TLC - 10 Ankara 2008

Brown rolling hills said, Open sesame. Shazam. 1,001 Arabian Nights shared stories inside stories. Dervish mystic dancers wheeling in trances welcomed his spirit.

Lucky learned the majority of Turks suffered from anxiety. They took anti-depressants called Xanax to calm psychotic neurosis. Symptoms of overwhelming sadness dressed citizens in rose petals between self-pity, loathing and thorns.

Ankara was a boring, cold capital city filled with sad administrative paper-pushing androids. He’d accepted a teaching/facilitating TLC job with an acquisition cycle.

A part-time female teacher from South Africa married to an English environmentalist studying seal habitats along the southern coastline helped Lucky buy a DNA cell phone. He’d never had one.

It was a 1984 red gadget with buttons and functions like calendars, tools, SMS, IM, Teams, Bluetooth, internet access, GPS and To Do, Did, and Does it work? Connections. Locations. It displayed points of interest at low interest rates. Instant, Everywhere You Are Or Imagine You Are or Need To Be Where You Are Now at this precise moment with dimensional proportions suited his nomadic status acquiring mobility extremes.

One morning he walked to the Ulus garden nursery below an old Roman castle. A red hammer and sickle flag waved above ramparts. He discovered white, red and purple roses, cactus, ten small plants, containers and potting soil. Good dirt.

A word gravedigger craves good dirt.

For language play he stole brown, beige and black linen pants, five long-sleeved button-down cotton shirts, two silk ties and three pairs of thin black socks. He bought an iron and ironing board for linen, cotton threads and extraneous words. Like Murakami he loved ironing. Zen heat and gentle pressure married textile’s texture.

He knotted a tie to his phone and dragged it through Ankara yelling, “Don’t think. Look. See. I’m connected to the Universe. I am now a VIP. I have Infinite Diversity through Infinite Combinations. IDIC for short.”

After studying cracked pavement anxious Turkish eyes expressed serious facial expressions In Search of Lost Time. Citizens cradled delicate phones like infants in sleep mode. Strangers congratulated Lucky with lilies, orchids, rose thorns, floral arrangements and invitations to weddings and funerals in Kurdish PKK controlled no-fly zones bordering Syrian refugee camps.

Garrulous, the TLC manager took him to a seafood restaurant. Waiters in white shirts and black ties guided them to a table decorated with multiple sets of silver cutlery, water glasses and folded cotton napkins. Where are the chopsticks?

A waiter brought mineral water in a thin-stemmed glass goblet. A slice of lemon floated on bubbles. He deposited a bowl of green, red, and black olives dusted with chili powder, oil and vinegar. They enjoyed a fresh green salad of tomatoes, carrots, beets, parsley, mint leaves, corn, and red lettuce in a pistachio sauce with hot fresh brown bread and yellow butter. The main course was braised salmon, flame seared potato, tomato and green pepper. Thick coffee finished the feast. Grounds coated his throat.

Sexually depraved women with dark seductive eyes flashing lost love signals escorted him to a local cafe. They taught him the traditional game of backgammon while sharing apple-flavored hubby-bubbly tobacco pipes past his bedtime regaling him with fables, legends, myths, lies and stories about their hard hearted survival strategies in a man’s world.

TLC