Simit

My San Francisco mornings are routine, three English muffins freshly baked from Arizmendi on my way to work along with Peet's from the pot at work. On Tuesdays, when Arizmendi rests and I'm ravenous from the Tuesday morning ride, I usually stop by Specialty's in the financial district and load up on day old cream cheese croissants or peach coffee cake, items high on calories with taste a distant second.

This morning, my third and last in Istanbul, might be routine, too, with simit instead of English muffins and the famous Turkish coffee replacing Peet's. It just might leave me with a trace of coffee grounds across my upper lip, my first ever moustache in a country that almost requires it.

Down Under

We're in Asia, of course, or at least we've been there, maybe having travelled back and forth across the Bosphorus from Europe to Asia a few times by now, making it three continents I've visited, and it would have been four, the same number as Baleen, had this vacation been the week before.

My boss is in Australia for a work trip, where I'd be were I not here. Baleen says not to worry, that I'll make it to Australia for another deal or we'll go there together sometime, but I'm not so sure. Baleen doesn't share my concern, nor is she sympathetic as she thinks it's sweet justice of a sort because I never read The Kelly Gang, despite what she says were not so subtle recommendations for three years.

You see, Baleen visited Australia by herself over Thanksgiving in 2008, six months after we'd started dating, on the trip she learned that I was the one, she says, as for the first time in her life, this solitary swimmer felt like she'd rather not be where she was, but with me. She even called me on her cell phone while I was in Austin with my family, where I talked to Baleen at a tailgate outside the UT stadium, but could still hear my mom tell somebody she'd just met, "That's his girlfriend. She's calling from Australia." And in Australia, Baleen did what I would have done, which is walk into a bookshop and ask what one book an American should read to tell her about Australia in fiction. She even read it on that trip, front to back, and told me all about it when she came back, and thought that I'd certainly read it that week, or maybe the next one. But that week passed, and that month, and the months after that with The Kelly Gang still on the shelf, and Baleen mentioning in less and less, it seemed, then hardly at all until a few weeks ago, when I first complained to her about the timing of this Australia trip.

The Cold War

We're in Asia now. Though it's my first time, Baleen's been here plenty, mostly further east in that most populous place in the world. But for one temper tantrum from an eight year old, this would have been a homecoming.

When we lived outside Seattle, and I was ten years old, Margarine was eight and Shrimp Jr probably three or four. We'd been in Washington almost three years which is about the time that Army officers receive new orders, though we were too young to know that. One winter night, and I know it was winter because the darkness made the news all the grimmer, Grizzly told us that we were moving to Turkey. Gorbachev was in power, the Berlin Wall still stood, and our country needed us in Turkey. All five of us. 

Margarine threw a fit. He cried like no eight year old has cried before, at least no eight year old in our house, and Shrimp Jr followed suit because whatever had big brother throwing a fit like that must have been something she should protest, too. Sometime later Mr Gendron and Chris picked me up to go to the Tacoma Dome for the hunting and fishing expo where I walked around like I'd just come from a funeral. Eight months later we loaded up the minivan and station wagon and moved to Williamsburg, Virginia. 

Delta Nights

The first New Yorker article I ever read was on Ios, the summer after I'd graduated from college. I was aware of the New Yorker, first from the Prince of Tides, my favorite book from middle school until I was 25, when the Wingo sister in the South Carolina story gets a New Yorker subscribtion from her grandparents, but more recently from the city kids at college who read it in between classes and talked about it at lunch tables where I didn't sit.

It was a bit like sushi, something I'd heard about and even seen, but seemingly too urbane until I came across an issue that another visitor had left in the house at Klima. I forget what else was in there, and I'm guessing I liked the Comments section as little then as I do now, but I clearly remember the profile of Lucinda Williams.

I printed it out and sent it to my sister almost five years ago, along with two tickets to a show at Town Hall, when she lived in New York, and I made Baleen read it when she surprised me with two tickets to a local Lucinda Willams concert for my birthday three months into our relationship. It's been a heck of a relationship so far, Baleen and me of course, but also the New Yorker, especially for something that started on Ios. This time, I'm just hoping for a few good photographs.  

34L

When Baleen met me, I was a habitual bachelor, which doesn't mean that I made a habit of being a bachelor, rather that I had the habits of a household of one. I worked long hours, ate pasta from the pot it was cooked in, and exercised almost every day, either soccer, some biking, or most usually, swimming in the Bay.

I was at my heaviest then, about two hundred and ten pounds, and the ten pounds I had then that I don't have now I carried about my thorax, widened at the top and back from hours and hours of pushing the Bay away. This was also the time that I bought two new jackets, my first suit since senior year of college and the requisite navy blazer.

Two years later, when Baleen and I were planning our wedding, and when I was muddling through a decision on what to wear, Baleen told me my blue blazer didn't fit. It has to, I said, it's brand new. It doesn't fit, she said. She was right, it hung loose and limp like a hand me down ski jacket. It was no use protesting that she was the reason it didn't fit anymore, that I had spent evenings biking to her apartment in Pac Heights rather than in the Bay. You'll have to buy a new one, she said. Instead, I swam like mad for a month until my shoulders filled it, and then watched them shrink again from disuse. Maybe, just maybe, today, my fourth day of swimming in the Aegean, my wedding blazer might fit again and Baleen might look at me like she did when I was 29.

The Gas Lamps

Baleen and I are headed from Santorini to Ios. Tough life. We'll get off the ferry and either get Peter, the British fella who visited Ios in 1979 and never left, to boat us over to Klima or hike the goat trail. With four of five days of provisions, including kerosene for the gas lamps, odds are we're paying Peter, especially as Baleen flatly refused my idea of making dinner carry dinner, "I will not lead a sheep to slaughter."

It's been over ten years since I've been to the beach electricity forgot. It's not a Back to the Land retreat, though, as we're bringing what we're eating, but there is well water, and kerosene lamps for light.

The lamps are what I remember most from that decade ago, the first and only time I've ever used one. They came with strict instructions not to break any, as relying on them is like driving around a classic car; whenever it breaks (the glass, in the case of the gas lamp), you're deep onto eBay and visiting garage sales looking for more of what they don't make any more. And as we're nine hours ahead of PST, could be that Baleen and I are reading by the light of one now. Or, more likely, playing hangman.

Passport

I've got pockets that zip on my shirt and pant pockets that button. Baleen doesn't love the shirts and tells me I look too much like a German zoologist on assignment, yet the shirt's probably on my back right now.

In the summer of 2000 I was a day behind Walker and the group getting to Ios and Santorini. They wanted to see Crete, I wanted to see the Italian boot. Connectivity then isn't what it is now and the days were more elastic so there were a couple missed days of ferries back and forth between Ios and Santorini. On one of those days, my passport didn't get off a Santorini bus with me. At the depot a few hours later the man behind the desk just shook his head.

I emailed Walker, telling him I was without a passport, and that I was headed to Ios. He showed up the next day. So did my passport. You just need to speak a little Greek, he said. Baleen and I are with Walker and his wife again this year, and though he makes a good back up plan, if you want to find my passport, check the zipper on my shirt.

Jet Plane

Baleen and I should now be on the final leg of our journey from San Francisco to Boston, with a two day stop, then Munich for ninety minutes, too short for either a beer or a bratwurst or even a walk to our next gate, then the Athens airport for a few hours before our final flight to Santorini, or Thira as the Greek ferry companies unhelpfully call it. If Baleen slept on the flight from Boston, then I might have slept, too, but if she didn't, or if the movies weren't any good, then I entertained her.

That sometimes means debating baby names or wondering where we'll live in ten years and when we'll buy our first house, how much that house will be and if it'll be made out of brick, wood, or something else, but what it most likely means is Hangman, played in the margins of whatever I'm trying to read or on the back of boarding tickets.

Baleen's win ratio, measured by the number of missed letters at the end of each game, is north of 75%. Each win is followed by enough discussion and back handed compliments, "For somebody who reads so much..." to make me want to look up seven letter words with just one vowel so she can't toot her own horn as she did on our last flight, an almost four hour pleasure cruise on a small United plane without any TVs.

Pro Bono

Just the essentials, as you can see, as we leave behind Blackberries and bikes for ten days and head east. Four pairs of goggles, illumination to find each other after dark and enough snacks to keep Baleen from collapsing on airplanes. There's no liquid above 3 fl oz, but there is something to worry about.

The 40 Days of Musa Dagh, the fictional account that supposedly isn't that fictional about the Armenians trying to get the heck out of Ottoman at the end of the First War, is just out of sight. I'll start it tomorrow and hope to finish all 800 pages of it before we reach Turkey.

Otherwise, I'll have my brother and s2B interpret Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code and ask if bringing the book, but not talking about it "insults Turkishness", the law that got Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk thrown in jail. If so, then a young corporate lawyer and a trial lawyer may team up not only in matrimony, but also an international criminal court.

Let it Mellow

48 hours left in this city and 72 in this country. Baleen's got a head start, having left for Boston early this morning, but I'm catching up. Her absence means not only that I get the whole bed, but that I'm pulling dishes from the dishwasher, flushing less frequently and eating chocolate in the open.