On the motherland
I was born in Turkey, yet was only there for three months before moving back to the US through JFK Airport and New York City.
Perhaps this is why both places feel like home—the latter, New York, where I lived twice for nearly eight years in all. The former, less explicably, given I have no memory of it, somewhere in my bones.
So for my fiftieth, I threw a party celebrating a country I can't remember in a city where I've spent most of my years, Washington, D.C.
My parents drove up. All day Friday and Saturday, the three of us stood in the kitchen for hours making the food—the two people who were actually there when I started, helping me reach back for a beginning only they remember. Hummus with za'atar. Kuru cacik (think tzatziki). Gavurdag salad (a tomato, cucumber and parsley salad). Another salad with fried halloumi. Dolmas. Baklava. Turkish delight. Some store bought, most handmade. All assembled with love.
There were evil eyes all around and my gift to my guests. The party cocktail was a Turkish Cardamom Old Fashioned. The wine? Red that I hauled back from Vermont because the grape is Marquette and so am I. A playlist of the number one song from every year I've been alive [“Silly Love Songs” from 1976 and Paul McCartney’s Wings, still in my head]. None of it was for show. I wanted to hand my friends a piece of myself, and this—the longing, the detail, the homeland I built instead of remembered—was the truest piece I had.
I asked for no gifts. I asked instead, if anyone wanted, to help send me back. This year, in celebration of my fiftieth, I'm going to Turkey for the first time since I was a baby.
My sister Holly came Friday and helped prep the backyard. My sister Rebecca made Turkish potato salad like she'd been making it her whole life. Family and friends had emailed me photos all week—more than two hundred!—and my cousin Kelley helped hang them on twine and place them around the tables, commemorating so many meaningful connections from across the years. Family, friends from every phase of my life, neighbors. Proof I had not done a single bit of this alone.
And then I sliced my finger open. My friend John played doctor; many played nurse practitioner; a few therapist. Ultimately there was a trip to urgent care with one of my nearest and dearest from D.C. United, Ellie. Holly came back Sunday to help me clean up, mostly because I had one working hand.
It should probably embarrass me a little, being homesick for a place I've never seen. Building a home out of wanting one.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
I haven't arrived yet but will be buying the ticket. And while it won't be the end, it will be the beginning.