood up. Then I began to tidy the apartment. I loaded the dishwasher and put some clothes in the wash. I emptied wastebaskets. Then, garbage bag in hand, I headed downstairs and outside to the metal dumpsters that sat across the street, Yalı Sokak (waterside street) from our building.

The door to our unit locked automatically. I usually left it ajar for brief trips downstairs, but a breeze could blow it shut. The door to the building also had an automatic lock, but it could be propped it open with the doormat. Still, whenever I left our apartment, I carried my house keys.

A tall chain link fence enclosed our complex. A black metal access door was built into it. For some reason this door was never locked. From the outside, you simply pushed it open. From inside, you pulled. Sema and Pinar, the longest residents of the building and the go-to folks for any concerns, obviously felt two layers of security were enough.

I pulled the black metal door open, crossed the road, lifted the lid of the dumpster, and tossed in my bag of garbage.

Then I walked back to enter the complex. I pushed on the metal door, but oddly, it resisted, so I pushed again. It wouldn’t open. To my surprise, it seemed to be locked.

How could this be? This gate had been unlocked every time we’d used it in our four and a half months here.

Perhaps one of my keys would work. I pulled them out of my pocket and tried one, and then the other, in the small unused-looking keyhole. No luck. I stood, dumbfounded. What should I do?

I tried my keys again. The door wouldn’t budge.

It was just before 3 pm. Sankar wouldn’t be home from work until 7 or so. I didn’t have my cell phone with me so I couldn’t call and let him know what had happened. Nor could I call and ask Ümit to come and help out. I was wearing flip flops and had no money on me, thus a walk down the steep hill to wait at Starbucks wasn’t a good option. The air was getting colder.

Could I climb over the door? Its smooth surface didn’t look like it would allow purchase. Furthermore, stretching either direction along the top of the surrounding fence were silver coils of razor wire.

I noticed some ivy growing just to the left of the metal door, and pushed it aside. Now I could see a twin black metal door, this one bolted in place. There were eight or ten buttons on it, lined up vertically. I’d never seen them before. Our apartment’s intercom system was located inside, next to the building door itself. For each tenant there was a nameplate and a button connecting to the appropriate apartment. These outside buttons looked like an older system.

I decided to try them anyway. I pushed every button on the console, moving from top to bottom and then back up again. I heard no sound, and couldn’t tell whether they were working or not.

Was anyone else at home? When Sankar traveled, I was sometimes the only one in the building. Aylin, on the first floor, was a divorcee with teenaged twin daughters in boarding school and a second home in Switzerland. Sema and Pinar were often traveling: to Bodrum, Turkey’s playground for the wealthy, to their second home in Florida, and even, recently, to Argentina. Their son, Can (John), lived on the first floor, but his apartment was undergoing renovation and I didn’t think he currently occupied it.

Nilufer and Erdi, a retired couple, lived in the third floor apartment opposite ours. They were often around, but I knew they had a son in the States who they visited. A carefully-groomed, well-dressed woman in her late sixties, Nilufer had stopped in one day to introduce herself, saying she and Erdi would like to invite us over for dinner. All of the residents spoke good English.

Our neighborhood, referred to as Kortel Korusu, Kortel’s grove, was full of three- to five-story apartment buildings, but we didn’t know a soul in any of them besides ours, not even by sight. Down the hill from us, facing the Bosphorus, were a series of lavish houses, some with front offices staffed by guards. Only the wealthiest İstanbulus lived in private homes. Asking residents—or employees—of these homes for help didn’t seem like a good option.

More pushing buttons. More silence. I looked around. What a stupid dilemma. And here I had been feeling so good today. Only this morning I had congratulated myself for reaching a new comfort level here, for feeling calmer and less anxious than usual.

I had come a long way from my early, error-filled days. Since arriving in June I had: walked smack into a plate glass window at a mall entrance; held up the line at the butcher’s while I struggled to ask for “ground” meat; memorized the first two letters of our car’s license plate so I’d recognize it when Ümit picked me up, only to find that every Istanbul license plate started with the same two letters; and inadvertently used a vulgar Turkish word with Ümit inside a tiny store, and then repeated it louder when, ashen-faced, he asked me what I was trying to say. But in the last month, things had started to settle down. Much of what had been unfamiliar was finally becoming familiar, and that gave me a feeling of great accomplishment.

But now this. If nobody was in the building, I’d have to wait here, shivering in the fall air.

No one walking down our quiet narrow street would fail to notice an ill-dressed, middle-aged foreigner alongside a locked gate and ask what was wrong. How I hated sticking out, especially now, when I wasn’t in control of the situation. And I didn’t even have the words to explain what had happened. Funny, back in Yemen there had been an incident of a locked door—I couldn’t remember the details—but it had caused me to learn the Arabic words for open, closed, and locked. I could still remember them. But I didn’t know these words in Turkish.

I loathed the thought of standing here all afternoon looking like a fool. It was an assault on my pride, my dignity.

How quickly a day here could turn from cozy and comfortable to helpless—and even, given the cold air, a little desperate.

Wait. What was that clanging noise? Was someone at home after all? I peeked through a gap between the metal door and the chain link fence. A stout, diminutive woman wearing an apron over a light blue dress was coming toward the gate. I didn’t know who she was, but I was elated to see her. The buttons had worked! I gasped with thanks as she pulled the door open for me, and tried to explain in Turkish that it had been locked from the outside. She smiled, half-comprehending, and I stepped inside.

The woman accompanied me up to third floor and I realized she was Nilufer’s cleaning lady. She and I were the only ones in the building. Thank goodness she’d been here.

Back in our apartment, I sat, shaken, for some time. Then I called Sankar and told him what had happened. We theorized that someone, most likely one of the other tenants, had decided that the outside gate now needed to be locked, but had failed to inform the rest of us. Sankar said he thought we’d initially been given keys for that gate, but had never put them on our key rings. “I’ll look for them when I get home tonight,” he promised.

Once I’d calmed down I wrote an email to our apartment’s listserv, briefly describing what had happened and telling everyone to make sure to have a key for the gate from now on.

Just after 6:45 pm, Sankar phoned from the outside gate, and I walked downstairs to let him in. Nilufer was arriving in her car. Sankar and I waited for her and the three of us walked through the garden and into the building. I mentioned that I’d been locked out and asked her if she knew anything about the new lock on the gate. She said she did not.

At that moment, I recalled something that had happened that morning. I’d seen some workers coming out of Nilufer’s  apartment, and had later walked past the same guys doing some work near the gate. It was suddenly clear that these workers had had something to do with the new lock.

“Were those your workers here this morning?” I asked Nilufer.

“Yes.”

“Did you tell them to lock the gate?”

“No,” with a kind of half smile on her face.

“Well, do you know how the gate got locked?”

“No,” still smiling. “I had nothing to do with it.”

“Could your workers have accidentally done something?”

“I didn’t do anything,” finality in her voice.

I didn’t believe her. And—I don’t know whether it was Nilufer’s odd smile or her failure to acknowledge what had happened to me, or both—but I felt anger rising. I wanted an admission of error; I wanted someone to take responsibility for what had happened.

“It was your workers, Nilufer. Your workers locked the door.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

We had reached the landing between our two apartments. I had left our door open, and now I stepped inside. Somehow I had my Turkish notebook in my hand, with loose papers sticking out of it. I wasn’t sure how it had gotten there. My anger was making me feel hyper-aware, but I was actually in a kind of fugue state.

With the apartment door open and Nilufer facing Sankar and me from the landing, I raised my notebook high over my head and then slammed it down on the floor. It made a wonderfully loud smack, perfectly punctuating my words, “It’s your fault!”

Sankar closed the door behind us without a word as I hissed, “She’s a liar!” He said nothing, but headed upstairs to change his clothes. I picked up my notebook and scattered papers, and went into the kitchen to make supper. He made scant conversation at dinner and then disappeared into the upstairs TV room until bedtime. I couldn’t recall him ever being so silent.

Regrets came quickly. I was a guest here in Turkey, and I’d insulted a Turk.  I had embarrassed myself—and Sankar. Was there ever an instance when being an angry foreigner was acceptable?

When Umit arrived the following day, he showed me the tiny lever on the edge of the gate that had to be pushed intentionally and with some effort into a new position in order for the gate to lock. I still didn’t know whether Nilufer, perhaps with some concern about crime, had directed her workers to move the lever, or whether they had done it on their own. I would run into her from time to time during the next two years, and we would nod to each other, but we never discussed the incident again.

It seemed I had reached some kind of emotional limit that day, a culmination of all the stresses of the last five months. I was beginning to recognize the unpredictable, combustible emotions inside of me. They had even provoked me to physical action, something I had never taken before.

But I had only been outside for ten minutes. Why had I become so angry?

It didn’t take long for the answer to become clear. It related to my personal competence, much valued, but shattered when I moved to Istanbul. Costa Rica and Yemen had been simpler places, but Turkey, Istanbul in particular, was far more complex than what I was used to. Every day since I arrived, I’d been slowly and patiently trying to put this important piece of myself back together again. Practicing Turkish, pumping other expatriates and Ümit for information, poring over guidebooks, studying maps to become familiar with the landscape. And progress had come. Slowly and sometimes almost imperceptibly, it had come: patience and persistence were paying off.

Until today, until this afternoon. Just hours ago, I’d seen all those months of effort disappear. In front of my home, in front of the place where I relaxed and let my guard down, I’d seen myself turn into a helpless, tongue-tied, middle-aged foreigner. Disturbing. Pitiful.

And even though I hadn’t ended up standing outside in the cold for hours, the fear of it happening had been enough to unhinge me.

I recalled that, in the cultural training we’d had before we left Minnesota, we had talked at some length with a long-term American resident of Istanbul. He told us that Turks, though warm and generous, are often hesitant to admit responsibility for errors. I asked Sankar if he was finding this true at work and he said yes, Turkish colleagues often denied saying or doing things even when it was clear they had. Fear of harsh consequences, Sankar felt was the reason.

There was that “f” word again. Fear. It certainly had a lot of power.

I wish I could say I underwent some serious self-examination after this incident. I didn’t, however. I simply hoped this kind of provocation would be rare here.

I did vow to be more self-aware the next time a situation made me stand out as stupid, and inevitably other incidents occurred. One took place on a bus I was boarding to go from Beşiktaş back home to Arnavutkoy. I swiped my IstanbulKart as payment, but the bus’ scanner wouldn’t accept it. I tried several more times, people crowding behind me to board (Turks, like Americans, show their impatience with sighs and the shuffling of feet). Finally I had to push my way back off the bus and take a cab home.

The next day I asked Ümit to take me to get my card replaced, but the clerk at the office replied there was nothing wrong with it. I insisted—it hadn’t worked, after all—but he refused and looked dismissively beyond me to the next customer. Frustrated, I got back into the car and started expounding to Ümit. But then I caught myself and calmed down. I couldn’t let my fear of looking stupid control me. I’d just have to accept that things would happen, that over and over again here I was going to wear the dunce cap. And the clerk was right: my card worked fine thereafter.

Later I realized that, if I stopped and thought, I could probably turn just about any mistake here into something positive. I knew this because we were experiencing graciousness from Turks over and over again. Turks got up from their tables at sidewalk cafes to direct us into tight parking spots. Turks walked up to us in provincial towns to ask if we needed directions. They stopped alongside our car at highway tollbooths to offer us the use of their prepaid cards. Once, when I inadvertently drove past an open electronic arm into an apartment complex only to have the arm lower and prevent me from exiting, the owners of a florist shop on the premises invited me in and plied me with tea while I waited for help.

Being locked out of my apartment complex, though inconvenient and embarrassing, would not have been catastrophic. Had I stood outside for any period of time, Turks would have stopped and helped me. Not my rich neighbors in their cars, busy and oblivious, but the more ordinary Turks making their way on foot down the hill. They would have asked what was the matter and then offered assistance, at the very least the use of a cell phone.

Even the IstanbulKart situation had a heartwarming solution. “If you ever have another problem with your card, just look around the bus. Someone will offer you theirs to swipe. You can then pay them back in Turkish Lira,” a friend advised me. I only had to put aside my own fear of foolishness.

I was going to be in this complex, baffling country for only three years. I would have to count on confusion—unexpected, random bewilderment—as part of life here. Regardless of my efforts, being in control and comprehending what was going on were going to be the exception here, not the rule. I would have to put aside my fear and deal constructively with uncertainty whenever it made its arrival. I would have to learn grace and patience—and also humility. The latter an important “getting older” skill.

I was always going to be on the other side of a fence here. Fences are not easy to embrace, but I would have to try.

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