Retrieving My Parents

Despite my best efforts, my folks have gone all-in on seeing the world via cruise ship. They’d been on a Mediterranean cruise with my mom’s sister for about a week and I’d been getting reports and photos from Rome, Naples, Palermo, Mykonos; your standard Mediterranean tourist spots. At this point in the trip, they were en route to Türkiye.

It was mid-April and I was out in the camper, working. It was quiet. I was deep into something or other when I heard the back door of our house open and shut. I peeked my head out to see who was at the door and my wife asked me if I’d talked to either my dad or my sister. I’d not bothered to look at my phone yet for the day and my wife’s tone made it obvious that things weren’t well.

After listening to a short voicemail from my dad that only went something like “we’ve had a problem, can you call us?”, I phoned my sister to discover that my mother had broken her hip on the cruise ship and had been taken to a hospital in Istanbul. My sister was determined that she needed to go help them and was already trying to sort through how to get to Istanbul. It’s funny to think about now, but at the time I thought that seemed a little hasty. Then, thankfully, ego got the best of me and I figured, since sorting through the intricacies of international—European, at least—travel is something that I’ve developed a knack for, that I should go with her. She’d never done the transatlantic trek.

By noon, my sister and I were on a plane to Atlanta, connecting to Istanbul through Amsterdam. I had the itineraries and the seat maps and the hospital’s address, and I kept them open on my phone the whole way, because as long as I was handling something I did not have to think about what I was flying toward. We made contact with my dad sometime during our journey to find out that my mom had already been scheduled to have surgery in Istanbul the next day and that my aunt had left to go home already. That settled it. We had done the right thing to blindly hop onto a plane to Türkiye. My parents, it would seem, needed to be rescued.

It was the next day when we touched down in Istanbul in the late afternoon and got word that everything with my mother’s surgery had gone well. The taxi ride from the airport was harrowing but, truth be told, it did add to the overall mood and energy. This was a quest and I was living a movie at that moment. Even though we were in the most generic-looking gray sedan you can imagine—one that was badly leaking exhaust fumes into the cabin—in my imagination, we were in a little tuk-tuk. Soon—after we got off of what seemed to be the Turkish equivalent of the New Jersey Turnpike—things would be looking much more like the opening scene of The Darjeeling Limited. I’d seen the photos of Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar… I knew what to expect.

When we arrived at the hospital in the Şişli district, the Grand Bazaar it was not. Şişli, it turns out, is the hospital district, where half of Europe comes for a new nose. It looks like ordinary city anywhere—apartment blocks, phone shops, traffic—and nothing like the Türkiye that was in my mind, save for the portraits of Atatürk hung up everywhere. We went up to the room where my mom was still drugged up from surgery and looking grim. I had been in hospital rooms with my mother before. I had never had to come and get her. My dad sat next to her on a fold-out bed with two pecked-at trays of hospital food beside him. He is a tall man, and he looked small. After a short while, the only person who spoke fluent English in the entire hospital building came into the room to check on my mom. My sister, being a nurse, was able to talk specifics with the woman, and we finally established that, whatever the signs on the walls said, the hip had been done the way it would have been done in Springfield. That news, along with the presence of my sister and me, eased the grip the situation had had on my parents for the past two days.

We were there a week while my mom started recovery. There is only so long you can sit in a hospital room, so my sister and I started walking the neighborhood in the afternoons. Not since I was in Tanzania had I been at a place where the adhan was called five times a day. Its rhythm and dominating presence reminded me a bit of how church bells in Rome help you keep the time of day. There were women in headscarves walking next to women in spaghetti-strap tank tops. My sister and I walked past a beautiful old mosque and came out the other side at Cevahir, the Turkish equivalent of the Mall of America, six stories of it, sitting in the shadow of the local Trump Tower. I bought some pants at the Marks & Spencer, which was between a Gap and a McDonald’s. Just outside the doors, old women were making bazlama on dome-shaped grills on the side of the street.

I found the food at the hospital to be wonderful. They served my parents humble dishes of rice, various meats and peppers, some cheese with nigella, and simple soups that were all cooked from scratch and served along with a little foil-covered plastic cup of ayran, a drink that I grew to enjoy quite a bit. The food wasn’t to my parents’ taste, so I got my fill of it. We found a kebab joint in the neighborhood that was more to my dad’s liking, and we had dinner there three times. The husband cooked and assembled; the wife ran the register. A cat came in off the street the second night, climbed into a booth, and went to sleep, and nobody including the cat seemed to think this was unusual. There were cats all over Şişli, in doorways and under cars, owned by no one and seemingly fed by everyone. One night the place had some tough-looking men in it and we ate a little quieter. Outside, a truck was selling watermelons off the back, piled nearly to the canopy. We had maybe five words of English and Turkish between the five of us, which was enough for a tiny, surface-level friendship: they smiled when we came in, we pointed at what we’d had the night before, and for an hour nobody felt out of sorts.

My usefulness on the trip, such as it was, came into play getting everyone home. The hospital discharged my mother with no return flight booked, so we took a taxi to a hotel at the airport and I went to find a wheelchair. It turns out that it is very difficult to acquire a wheelchair at the Istanbul airport without a plane ticket. I left everyone on the curb and went in alone. You have to pass through security just to enter the building, and a stressed-out man with no ticket asking about wheelchairs is not what they are hoping to see. In the end it was the hotel that lent me one, after some coercing. That night I booked us Istanbul to Dallas to Springfield, leaving early the next morning. My aunt, for comparison, had flown Istanbul to Belgrade to Barcelona to Chicago and then on to her hometown. Once we had tickets, everyone at the Istanbul airport was helpful, kind, and welcoming. The airport in Dallas was full of assholes. Even my parents could smell it. My mother slept in her own bed the next night.

In the end, we were gone only a week. I still can’t believe that we pulled the whole thing off. My mom is recovering well and has even talked about trying the same cruise again. One day I’d like to see the Istanbul I had in my head. I would also like to go back to that kebab place in Şişli. We never learned their names.