SWEET&SOUR

Packing my bags this weekend feels strangely like the tail end of a grand adventure as much as the start of one. The past two weeks have been a happy marathon of my favorite places, people, and activities— hiking through redwoods, riding the Big Dipper, drinking good coffee, kayaking with dolphins, beach worship, wedding celebrations, stargazing, and wine tasting, with friends and family, both old and new.

Nevertheless, in visiting all these places and people— each of which at one time or other encompassed in my idea of “home”— I had the strangest feeling of displacement.

It seems anything good is always somewhat bittersweet: catching up lost months with best friends from childhood, giving an old roommate a housewarming gift for her new apartment, getting a tour of my ‘baby’ brother’s new apartment for his sophomore year of college, watching a new class of freshmen take over the school that I felt so much ownership of over the past four years, sleeping in my room at my parents’ new house where the majority of my things remain stacked in cardboard boxes, happy reunions followed by goodbyes as we all drift into the amorphous void of the future.

I have a similar feeling every time I find myself at a loss for words trying to explain the dizzy, vague excitement of moving to a country I have never been to, where I know no one, and can speak next to none of the native language to the hundreds who ask “Are you excited? Are you nervous? How are you feeling?” The place that I will very soon call home.

And it is the same overwhelming sense of bittersweet that feel as I pack item after item into suitcases, envisioning myself finding a spot for each in my new apartment, and all too soon cramming everything back in to leave a place I love after the adventure of a lifetime.

Perhaps that is the beauty of life, which, as one of my favorite professors used to say, is like Chinese food: sweet and sour. I like to think that the bittersweet is a testimony to a life fully lived, a love fully given, and a community fully invested in— a feeling to be thankful for rather than mournful of.

It is a feeling I pray to have ten months from now, as I sit staring at these suitcases.

WHY TURKEY?

People ask me all the time “Why Turkey?”

I could burn hundreds of words trying to explain how I narrowed down the list of Fulbright countries, regions, statistics, and opportunities, but in reality that would only give a portion of the story. 

What I really wish is that I could invite others into way my dad and grandparents have excited over the opportunity to share a portion of their past with me— their memories of those few years living outside Ankara in the late 1960s while my grandfather worked for Mobile Oil. The clipped newspaper articles about Turkey mailed by my granddad, my Nana’s home cooked meal from her old Turkish recipes, and my dad’s shared memories of junior high antics and reactions to life in the Middle East.

Stories of eating handful upon handful of pistachios in class and shoving the shells under desks so that “every time you moved the furniture or pushed a book in underneath, all the shells would come clattering out like the payout of a slot machine.”

Or of driving a VW bus full of blond children across the countryside and being mistaken for Germans.

Or of the brief and tragic saga of the family pet lamb that imprinted on the family pet dachshund.

I can’t wait to come back with stories of my own to contribute. :)