Season's Bleatings -- 2019

Oliver Rhoads Bohnhorst was born March 10, 2019, to Brendan and Jodi in Grand Rapids, of Michigan, of America, of Planet Earth, of the Solar System, of the Milky Way... he, the babe in arms, a mere microscopic mote drifting through The Universe. But if you get close, Ollie impresses as anything but mere. Behold the grabby hands that slap at a puddle of dripped, pureed peas. Behold the triumphant proclamations: "Buh! Buh! Buh!" Behold the bib drenched in teething drool and how he teeters upright verging on first steps. And behold how he's babbled his way deep into our grandparental hearts. Forever and ever, Amen. The opposite of anything mere, the whole of The Universe in and of himself.

Oliver's skin is as soft as a rabbit's underbelly except for around the nostrils. They get encrusted with dried snot. Elizabeth's skin is just as smooth in spite of her advanced age of 34. Her partner, Andrew, for the record, hides a mysterious complexion under beard. They have festooned their house with a jungle of plants and through their bay window the greenery filters a lovely view over white Grand Traverse countryside. Elizabeth has just gotten a job in a shelter to support homeless adolescents. Those kids have the very best person in their corner.

This fall Brendan and Jodi sold their four-level, in-city house and bought an expansive, one-level in the Cascade area of Grand Rapids. No more stairs! With all that moving out and moving in, taking care of baby Oliver, Jodi maintaining her demanding health care job, Brendan starting a new job... even with all that stress, their complexions remained unblemished. Nary a pimple! Brendan's many tubas have adjusted to the new atmosphere and their dogs now bark at reimagined varmints. New beginnings are born.

Every night before bed, Sue applies a degreasing compound to remove her makeup before rubbing in a new grease to juice up her pores. When in the morning she springs from bed, her skin positively glows! I've put sunglasses on my side table to reduce the blinding sheen. Sue's life-long high school friends and later her life-long college friends (very bad influences, all) held their annual reunions this summer. And to top it off, the women from both groups engineered a surprise 70th birthday party for her. Such unmitigated adoration. Sue returns home from these events so very grateful, her face emitting a rosy hue, but also concealing renewed criminal intent.

In 2019, I caught rainbow trout with a fly rod in the Colorado mountains, caught a pompano in the surf near St. Augustine, and, best of all, suffered an in-grown toenail. I came to believe that in-grown toenails are the hors d'oeuvres en route to Satan's promenade into Hell. I pondered this while my toe's sac of pus finally started to deflate. I came to Jesus and vowed to repent, to improve my ways: go on fewer ice cream binges, keep the D-con fresh and the mousetraps emptied, read more literature with less smut, and give friendly waves to the neighbors, whose names escape me. So far, so good.  I've had no recurrences of purple toe and my mouth is free of cold sores. My conscience and complexion are clear.

And what Christmas letter would be complete without an homage to… The Impeachment of Donald  J. Trump? The hearings, as Democrats and Republicans took their turns, threw me into a fit of ping-ponging between bug-eyed incredulity and gross inflations of intestinal gas. And it’s so strange:  those hot Republican faces took on the blush of a familiar orange hue. It’s either a case of neckties noosed too tight or a somatic reaction to blind allegiance.

Keep your skins moisturized this holiday season. And it’s important to prevent crusty nostrils. For Christmas, you really want that effervescent, pinkish hue.

Peachtree Street

From 1956 to 1960, my family lived in Atlanta. I was in third grade in 1959 and took a school bus to Jim Cherry Elementary School a few miles away. There was a poor African American neighborhood across the street from the school, but, of course, no kids from there attended.

I didn't know any black people other than Ero and Mary. Ero was our old, gentle Negro maid who I remember hummed soft hymns while ironing laundry. I remember playing with cars on the floor nearby, listening to Ero hum in her low quiet voice as she ironed there, her stockings rolled down to her ankles in the heat. One evening, my father drove her home and he let me come along. We dropped her off at a tin-roofed, ramshackle house at the end of a dirt street. A dozen people relaxed on the raised, covered porch while lazy dogs panted beneath. It must have been an odd sight for them to see white people driving into their neighborhood, let alone providing escort to one of their own. They sat silent and without expression as we dropped her off.

Mary replaced Ero after Ero got sick. I remember her as a sweet and smiling young woman. She had a baby after working for us for a few months. My father again let me come along when we visited her to take her some money. We drove up through a long stand of woods to a tiny cinder block house with a flat roof and no windows. We knocked on the door and a faint voice beckoned us in. There was Mary on a bed alone in the house with her infant. She had had the baby at home. We stayed less than a minute.

My father in 1959 taped a sentence onto the dashboard of his car. He worked as an outreach professor for the Georgia Department of Education, a job which sent him to Georgia prisons to advocate for educational programs for inmates. He might pass chain gangs along Georgia's country roads, the black prisoners in striped jumpsuits slashing away at brush or picking up trash, their master nearby on horseback. I guess that's how I envisioned black men back then: mean and menacing, but safe at a distance. Years later, I remember Dad telling me how he felt when challenging a system hell-bent on preserving ignorance and cruelty. He tried to bring a message of hope to penitentiary officials afflicted with ears that would not hear and eyes that would not see.

But in his boxy Rambler, off he would gallop on those Atlanta mornings to his appointments, over the hills to the north or over the flatlands and cotton fields to the south, east, or west. He had a wife and four kids to support and a job with meager pay to promote the impossible. He may have felt undaunted much of the time, like a Don Quixote charging forth against all odds. But often he despaired. It was at those desperate times, so he later told me, that he would glance over at the dashboard to gain an ounce of courage, glance over to the meditation he wrote to himself: "Ride 'em cowboy!"

One day we were driving down Atlanta's main thoroughfare, Peachtree Steet. While stopped at a light, a black woman in a colorful sweater walked by on a crowded sidewalk, wearing the exact sweater as my mother. Mom was so mortified that she slunk down in the passenger's seat to prevent any detection by the white people around. My father chuckled at her for feeling humiliated but she frantically stripped herself of the sweater and threw it on the floorboard. She never wore it again.

My actual contacts with African Americans were sparse. I remember going bowling for the first time at my brother's birthday party. Raggedy black boys worked as pin setters. They sat at the end of the lanes on stools and after a ball was bowled, they tossed the toppled pins back into a bin and rolled the ball back to the bowler on the return chute. The boys would then return to their stools and comic books until the next ball. They weren't much older than me, about eight years-old, but how alien they seemed.

We kids knew "nigger" was a bad word and not to say it at home or at school. It was always NEE-gro, you've got to say NEE-gro. But one morning a loudmouthed boy in my classroom let fly the n-word when degrading his family's maid. "You mustn't say that word," the teacher said. "You must say "niggra." How odd that "Negro" wasn't her correction. White people mainly described African Americans as "colored," though my parents never did. They always said NEE-gro, as the educated, northern-born were wont to do. If  the "Negro" moniker was intended to give black people some equivalence, no equivalence seeped into me, at least not in that place and time.

No, I absorbed Jim Crow into my bones. One summer afternoon, my friend, Phillip, and I were walking near our neighborhood church when we observed a young black man hustling down the nearby road. A black pedestrian was an unusual sight in our white neighborhood. "Let's yell at him," I said.

We took positions up a rise and behind a low wall on the church property, a safe distance away with an escape route if he should chase us. On the count of three we would let him have it. "One, two, three," we whispered together and rose from behind the wall to scream, "HEY NIGGER!"

The man froze and turned to see us gazing down at him. "What you want, snowballs!" he yelled, seeming mad as hell. He held his stare. Philip giggled. My heart pounded, ready to run. But then the man turned and quickly went on his way down the road.

I never felt proud, nor right, nor thought the racist taunt was funny. But I wasn't ashamed either, like the way I felt after I shot a turtle dove through the neck with my bb gun. I never shot at birds again after that. But I am ashamed today. Did that man slough ours off as just one more of a thousand insults? Did we fan an inner rage? Did we cause him to lash out at others? Did he cry? Would he forget?

My family moved to Lafayette, Indiana, when I was nine and entering fourth grade. On the first day of school, my teacher asked if I as the new student would stand and announce my name to the class. As I rose and in my distinctive southern drawl, I responded, "Yes, ma'am." The class howled. I stood red-faced. I learned then and there to eliminate that southern "ma'am" from all encounters. And my drawl soon morphed into something twangy without my realizing it.

It's easy to hatchet out certain words and give new parlance to accepted ways of expression. But you can't simply extricate bone-deep feelings born in childhood. Even though your father may have been Atticus Finch, we all lived near Peachtree Street. Long ago I let go of the big, vicious lies I learned as truth in Georgia. I like to think that today I'm more like my father. But there's no denying that those feelings, not completely defeated, still lurk darkly within me.

Oh, Madonna

Those were heady days back in 1971 and 72. George and I shared room 226 in Snyder Hall at Michigan State University, I a sophomore, he a socially awkward freshman. Before the leaves started to turn, we became best buddies. The Stones blared and we guzzled quarts of Colt 45. Dozens of boys from the down the hall would wander in and out our open door to appraise our latest rendition of chaos. Neither of us had started to shave.

Some might have said that as copacetic roomies go, we were an unlikely pair. George had a ponytail and abhorred smoke of any kind. I also had a ponytail but adored smoke of several kinds. I fancied myself a revolutionary and joined SDS. George mocked my left windedness and all hell could break when our clashing ideologies were fueled by malt liquor. 

One spring evening an angry mob of student protesters marched past our second-floor window. Hundreds filled the space between Snyder and Abbott halls. The American military that day had bombed Cambodia. I would soon join that anti-war mob, grab a bull horn, and help lead a takeover of the Administration Building. But on that night, half drunk on Colt 45, George thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle. He cranked open the window and screamed, "Go Purdue! Go Purdue!"

George grew up on a pig farm in western Michigan, but his father also worked as a chemist. He was an intellectual, a descendent of blue bloods back in Boston. Visiting George at the farm made for a collision of senses. Inside, family members sat by lamps reading novels.  Outside, pig stink wafted through cottonwoods while chickens in their coops clucked and pigs grunted from within the hog barn.There was a milk cow named Bossie and an old, fur-matted collie snoozing on the porch by a row of high rubber boots ready for chores. Fly paper hung in the kitchen. Meanwhile, George's mother sat in the parlor doing the New York Times Crossword Puzzle. He and his family had shed any social graces out on that farmland of Allegan County

George had no aspirations to acquire his father's pig farm. He hated the place. But he shared his dad's keen aptitude for chemistry and toddled off to MSU in 1971 to major in the subject. The plan was short-lived. By his second semester, he switched from chemistry to English, my major. He would later say that I had had a major impact on his decision. I did argue that his passion for Robert Burns the poet far outweighed any curiosity he might have had about carbon interacting with hydrogen. I did argue that his love for Kurt Vonnegut was unmatched by any love for the laboratory. I did argue that he was a fine writer with a fine wit. But I suspect it was just easier to be an English major when your academic demands were tempered by dormitory mayhem. 

So, George and I, both students now of the humanities, took a course entitled, "The History of Famous Art in Europe from April 12, 1165 to July 29, 1354, Mainly Paintings but Some Really Old Architecture Too." The class fit nicely around important stretches of sleep and priority beer activities. One hundred students, about ninety eight of them girls, attended. We sat up in the back of a darkened, stadium-style lecture hall where the professor presented slide after slide of really, really old paintings.

For ninety minutes one day, the prof presented an endless stream of Madonnas. Evidently, pre-Renaissance Italians just loved their Madonnas and couldn't get enough. With all the proportion of a second grader's crayon drawing, those old painters unleashed a buttload of madonna classics. Slide! Here we have Madonna with Child, and notice how the artist... blah, blah, blah. Slide! You got your Madonna with Saint Agnes, and notice how the saint holds an olive branch... blah, blah, blah. Slide! You got your Madonna with Child and the Saints! Slide! You got your Madonna with Child in the Manger. Slide! Madonna with Saint Ignatius. Slide! Slide! Slide!  Droning and droning, noticing and noticing, the professor persisted in monotone. And each medieval madonna wore the face of an unpleasant woman with uncomfortable gas. Madonna with This. Madonna with That. You could hear a smattering of snores.

At about the seventy minute mark, George gave me a poke and handed me a note. This was odd. In the dim light, carefully, I opened it. It read,

"Madonna with Beard!"  

I was unprepared. I lost it. I laughed loud and I laughed long. The professor stopped mid-sentence and froze. And all those eyes, those two hundred eyes, they searched the room and fused their gazes upon me. But I was a goner. I was in mid explosion. There! There seared into my brain, I beheld the most precious madonna of all, Madonna with full cheeks of hair.

Before Giotto, DaVinci, Michelangelo, and all the other Renaissance Boys came around, you wouldn't have seen any painters down at the Florence Comedy Club. Those old masters, back in their musty studios, they could have used a guy like George. For hundreds of years, saints just stood around adoring. Baby Jesuses just laid around being adored. And hundreds of madonnas, they just stood or sat there with unpleasant faces. It would have been nice, if one of those Madonnas, just one, would have been depicted sneaking two fingers behind the head of an unsuspecting pope. Rabbit ears!

If you happen to visit Florence, join the throng at the Uffizi Gallery, and visit the madonnas of the Pre-Renaissance. If you get bored and don't mind some playful sacrilege, you can let George be your guide: Madonna with Personal Flotation Device. Madonna with Mohawk. Madonna with Burrito. Your appreciation for art will skyrocket.

I remember him sitting in our dorm room with a book in his lap, laughing at a Robert Burns' verse or at a passage in a Vonnegut novel. His love for a turn of phrase rubbed off on me.
We took a class on Chaucer together and learned to read Middle English. He tutored me. Responding to George's final paper, the professor at first accused him of plagiarism. He hadn't, but his thoughts coincidentally had mirrored a scholar's thoughts. After George stormed the professor's office, the professor became persuaded. George got an A. Besides, cheating was beneath him.

I sometimes wonder what draws people to become friends. Kindred interests, of course, and kindred spirits. I lost it when I read the note that read, "Madonna with Beard." But of the hundred students in that class, how many would have had a similar response if passed the same note at the same time? A minority, I would bet.

One afternoon on an East Lansing street, a group of us were clambering into my parked Pinto when from out of nowhere a large friendly puppy bounced up and jumped headlong into the back seat joining George and another friend. They suddenly became ensconced in a tornado of frenzied dog like three characters spinning full tilt in a clothes dryer. No one could grab the beast as it bounced from floor to roof to front seat and back, its tail slapping faces and its tongue splattering froth as it gyrated.

Springing from some demented recess in my brain, I thought in that moment to shout, "Out damn Spot!" 

And off Spot ran. Look! See Spot run. George howled at the joke but my other two friends comprehended nothing funny. That was a big thing that made good buddies of George and me, to twist from the events of a day some absurd irony.

Two young strangers assigned to Room 226. Kindred spirits, kindred thirsts, kindred points of view. I admired the kid who celebrated a crazy connection between an anti-war mob and a football rally, who was inspired to pass a note in art history class. I admired the kid who grew up on a pig farm and would sit down with a 19th century Scottish poet. He celebrated my hair-brained connection between MacBeth and the puppy in the Pinto.

We got each other.

Bean, the Big Shot

(Transcript of Tom Rhoads' interview with Bean, author of the blog, Poop Ederim, from the WTRB broadcast of Blog Agog, January 22, 2019.)

TOM: Welcome, listeners, to another edition of Blog Agog, the show that highlights the popular and the peculiar in creative blog publications. Today our guest is the producer of Poop Ederim, a site that has gone bonkers on the blogosphere in recent months. Welcome, Bean... you just go by Bean, is that right?

BEAN: Maybe now I should go by Big Shot Bean. The Big Legume. I mean, here I am on your show.

TOM:  Big Shot it is. You've earned it. Now that you're the man with a big shot blog, readers across the country are wanting some answers.

BEAN:  It's "readers across the world," if you don't mind.  I have solid followings in Turkey and Britain, and also a follower in Nigeria.

TOM:  Okay, sure. International big shot then. About your name. Were you named Bean by your parents? Or was that a nickname you picked up somewhere?

BEAN: My last name is Bohnhorst. "Bohn" in German means bean, so it comes from that.

TOM: And "horst"?

BEAN: Storage house. My name means storage house of beans, at least that's what my father always said. I guess you have to put all those kidney beans somewhere.

TOM: Speaking of names, people are intrigued by your blog-title, Poop Ederim.  Your readers have googled it, consulted Merriam-Webster, called the National Weather Service. Nobody can find a clue. What does it mean?

BEAN:  People are googling it? Cool! I wonder what they find.

TOM:  One listener was linked to a website having to do with "poop dreams".  Any connection there to Poop Ederim?

BEAN:  Poop dreams? What is that? Confessions of the constipated?

TOM:  So what about it?

BEAN:  What about what?

TOM:  Poop Ederim! The name, where it comes from. All this poop business. You have a funny blog entry called Chasin' Jackie where a grandfather comes up with, like, a hundred rhymes for a toddler's poop in his diaper.

BEAN: I had a lot of fun writing that, dreaming up all those rhymes. Truth be known, my wife helped me while we were on a road trip to Florida. I suppose I do write a fair amount about the butt. My friend, Bill, has accused me of being anally obsessed.

TOM: Are we really talking about this?

BEAN: It all started in first grade, Tom. I was an advanced reader and a proud member of the Blue Birds reading group. We were tearing through The Adventures of Dick, Jane, and Sally when we were introduced to a new chapter word... behind. As was the custom, we went around taking turns reading pages, and that morning is the most memorable of my first grade career. We read, "Look, Dick, look! Spot is behind the chair." Let's face it: six year-olds just love butt talk, and to be encouraged to read the word BEE-hind aloud in front of our teacher, Mrs. Terroff, well, it was pure joy! Dick, Jane, and Sally really came to life. I'll never forget it. Maybe that's where my problem started.

TOM: Let's try this again. Poop Ederim?

BEAN:  Poop Ederim is derived from the Turkish language. It is a bit mysterious, isn't it?

TOM: That's why I'm asking.

BEAN:  Okay, the Turkish language. I went to an American high school in Ankara, Turkey, in the late 1960s as my family lived there. In 1973, I returned to Turkey from college and got a job teaching English to adult Turks at the Turkish-American Association.  It was great fun. I would stand in front of 20 students who were very enthusiastic about learning English.  One of the main teaching techniques we used was "listen and repeat."  I would say something and they would repeat it.  For example, I might say, "Good morning, Mr. Jones.  How are you today?"  And the class would respond in resounding chorus:  "Good morning, Mr. Jones. How are you today?" Then I would insert a different name. I might say "Mrs. Smith", and the class would chant, "Good morning, Mrs. Smith.  How are you today?" And so on. I had such power!

Sometimes I would close the textbook and insert my own names.  I'd say, "Batman."

"Good morning, Batman,” they’d bellow. “How are you today?"

 "Rocky and Bullwinkle."

"Good morning, Rocky and Bullwinkle. How are you today?" Had they ever heard of Rocky and Bullwinkle? It didn't matter.

"You idiot and your idiot horse."

"Good morning, you idiot and your idiot horse. How are you today?" Those trusty Turks could really close the deal. Such fun!

TOM:  I'm getting discouraged.

BEAN:  I didn't know it then, but as I would soon learn, the English word "book" sounds like the Turkish word, "bok", which means, to put it bluntly, "shit". This caused some listen-and-repeat disruption. I unknowingly hurled verbal turds around the classroom. When I modeled, "Hello, Johnny. May I see your book?," the class whimpered. They probably wondered if I liked to hang around public restrooms. Some students pretended not to notice, but there was no ignoring the bok-faced elephant in the room. They probably felt like first-graders reading that Spot was BEE-hind the chair.

I singled out a good student who for some reason was listening but was not repeating. Instead, he was laughing. "Mehmet," I said. "Please stand up. Come on now, repeat after me:  'Yes, Mr. Brown. I will put my book on your desk.'"

Mehmet dutifully responded, "Yes, Mr. Brown...  I will put my b... b... b..."  Mehmet collapsed in howls and others buried their faces in tears. I was so puzzled. I was at a loss.

One brave lady approached me, took me aside, and tried to help. "Mr. Bean," she whispered. "Your English word... book... is our Turkish word for... I don't know. Book is dirty Turkish word."

Incidents like this made me wildly popular. My reputation, I'm afraid, had everything to do with my demonstrated deference to their, well, shit.  Whenever I then asked my students to "look in your book" or "bring your book", we exchanged knowing glances. Eventually, we all got past it.

TOM:  And... so....?

BEAN:  Yes?

TOM:  All that, somehow, in some way, has something to do with, dare I ask, "Poop Ederim"?

BEAN:  Oh, no. Look, when I was seventeen, I was traveling with my parents and little sister in southern Spain. We went to a fancy restaurant for dinner, white tablecloths, dressed up waiters, and all that. We were served bread, but no butter, and I wanted some butter. So I asked our waiter in my school-learned Spanish to bring us some "burro," por favor. We had just been in Italy and the Italian word for butter is burro. I made an innocent mistake, okay? The waiter looked perplexed but nodded deferentially and strode back to the kitchen. We then noticed through the window back there a major debate going on between the waiter, the manager, and the chef. They kept arguing about something, looked over at our table, then went back to their argument. They must have wondered what exactly I wanted. We were high rolling Americans, after all, and they wanted to do right by us. Finally, the waiter sheepishly and formally approached our table and from under a linen napkin, presented me with a small, wooden box. I opened the box and there inside lay a single, fat cigar. My father just exploded in uncontrollable guffaws. Everybody stopped mid-bite and stared. I wish I had a recording of that conversation in the kitchen. My father told that story a hundred times over the years.

TOM:  Mantequilla.

BEAN:  Pardon?

TOM: Mantequilla is Spanish for butter. Burro is Spanish for donkey.

BEAN: I wanted butter, ordered a donkey, and wound up with a cigar. Burro and bok. Both of those situations were innocent mistakes. And now I am reminded of another one. I have a friend who years ago went to church every Sunday and took his kids to Sunday school. His then six year-old named Sam was obsessed with dinosaurs as little boys are. We would always see them at the beach in the summer and there would be Sam playing in the sand with his toy dinosaurs. So Sam goes to Sunday school every week and my friend noticed that Sam's attitude about going suddenly changed. He became afraid and didn't want to play with his dinosaurs anymore. My friend had a chat with Sam and this is what he learned: the Sunday school teacher talked about God, as Sunday school teachers do, and how God loves and protects them and if they were quiet and still, they could feel God in their hearts. Well, one of Sam's dinosaur toys was the bad guy, the horrible and monstrous Godzilla. It turned out that whenever the Sunday school teacher talked God, which was like non-stop, Sam thought she was talking about Godzilla. He imagined the body of Godzilla whenever she told stories about God, like when on the seventh day of creation, Godzilla rested. Or when Sam learned that human beings are made in Godzilla's image.

TOM: Poor kid.

BEAN: I know, right? Just another innocent misunderstanding.

TOM: All right. Let me try this one... last... time. Poop Ederim... Please tell us. Where does your blog title come from?

BEAN:  You didn't let me finish. Like I said, "poop ederim" has its origins in Turkish, but more precisely, with Roger Price.

TOM: Who is Roger Price?

BEAN: You mean, who was Roger Price. He died tragically some years ago. Roger was the funniest person I've ever known. Maybe the saddest, too. We were good friends in high school in Turkey. Our fathers worked together for the Agency for International Development and Roger and I would knock around Ankara together. One of the first things you learn to say in a foreign language is "thank you." In Turkish, you say "teshekur ederim." Ederim literally means, "I would" and you find it attached to all kinds of terms and phrases. You hear it a lot -- this-ederim, that-ederim. One Saturday night Roger and I are getting drunk at a downtown restaurant called Piknik. The waiter brings us our third or fourth beers, and I, of course, thank him by saying, "Teshekur ederim."

Roger, on the other hand, takes a long swig of his beer, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, smiles up at the waiter, and shouts, "Poop ederim!"

TOM: That's it? What does it mean?

BEAN: It doesn't mean anything. I suppose it could mean, "I would poop," but it was just funny. I was feeling it, and in that moment, Roger's perfect words were a perfect summation of being a half-drunk American teenager on a Saturday night in Ankara, Turkey, in 1969. From then on, as you can imagine, we would say "poop ederim" whenever the time was right.

TOM: So that's where the Poop Ederim comes from.

BEAN. Yep. Sometimes I try to write funny stuff on the blog. I can never hope to be as funny as Roger was. Poop Ederim is a tribute to his humor and and to his memory.

TOM: I'm sure Roger would be very proud.

BEAN: Why, teshekur ederim.

TOM: It looks like that's all the time we have. For readers who are interested, Bean, where can they find your blog.

BEAN: Thanks very much. tombohn.blogspot.com

Season’s Bleatings -- the ABCs of 2018

A is for... ACHTUNG! Be forewarned. This alphabetical mishmash sums up our year's highlights, swung-at knuckle balls, and emotional rampages... warts and all. Yes, there's a wart. We, unlike most others, are only human. We are prone to complaining, skin abnormalities, and bad grammar. Besides, it's a damn long slog.

B is for Bambino! It’s a boy! Or will be. Yes,  on March 31 Brendan and Jodi are expecting a bouncing bundle of bibs and baby barf. They are very excited. Sue will become “Nana” or “Gramma” or “Granny” or maybe “Grams”. As for me, I shall be dubbed The Grandfather Thomas Supreme. Like a pizza.

C is for Crescent Beach, Florida. For the third year in a row, we spent a condo month near St. Augustine. And we’re headed back in 2019! The only cold temperature will be in the cooler to chill bait. Daily I shall walk the beach, barefoot in cargo shorts. I shall pause mid-stride to gaze northward at the wretchedness of Michigan’s winter. And then I shall make very satisfying and obscene gestures.

D is for Dear Donald. Oh, how you’ve revolted us, permeated our daily lives, and made us drunk on tweets. There is nothing we can say that we haven’t heard thousands of times on MSNBC. The station blares at us non-stop as, agog, we watch. Why not change the channel, you ask. Simple: A drunk cannot refuse a free drink.    

E is for Ernest. That’s a fine baby name. “Ernest Bohnhorst”. Consider the namesakes. The kid could become a great writer like Hemingway, a great hitter like Banks, or a great actor like Borgnine. Namesakes: that’s the importance of being Ernest.  

F is for Fatso and Pierre. My skin tag buddies have had a great year. Nestled there in my left armpit, they make no demands and make no complaints. They don’t even itch. I always say hello when I take a shower.

G is for Golf Whore. I will play in an earthquake and I will play during a kidney stone attack and I will play in swarms of bees. Making great golf shots is my holy grail.

H is for Hellmann’s mayonnaise, straight from the jar, and everything high fat, high carb, high fructose, bad as hell for you, that I suck down like oxygen to beat the winter blues. H is also for “Holy shit! I just gained 10 pounds!”

I is for Ichabod. “Ichabod Bohnhorst”. Okay, maybe not.

J is for Just Do It! You there, Robert Mueller. Bob. Bobby. Dude. We can’t take it anymore. We’ve paced so long and so hard, there’s a gutter in the floor. Please, no more of those depressing black redactions. You hold the can of peanuts with those coiled up “snakes” inside. Release the lid! Release the snakes!

K is for KA and KI. KA and KI are actual words. I have played KA and KI hundreds of times playing Words with Friends. I have won 1,103 games and played tiles that extend 87,505 feet. I can’t stop. Did you know there are no two letter words that contain a C or a V? You really should know this.  

L is for the Leelanau School. Elizabeth moved back to Traverse City from Los Angeles in February and got a wonderful job as English teacher at the private Leelanau School this past fall. But, alas, they had to downsize and let Elizabeth go. She may be able to return next year. Undaunted, she’s back to the job hunt while writing and submitting sublime poetry to elite literary journals.

M is for Mecca. America’s moles have ended their haj, their pilgrimage, to 9554 Westwood Drive. The yard has erupted in snow-covered peaks as the mole horde ejects tons of dirt to construct their subterranean, religious capital. But hey, I’ve always wanted to live in the mountains.

N is for New Abode. Elizabeth and her boyfriend, Andrew, have purchased a modern and cozy house just south of Traverse City. After a few years stuck in LA traffic, their Michigan roots are re-planted. There’s even a fenced-in backyard to contain the wanderlust of Elizabeth’s frisky pet, Omar.

O is for Omar the Dog. We took care of Omar for those years Elizabeth was stuck in West Coast traffic. But she’s back and he’s back with her. We so miss him, especially now that local squirrels feel free to mob our mountainous yard, the yard known by our neighbors as Mole Mesa.

P is for Picnic. I continue to stand the helm of the open adoption program at Catholic Human Services. Every July we hold a picnic where adoptive and birth families congregate to feast on bratwurst and each other’s company. This year some 90 folks assembled. It was great… open adoption is thriving. If you’d like a glimpse, go to our FB page, CHS Open Adoption.

Q is for Quality Quilt Maker. Sue continues to spend our children’s inheritance on fabrics from The Missouri Quilt Company. Her sewing machine is smocking, about to blow a fuse. At times I don’t see her for weeks, such is her driven love of quilting. Her labors produce masterpieces that she, of course, gives away. Oh, it would be so nice to retire on quilt revenues, far away from it all on some plastic-strewn beach.  

R is for Reunions. Every June, Sue holes up with beloved high school girlfriends at an undisclosed location. And every August, she holes up with beloved college roommates somewhere, I suppose, in the western hemisphere. She talks about how they laugh and go to flea markets and dress up in funny hats. There may be a sip of wine. But she always comes home happy and exhausted with pupils dilated. I ask but I get no answers.

S is for Schubert or Stravinsky. How about “Schubert Bohnhorst” or “Stravinsky Bohnhorst”? Solid names for a boy. No pressure, but the kid would have to compose symphonies. His great grandmothers, musicians both, would be so proud.

T is for Tchaikovsky. Brendan is fond of Tchaikovsky. He continues playing for the Holland Symphony Orchestra and will perform in a brass quintet at a Catholic mass on Christmas Eve in Grand Rapids. It might be a religious affair, but we will be there anyway.

U is for Unguentine, Uruguay, and Urethra. Unguentine is what you smear on your dry skin because you spend your winter in Michigan. Uruguay is a warm country that is the opposite of winter in Michigan. Urethra has something to do with a bladder infection you get because you spend your winter in Michigan.

V is for Vaseline Petroleum Jelly. Winter tip: If you run out of Unguentine, you can smear on Vaseline.

W is for Wart Removal Kit. I am happy with my burgeoning population of skin tags. But the wart, he I abhor. A crusty little devil, dammit, has bloomed near my elbow. All I want for Christmas is a wart removal kit. A wart should not be confused with a mole, and unlike skin tags, moles lack personality. Unless you’re talking about a Mole Mesa mole which is different.

X is for eXcruciating. I thought I got another flare-up of gout in my big left toe, only it turned out not to be gout at all but an ingrown toenail. It got really swollen and sore. And then a blistered pool of yellow pus formed at the base… Wait. Geez. So sorry. One should NOT write “blistered pool of yellow pus” in a Christmas letter. Please forgive and ignore.

Y is for Yellow Snow. Oh, how we miss Omar the Dog. Today atop Mole Mesa, the snow is white as freshly flaked dandruff. Gone are the yellow splotches of snow. Gone are the body slams we got when arriving home to an overjoyed canine cannonball. Gone are the bruises.

Z is for Zmas. That’s about it this Zmas. As you have seen, we still lead deeply flawed lives, but lives that are consistently rated above average. We hope you celebrate your own flaws, warts and all. Have a merry little Zmas!

A Toast to the Kumandan

We made it to Ankara, Paul and I. It was August of 1973. A month later, we would be standing at attention in a dark Turkish jail, sober as those walls of concrete.

In June, we had flown from New York City to Luxembourg on Icelandic Airways. When we touched down I was half-drunk from the pint of scotch I bought at the duty-free shop on our stopover at Reykjavik. Half-drunk and half-ready for our hitchhike through Europe. I was 21.

Paul also was 21, but he was sober and all-out ready. He had just graduated from Michigan State University and looked upon our trip as part reward and part self-exploration in forming a path into a new phase of life, whatever it might be. I was a junior. We had become friends at school, getting wild at parties, and sharing a table in a creative writing course. He looked upon me as a "guide", as he put it, as I had already backpacked through Europe during the summers of 1968 and 1969 when I was in high school and lived with my parents and sister in Ankara.

Ankara was our eventual destination. My parents still lived there and I thought I might stay for a while. But who could say? I wandered according to whim, a fine and loose fit for a young drifter with backpack and a thumb extended. One July afternoon, we came to a forked road in southern Austria, Paul and I. The southern route headed into Italy. The eastern route headed into then-Yugoslavia. Which road to take?

"Guess I'll go through Italy," said Paul.

"Guess I'll go through Yugoslavia," said I.

We planned to rendezvous in Athens, and wishing each other luck, off we walked to our separate roadside posts. It seemed then such an easy and breezy choice to make. An hour later we were both still thumbing in our respective spots when Paul decided to delay his trip to Italy and walked the hundred meters back to join me on the road to Yugoslavia. We got a ride with two young German men in a VW camper and climbed the winding road through spectacular mountains. Dazzled, Paul turned to me and said, "Michigan who?" We landed in Ljubljana where our German hosts cooked up oxtail soup and shared a bottle of champagne. We caught a train the next morning to Thesalanki, Greece, and wound up guzzling cheap wine with drunken Yugoslavian sailors who packed the aisles when night broke.

You never knew what lay ahead when thumbing rides and trying to survive on a few bucks a day. We took five weeks to travel from Luxembourg to Ankara, the last leg a 12-hour bus ride from the Turkish coastal town of Bodrum to my parents' apartment in the Turkish capital. Mom and Dad welcomed us with open arms and on late afternoons, an open bar.

I showed Paul the Ankara neighborhood of old Ulus with its teeming open-air food markets and dimly-lit copper and carpet shops. Merchants invited us in for tea and pitches to haggle for goods. From there, we ascended streets and alleys to stand upon the towering citadel for the spectacular view across the sprawling city there on the Anatolian plateau. We traveled to Istanbul and stayed silent for the prayer at the Blue Mosque. We traveled to Akcakoca and body surfed on the Black Sea. We took a day trip to Eskisehir and procured a cache of meerschaum pipes.

And every day there was beer, wine, or raki at restaurants. There were martinis or manhattans before dinner. My parents enjoyed drinks but not to excess. Paul might imbibe should the spirit move him. But I loved to drink and had built an unfortunate reputation. It was no easy task to be regarded as a standout at MSU.

One evening at home after drinks and dinner, the four of us sat down in the living room as usual to read or play cards. Soon I went to the refrigerator for a beer and set the bottle in front of me after draining a third of it in a single pull. My dad, serious and calm, spoke a sentence that would haunt me for years to come: "Son, you have an alcoholic problem."

It was true, but I was light years from admitting it. Dad asked Paul if he had observed a problem in our travels, and Paul recalled three or four nights of drunkenness, but that the occasions were in sync with the venues: a night at the Hofbrau Haus in Munich, a wine festival in Greece, pub crawling in London. Paul wasn't covering for me, just calling it like he saw it. He had no view of my silent craving, just the evidence of random losses of control. I could have hugged him. My parents seemed satisfied.

A few nights later, Paul and I took a dolmush to Genclik (Youth) Park in Ulus to take in the life. It is an enormous area with a lake for rowing boats, amusement rides, and cafes. Hundreds of Turkish families stroll the sidewalks during cooling Ankara evenings. As we sat on a park bench, we befriended two young Germans who, like many hippies we had met, were backpacking to India and Nepal. We swapped stories and biographies and decided to head back to their hotel for more camaraderie. I stopped at a kiosk en route and bought a half liter of raki to pass around.

Turkish raki is a popular, anise-flavored liquor meant to be iced, diluted with water, and sipped like wine at dinner. None of the other three had any interest in warm raki straight from the bottle. But I sure did. As we sat there on twin beds in the Germans' dingy hotel room, I gulped away, and when the bottle was almost done, I staggered out of the hotel, rode home with Paul to my parents' apartment on Cankaya hill, and went to bed -- none of which I can remember.

I woke up on the couch wearing different clothes. My head felt like it was bouncing on cement. My mother walked by, silent and mad as hell. "What's up, Mom?" I pleaded.

"I hope you're proud of yourself!" she cried.

I shivered in the dead opposite of proud. "What happened?" I whispered. What happened was: I was making all kinds of noise in the middle of the night and woke her. She came into my bedroom to see that I had urinated all over my bed and myself. And when she appeared I had become relentless in hugging her with melodramatic claims about a son's undying love for his mother. She changed the bed, got me into the shower, clothed me, and put me down on the couch with a blanket. And that was probably the least of it.

Humiliation. Shame. Remorse. A begging apology. I groveled for some love. This was it. I was done. No more.

When my father got home from work, it was time to bare souls. And in his unwaveringly supportive and sympathetic fashion, he sought with me to find higher ground, to cultivate from my drunken escapade a "learning experience," as he liked to put it.

I complied, honest and repentant. This was it. I was done. No more, I promised. My mother hugged me.

But alcoholics have built-in amnesia when it comes to learning experiences. The sting of self-loathing is vicious in the first days of the aftermath. But as subsequent days unfold, the jail house doors begin to open, and the drunk will poke holes in his promises until they sag without weight. The pain of shame is minimized and forgotten.

In a few short days as Paul and I collected our bus tickets to Turkey's Mediterranean coast, I remained resolved to refuse all alcohol. We planned to take a bus to Antalya, then hitchhike to the coastal town of Silifke 200 miles eastward, and return to Ankara by bus from there. We expected to be gone a week.

*        *        *

We took a southbound bus on a late afternoon for the eight-hour ride to Antalya. Paul and I read or played chess on a magnetized board I had, or we just gazed out upon the barren Anatolian plateau receding in the twilight. Every few hours the bus conductor walked by offering free and delicious snacks or a few splashes of lemon water into cupped hands which passengers then splashed onto their faces and necks for instant refreshment. Greyhound could never have boasted such exquisite customer service.

We arrived in Antalya in the wee hours and found a room at a pensyon for the night. The quarters were clean, simple, and spartan, although we disturbed a peculiar and translucent lizard stationed fast to a wall. It hightailed around the room before Paul smashed it with his sandal.

I suppose others could have seen Paul and me as unlikely traveling companions. When we became friends back at MSU, he could be a brash and loud-laughing party animal, a ladies' man who trolled bars for "sweet cupcakes" as he liked to say. He was a leader among his peers whom he bequeathed with nicknames that stuck. Paul was an athlete, a big guy who stood six feet two, an all-conference lineman on his high school football team. He was handsome. He was an extrovert and charmed others with a confident, easy grin and a penchant for telling uproarious stories.

Eight months earlier, Paul, two others, and I were headed from East Lansing to Daytona Beach over winter break. We drove quietly through Cincinnati at about two in the morning. There on southbound I-75 we observed an enormous billboard advertising their local brew, Wiedemann Beer. And out of nowhere, Paul shocked the silence by yelling, "Wiedemann Weep!" Vintage Paul. We howled all the way into Kentucky.

I, on the other hand, was mainly introverted, unless fueled by beer. I was not self-assured in the presence of women. I rarely dated. I was among that cluster of young men who thronged in dorm rooms or bars while subverting our hormonal urges in favor of a communal comfort zone.

One evening that summer, Paul and I were riding in a crowded Paris subway and bumped up against two attractive British girls our age. Paul took an immediate interest and took charge in trying to hook up with them. His pursuit was well outside my comfort zone and I retreated into myself with outward disinterest. I hated myself for it, but there I was. My lack of fortitude, of course, quickly doused any designs Paul may have had, and the girls went their separate way. He was a natural and I wasn't. He was pissed. He couldn't understand how I could let such a golden opportunity slip away.

Paul and I had met through a common friend and got to know each other in that creative writing course. He loved Dylan, bluesy rock and roll, and good literature, and he was impressed that I had memorized several stanzas of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Many days that summer when we would start a hitchhike on some European road, he would chant, like an anthem that tied us together, the beginning of Eliot's poem:

               "Let us go, then, you and I,

                When the evening is spread out against the sky

                Like a patient etherized upon a table.

                Let us go through certain half-deserted streets..."

In some ways we were odd partners on that journey. But after Paul landed in Europe, he began discarding his youthful bravado to discover inner chords that gained resonance roaming through foreign half-deserted streets. He journaled every day and his mind opened with introspection. His sister remarked after he returned home to Michigan a year later, "Paul left as a boy and returned as a man."

We awoke to a bright sun and familiar Turkish street scenes of Antalya, but now we were among palm trees with the towering Taurus Mountains following the coastline just to the north. Today, it has a population of over a million (the fifth largest city in Turkey), but in 1973, it had but one hundred thousand. Antalya was still a bustling metropolis then, but without the long flank of international hotels spiking its shore today. It was a provincial city with a rich history as a seaport since its founding thousands of years before. You almost get used to seeing ancient Greek and Roman ruins interspersed in daily life in the major Turkish byways.

Soon we were walking the stony Antalya beach on the shimmering Turkish Riviera. The water is a magnificent blue-green, and legend has it that when French Crusaders first witnessed that Turkish sea, they founded a new word for its color, turquoise.  But more probably, the word is the color for the turquoise stone, originally brought west from Turkey hundreds of years ago.

Our aim that first day was to hitchhike to Side (pronounced, see-deh), a small town about fifty miles east of Antalya. I had traveled this stretch of coast with my parents and sister five years earlier and remembered it as a quaint fishing village with the best fish, fresh sea bass, I had ever tasted. It was also home to different civilizations over the past three thousand years, like most of the towns along the Mediterranean coast. It boasts a fantastic array of ruins, including a 7,000 seat Greek amphitheater where high art and later Roman gladiator blood-letting were all the rage. Alexander the Great and Hannibal had set up temporary camps there. Various tribes of pirates over the centuries made Side their headquarters as it provided a safe and natural harbor for small vessels with its kilometer-long peninsula that juts out into the sea.

Paul and I arrived in the afternoon and wandered the shops around the town square. There at the village's center was a typical statue of Kemal Ataturk, the beloved founder of modern Turkey. His images are everywhere. We set out for the spectacular, five-columned Temple of Apollo stationed at the point of the harbor. There was no need to find lodging as the long and deserted sandy beach would provide fine comfort for our sleeping bags that night. At dusk, we settled on a small and simple open-air restaurant along the water. There were very few people around, just small bands of German or Norwegian tourists. We didn't have the foresight to appreciate that the simple, sweet charm of the scene would all but disappear in the short years to come. We experienced small Side as it had stayed for decades, as primarily a local Turkish fishing economy, a culture away from the onslaught of venture capitalists that would invade, develop, and forever change the geography there.

Paul had shish kebab and I had the fish. And we ordered water. Yes, we would have some goddam water. The waiter, of course, took our request without raised eyebrows, but I had been so accustomed at dinner to drinking bottles of beer or carafes of wine, that there seemed a gaping hole in the regular scheme of things. Paul pulled out his journal, as he did every day, and as we sat waiting for food, withdrew to recording his day's summation. I sat looking out over a small fleet of moored fishing boats and the calm pink water beyond. I could not enthrall in that sunset, but smoked Bafra cigarettes and wished that I did not want a drink. I could have had a beer, of course, but goddammit, with all that came before, I couldn't. I gritted my teeth and lit another cigarette in that anxious and empty middle ground that I would experience a thousand times again.

Strings of colored lights now lit the restaurant. Paul and I played chess at the table and friendly restaurant staff gathered round to kibbutz. We were peculiar customers to be sure, these two young American wayfarers, with their chess game and backpacks. I spoke some streetwise Turkish which always seemed to endear me to those I met. And I always found the Turks to be such warm and hospitable hosts, for which they are world famous, that it seemed quite natural and relaxing, affirming really, to be among them in friendly commerce.

We finally wandered out onto the flat, moonlit beach that extended eastward from town and spread our sleeping bags on the sand. Paul and I talked about whether to stay in Side another day or whether to hitchhike on to Alanya. We would decide in the morning. Sleep came easy as gentle waves licked the sand only yards from our feet. There were no people around. The air was warm and the quiet Mediterranean slept.

*        *        *

I was jolted awake by a blow to the the small of my back. "Kalk! Kalk!" Get up! Another kick to my spine!

I stood to face two soldiers in full military garb with rifles slung over their shoulders. Paul had been kicked awake by the other.

"Ne var?" I asked. What is this?

"Pasaport!" he demanded. My interrogator seemed incensed.

This was from a dream. I couldn't make out his face. Where was I?  I looked at my watch. Midnight.

"Pasaport! Shimdi!" he shouted. Now!

I tried to put it together. "Biz Amerikan. Pasaportler Ankara," I said. We're Americans. Our passports are in Ankara.

"Pasaport yok?" he cried. No passport?

"Yok, afadersiniz. Pasaportler Ankarada. Ankara oturiyoruz," I replied. No, I'm sorry. Our passports are in Ankara. We live there.

The soldier's face was coming into view. He stared at me from under his army helmet, before stepping away and conferring with his cohort.

He returned to face Paul, and demanded, "Pasaport!" Paul didn't speak Turkish, of course, and with palms up and said, "My passport's in Ankara, man."

The soldier turned to face me and, shouted in accusation, "Nasil Turkce biliyorsun?" How do you know Turkish?

I tried to explain that I lived in Ankara and that Paul and I were tourists on the coast, but it didn't seem to register to him or at least to satisfy. I was hardly fluent when it came to carrying on conversations, although my good accent might have suggested otherwise.

The soldiers ordered us to walk into town, and after we gathered up our bags and backpacks, off we trudged along the beach with our escorts following behind. All was quiet aside from occasional and light-hearted exchanges between the soldiers. After a while one of them began to sing a song, a folk song I presumed. A sweet serenade whispered behind us as my heart pounded.

After ten minutes and nearing the edge of Side, we came upon two Turkish teenaged boys who also were sleeping on the beach. The soldiers pounced on them and kicked them awake with their heavy boots. The boys sprung upright and the gendarme engaged them in a similarly angry interrogation. After some apparent demands and unsatisfactory responses, the boys were ordered to fall in line and march with us into town. Now we were a column of six.

We came to befriend our fellow captives as Kemal and Mehmet. Kemal spoke some English. They lived in Antalya and were in their last year of lise, high school, together. They had come to visit Side for the weekend. Kemal would explain that the soldiers had demanded to see their "papers" but that they did not have any to authenticate themselves. No passports with us and no papers with them. The four of us were escorted and handed off to the office of the kumandan, the commander, at the Side village jail.

It seemed odd that the Turkish Army would be tasked with patrolling beaches and making arrests. We would learn that the Manavgat region, of which Side is a part, was under martial law as a result of governmental chaos and power grabs in Ankara, Turkey's capital. I paid no mind to those goings-on, but it explained why Kemal and Mehmet were required to carry "papers" and why we were arrested.

Turkey for decades has been ripe for political violence. Those expounding traditional Islamic values and those adhering to pro-Western liberal ideals have come to blows time and again. At election time, I remember watching open truckloads of rabid supporters waving flags and screaming slogans as they careened about Ankara's main streets. About every ten years from 1950 on, shots could be heard and tanks would roll down Ataturk Boulevard, Ankara's main thoroughfare, as the military would seize control when the government faltered. Americans living there seemed mainly oblivious to political clashes at least until the military brought out the gunpowder. And then, as control was established, parliamentary functioning would take hold again.

The kumandan was a sour and dour man. The rank of commander displayed on his office door seemed overblown -- he was in charge of a staff of two in a podunk jail in a podunk town. I noticed his name badge sewn over his breast pocket, Yildirim, which means "lightning". It seemed an unlikely moniker for someone so morose. As the four of us stood before him, side by side, he only briefly raised his eyes to scan our faces. He held his gaze on me for an extra beat and seemed especially disgusted with my hair, which was on the long side then. He barely motioned to one of the soldiers who then whisked us away to the holding room.

The jail building consisted of a small office for the commander, a small central room with a table, and one "cell" just off the central room that measured about six by ten feet. It was not a jail cell in the usual sense -- there were no iron bars -- but was simply an empty room with a concrete floor and high windowless concrete walls. There was no water, nothing at all. There was a single door that adjoined the central room and a hanging light bulb that was wired to a switch next to the door. There was no one else in the building other than we four prisoners, the kumandan, and the two military guards who had arrested us on the beach.

The soldiers herded us into the cell and promptly departed, slamming and locking the door behind them. It was then that we actually met Kemal and Mehmet and the story of their planned weekend without the required papers. They were friendly and talkative, especially Kemal, and didn't seem especially worried about their plight. We all sat with our backs against the walls and got to know one another. They were curious about their sudden American brethren, where we came from, and why we were there. They loved American cars, especially Corvettes and Ford Mustangs, and asked about--

In a crash, the two guards stormed in and ordered us to stand. They slammed Kemal and Mehmet against the walls and barked instructions into their faces. The boys immediately stood at rigid attention before the soldiers fixed their gazes on Paul and me. Kemal whispered in English, "Straight stand up," and we complied, each one of us against each of the four walls. The two guards silently circled from one of us to the other, glaring fierce eyeballs as they passed. After a minute of this, a soldier barked out a command: We were to stand there at attention without so much as a whisper. And with that, they turned off the light and exited.

Thoughts raced in different directions. How absurd was this? Would we have to stand here all night in the dark? How would it end? Would we be transported to a Turkish prison as my friend Joel had been four years before? Joel and I had attended the American high school in Ankara together when he was arrested in a drug bust. He languished in desperate confinement for eight months before he escaped with the help of his father. I remembered him weeping through a small, filthy pane of glass when I visited him in prison. There was rotten food and sexual assaults. Thoughts turned to Paul who stood six feet away. He was probably thanking me for hauling him to Turkey and this nightmare. He was probably--

Mehmet began to giggle. He whispered something to Kemal who joined in with laughter. They carried on in some hushed and funny conversation and, aided by the crack of light from under the door, I saw them slide their backs down the walls into sitting positions again. They must have known somehow that the guards would not return. Paul and I followed suit and sat listening to the boys' incomprehensible Turkish dialog for a few minutes.

Paul whispered, "You all right?"

"I'm okay. You?"

"I'm pissed, man. What is this shit? Can they do this? Is this even happening?"

And like an explosion, the guards blasted in again and turned on the light. We rose to our feet. They were savagely mad.

"Ayakta durmak söylemiştim! Sana hiç konuşma söyledi!" the first one screamed. I told you to stand up! I said no talking! The second one slapped Kemal across the face, turned to Mehmet, and slapped him across the face.

The first one then came over to me and brought his face to within an inch of mine with his rancid breath of tobacco and tea. 

"Salak! Neden saçınız çok uzun?" he yelled. Idiot! Why is your hair so long? He grabbed handfuls of my hair and slammed my head against the concrete wall.

Over the guard's shoulder, I saw that Paul's face became grave and, with clenched fists at his sides, took a slow step towards my guard who still had my head pinned to the wall by my hair.

This could get very bad. "Easy, man," I said. "I'm okay." Paul paused, then retreated the step back to his wall, his face creased in utter hatred. The soldiers again ogled us from one to the other, barked the previous order to stand at silent attention, and left us again in the locked, dark room.

It seemed odd that the guards felt free to assault three of us, but had not raised a hand to Paul. I supposed that his stature intimidated them, although as it was, my tormentor came near to receiving the brunt of Paul's blows. The image of Paul's protective step and clinched fists stands as clear in my memory as any from that corrupted journey. He was the man you wanted in your foxhole. If that guard had been a mere bully on the street and attacked me like he had, he would have paid with blood and bruises.

We stood in silence. Mehmet began to whisper again but we shut him down. Fifteen minutes must have passed before the door opened and the light switched back on. This time the kumandan accompanied the two guards. One of the guards carried a rifle and their boss held a yard-long cane-like stick. This time they came without commotion or abuse. Indeed, the three men went about their business as though setting a table for dinner. There were no words other than the subdued instructions proffered by Commander Yildirim. First, he ordered Kemal to remove his shoes and socks.

He made Kemal sit with his back against one of the narrower walls. The guards stood astride of him, each holding one end of the rifle. Kemal was ordered to put his feet through the rifle's shoulder strap which looped beneath. Once Kemal's ankles were through, the guards twisted the rifle several times so that the boy's bare feet were cinched tight through the strap. They then raised the rifle waist high and held it firmly so that the helpless Kemal could not budge. The guards had served up the soles of Kemal's feet for their superior officer.

The kumandan squared his stance and reached back with his stick to unleash a seething blow to the bottoms of Kemal's feet. The boy howled in piercing pain. Every two seconds, and with maddening monotony, the man reached back and with mighty blows tortured Kemal's feet to a sickening purple. Kemal's face turned a similar crimson and his screams interspersed with coughs and blurts of choked words begging the man to stop, begging almighty Allah to make it stop. All of Side must have awakened.

After five or ten blows, I don't know how many, the beating came to a stop. The guards unwound the strap, removed Kemal's legs, and set his feet on the floor. He was reduced to moans as tears drenched his cheeks. I stared down at my own sandaled feet.

The kumandan then ordered Mehmet to remove his shoes and socks. He and Kemal exchanged places with Kemal crawling then curling fetus-like against Mehmet's wall. Mehmet dutifully positioned himself, put his feet through the noose of the rifle strap, the soldiers cinched his ankles, and the kumandan reared back. Mehmet took a deep breath and held it in.

The man wailed away with his cane, first blow, second blow, the third, but Mehmet kept his mouth shut with his breath held tight. The fourth blow, the fifth, and Mehmet held fast without uttering a sound even though his small body jarred and his eyes bulged with each passing lash. This only angered his torturer who sped up the pace and the force of the strikes. Midway through, all of Mehmet's pain and breath geysered out in a violent howl of spit and a cry of "Allaaaaaah!"

The kumandan allowed a brief smile when at last he was able to extract Mehmet's inner horror. He withdrew the cane. The soldiers loosened Mehmet's feet and the boss directed him to trade places with Paul. Mehmet crawled on hands and knees across the floor and sat at Paul's wall as before. While Kemal remained prone and moaning, Mehmet sat in his position with a scowl. His only outburst had been that one moment of release and his eyes now fixed on a single point of the floor, his honor undefeated.

The kumandan ordered Paul to remove his sandals and take the position. Paul moved to the flogging wall, sat down before the rifle and extended his legs, his large frame was in stark contrast to the smaller spaces Kemal and Mehmet had filled. He seemed to take up half the room. My heart pounded. The room held no air. First Kemal, then Mehmet, and now here was my friend with his ankles twisted tight in a rifle strap in a small jail in a small Turkish town eight thousand miles from home, guilty of sleeping on a deserted beach. I would be next.

Paul kept his glaring eyes glued on the kumandan as if to say, "Go ahead. Come at me, motherfucker." The kumandan was calm and took his time. He checked to see that Paul's feet were tightly secured, said a word or two to the guards on each end of the rifle, and turned to face me with the same disgusted look he gave me in his office two hours earlier. 

The kumandan moved to his position, brought back the cane, 

And froze. And the earth froze. Seven breathless men and boys frozen solid in a small cell. The man then dropped his arm and locked a momentary stare upon Paul. His work was done.

He ordered the guards to release their hold and Paul's feet were freed. Our three captors left without a word. They left the light on and closed the door. Paul sat with his face buried in his hands. Kemal lay quiet and curled up, his eyes shut. Mehmet still sat staring straight at the floor. I stood against the wall.

A soldier returned with four blankets and said it was time to sleep. He left the room, switched off the light, and closed and locked the door. Without words, we arranged our blankets in the dark room with Kemal's moans the only sounds. If I fell asleep, I wondered, would I wake up on the beach to the morning sun? Exhaustion seeped in and I began to drift. Then Mehmet, the boy who spoke no English, nevertheless signed off in English: "I love Bridgette Bardot." Kemal somehow allowed a laugh.

*        *        *

A guard opened the door and light filled the room. It was eight o'clock in the morning. He collected our blankets and directed us outside to a table and chairs by the entryway of the jail. We sat under palm trees and our backpacks and sleeping bags were there waiting for us. We were allowed to use the hole-in-the-floor toilet and the other guard brought us tea and plates of toasted bread, jam, olives, and goat cheese. It was as if we were guests at a bed and breakfast. The guards carried no hint of the terror they inflicted just hours before. Kemal and Mehmet ate like starved animals while Paul and I poked at the edges.

With bleary eyes, Commander Yildirim emerged from his office. He must have been sleeping. He announced that Kemal and Mehmet were free to return home to Antalya. But he said nothing about Paul's and my fate, other than we would be transported to Manavgat, a small city that serves as the provincial capital about ten miles inland.

Kemal and Mehmet finished their breakfasts. They must have expected they would be freed as they received their news with little reaction. But Kemal couldn't understand why Paul and I would remain in custody, and like a lawyer to a judge, pled our case to the kumandan. But the kumandan just stood there with a sleepy face. Kemal gave me a pitying look and asked for a pencil and paper to write down his phone number for me.

"Call me if you come to Antalya," he said. "We will drink, what is word... oh yes, we drink toast to America. We drink toast to life."

"And drink a toast to Bridgette Bardot," I said. 

When he recognized the name, Mehmet broke into a grin. Paul found nothing funny in this but stared hatred at the kumandan who was retreating to his office.

The boys gathered their things and limped on swollen feet to their way back home. Paul sat stone-faced and inspected his backpack to make sure nothing was stolen. I did the same. Nothing was missing.

"What is happening, Tom?" Paul asked. "What are they going to do to us? Are we going to prison?"

I, Paul's "guide" as he liked to say, the presumed knower of all things Turkish, had no clue. And in a few minutes, we were ordered to take the backseats of a military jeep. The two gendarme, the same two who had arrested us, abused us, and held the rifle for their commander, sat in front without saying a word. And off we drove into that brilliant and quiet morning bound for Manavgat.

I came to learn that foot whipping, or falaka as it is known in the Middle East, or bastinado as it is known elsewhere across the world, is a torture that existed in Europe as early as the sixteenth century, and in China in the tenth. The soles of the feet are especially sensitive to inflictions of pain and flogging them has been common in prisons across the world as punishment. Since going barefoot in the Muslim world is a sign of dishonor and social degradation, exposing them to punishment is personally humiliating as well. In the Side jail, we had stumbled onto a widely used and long-standing tradition of torture.

Like most Turkish towns, Manavgat has a kasaba merkezi, town square, at its center, with one of its sides occupied by a governmental building: a three-story, rectangular, concrete fortress housing dozens of offices. Our two captors escorted us through the front door and handed us over to another soldier, a private we came to know as Ali.

Ali had been expecting us and was absolutely thrilled to have us in his care. To a lowly conscript who grew up poor and ignorant and whose duty was to sit bored on a hard government chair or to stand guard by a hard government door, hour upon hour, month after month, the prospect of guarding two young Americans must have seemed like winning the lottery. The bland faces of our two captors matched the grey facade of the governmental building. Ali's was the face of a child on Christmas morning.

He was a tall and lanky young man, his head buzz-cut to near baldness. His green, woolen uniform was too small for him, his trousers tucked into tall, black boots. When I spoke a few Turkish words to him, Ali beamed and squeezed my shoulder with an arm around my back. I seemed an answer to his prayers. We were in very friendly company at last.

"Bize ne olacak?" I asked him. What will happen to us?

"Haydi, gidelim!" he answered with a smile. Come on, let's go! Ali took us up the stairs to the second floor, a long hallway with offices off each side. We came to an office door on the right and Ali pantomimed that Paul and I needed to present ourselves to this official with respect, that our eyes should remained cast downward and our hands held together in front of us. We should be submissive, he motioned. We got the picture.

Ali knocked on the door and the occupant told us to enter. A man was seated at his desk looking seriously at documents. There was an enormous portrait of Ataturk on the wall behind him. The three of us entered and stood before him. The man barely looked up.

"Kimsiniz?" he asked. Who are you?

I gave him our names, told him in Turkish that we were tourists from America, and tried to say that we were staying with my parents who lived in Ankara. The man took notes on a sheet of paper.

"Neden buradasiniz?" he asked. Why are you here?

I tried to tell him we were sightseeing in Side, and we were arrested for sleeping on the beach without our passports. Again, more notes.

"Pasaportlar nerede?" he asked. Where are your passports?

I said our passports were in Ankara.

"Neden pasaportlariniz Ankara'da?" he asked. Why are your passports in Ankara?

I tried to say that we didn't think we needed them because we weren't planning on crossing any borders. I wasn't sure my meaning got through, but still, he took notes.

"Neden oyle dusundun?" he asked. Why did you think that?

I paused. It was hard to say. But I tried to tell the truth. "Belki, cunku biz biraz aptal." I said. Maybe it's because we are a little stupid.

The man stopped taking notes and looked up to glare at me. I cast my eyes to the floor. He grunted and returned to his notes. He asked Paul where his passport was. Paul, of course, didn't understand and looked at me. I told the man that Paul didn't speak Turkish. More notes.

"Ishten," he ordered. Dismissed. And we took our leave.

Back in the corridor, I asked Ali if we were now free to leave. Ali laughed and reached behind and gave my shoulder another hard squeeze. "Haydi," he said. Come on.

A few doors down, Ali knocked on another door and demonstrated again the need to show respect. We were told to enter and this office likewise held a looming picture of Ataturk. Here was another serious bureaucrat at his papers. The interview was a carbon copy of the first with the same questions and my admission that we were a little stupid. We were dismissed as before.

Farther down the second floor hallway, we entered a third office and then a fourth, and nothing in memory signifies any difference between the non-personalities of the office holders or their questions. Ataturk watched in every space and in each session I admitted to being a little bit stupid. I was getting good at reciting the script.

After each encounter, I asked Ali if we were free to go, and each time he would laugh and squeeze my shoulder. It became a standing joke between us, but no, we were not free to go. Ali had no idea what lay in store, bottom feeder that he was and the unique situation that it was, but he was sympathetic to our cause. Between interrogations, I learned that Ali had grown up in a small village in eastern Turkey and Manavgat was the largest town he had ever seen. He had never met any foreigners, let alone Americans. He had been to the movies in Manavgat and expressed his admiration for Jerry Lewis and Clint Eastwood. He asked whether we knew any cowboys and Indians.

We took smoke breaks, and because we had run out of cigarettes, Ali gladly offered his. They were a brand I hadn't seen before, the army-issued Ikinci. Ikinci means seconds, the dregs of the tobacco used in Birinci, or firsts, a dirt-cheap and foul cigarette smoked by the Turkish masses. We smoked Ali's Ikincis even though I noticed worm holes in the paper of every cigarette. There was nicotine to be had, by God, even as the smoke of burning worms and whatever else hit our lungs.

By the fifth interview, we were up on the third floor where the offices were larger and the positions of our interrogators were more senior. I had given an official my parents' telephone number at some point, and we were told later that my father had taken our passports to a Turkish government office for verification. It seemed we were on the threshold of release. Fear dissolved.

Our final interview, the sixth or seventh, was handled by a nasty superior who felt his duty was to shout or grumble, or just plain humiliate. Yes, he knew our passports were left in Ankara, but why were we so stupid? Why, why, why? Explain! We had no answers.

Ali ushered us out of the honcho's office, down the stairs, and out into a courtyard on the property. We sat at a picnic table and Ali complimented us on how well we had comported ourselves. It was one o'clock in the afternoon. Finally. It was time to bid farewell to Ali, the grey government fortress, and the city of Manavgat forever.

"Let's get the hell out of here," muttered Paul. "I don't care which direction. Let's just get the hell out of here."

Hell, yeah! I extended my hand to Ali. "Allahsmarlidik, arakadashim," I said. "Cok teshekur ederim." Good bye, my friend. Thank you for everything.

Ali would not take my hand but held up his own in a gesture to stop. He had become stern.

"I'm sorry," he said in Turkish, "but I can't release you. You are still in my custody."

"What?" I demanded. "They know our passports are in Ankara! We are free!"

"No," he said. "No one gave me an order to let you go."

It dawned on me: we must be on a simple lunch break. We would have to endure more encounters with more officials in the afternoon. But then again, we had been interrogated by men at every tier in the hierarchy, from the low to the very top, across the second floor and up to the third. There was no fourth floor. I looked back at the building. Everyone had left. All the corridors and office windows were dark.

It was Saturday. In those days, government offices closed at one o'clock on Saturday afternoons. No one would return until Monday. Panic set in. I asked Ali what we were to do. He raised his eyebrows in a look of total ignorance.

"Bilmiyorum," he said. I don't know. And Ali wasn't at all interested in trying to find out. He may have been sympathetic, but it wasn't his job to know anything. He just stood there looking quite stupid.

He broke into a grin. "Let's eat lunch!" he exclaimed.

When I explained all this to Paul, he walked to the edge of the courtyard and stared out onto the mountains. All that morning and early afternoon while we were herded from one interview to the next, he had been stoic with anger idling beneath. He had relied on me, of course, to interpret what had transpired, or had not transpired, at every step. And now that this crazy bureaucratic maze had left us nowhere, in the continued custody of a clueless nobody, he had had enough.

I walked over to him. "No, Tom, no picnics for me and Ali," Paul said. "This is total bullshit. What are we supposed to do, sit here till Monday, go back to jail till Monday? Let's hit it. I'm grabbing my shit and hitting the road."

I looked back at Ali. "Probably not a good idea," I said.

"Okay, then ask this shithead what would happen if we just took off. What's he going to do, shoot us?" Ali did have a holstered pistol on his belt.

"I can't ask him that, Paul," I said. "Let's get something to eat and figure it out."

He stood there simmering but relented. "Turkey," he whispered to himself.

*        *        *

Ali, all smiles again, escorted us to a fly-infested store and deli across the square. The business was crowded and loud, but when a soldier with two long-haired, foreign backpackers arrived in their midst, the place grew quiet and full of stares. We ordered a large bowl of white beans in oil, grape leaf dolma, a loaf of bread, and bottles of Pepsi. I paid, insisting to Ali that I buy his portion as well. He protested at length but then squeezed my shoulder in thanks. I had paused at a cooler to gaze at the bottles of beer for sale. It occurred to me that in the past fourteen hours I hadn't thought once about drinking.

We returned to the courtyard and sat down at a table in the shade of a stand of poplar trees. The government property was deserted and there was little traffic with few pedestrians outside on that hot afternoon. As we finished lunch, we saw a military jeep pass by the government building and circle the square before stopping on the street in front of the courtyard. Two soldiers inside the vehicle stared at us before exiting. They arrived quite by accident - they had not been sent - and must have thought it strange, in Manavgat of all places, that a soldier was sitting with two young foreigners outside the closed government building.

Ali scurried up to meet them, saluted to attention, and the three carried on a conversation which I couldn't understand except for the word pasaport.  It was obvious the two men were ranking officers from how rigidly and submissively Ali interacted with them. Their uniforms had insignias on their shoulders and their hats showed rank. The officers sauntered up and sat with us at the table. They wore short sleeves and open collars, looked to be in their 40s, and were quite relaxed and friendly.

They loved that I spoke some Turkish. They spoke no English. One officer offered Paul and me high-class Samsun cigarettes which we gladly accepted. No such offer was made to Private Ali who stood at-ease off to the side. There in the shade, I shared with the men, as best I could, how Paul and I hitchhiked through Europe, how my family came to live in Ankara, and that we had been college students back in Michigan. They had never heard of Michigan. How about Chicago, then, I asked. Yes, of course, they had heard of Chicago. So yes, in that case, we had gone to college near Chicago. The officers were thrilled. They loved that they could identify our memleket, or home region. We conversed in this light-hearted way, and I asked about their children whom they spoke of reverently, at least their sons. We joked and laughed and at one point, Paul removed the hat from one officer and placed it backwards on my head. I rose, stood at attention, and gave the officers a sarcastic salute. They almost fell to the ground with howls. Oh, these fantastic Americans. What treasures these boys are, they seemed to think. Ali, meanwhile, stood in a constant grin of disbelief.

I returned the hat, we all took a breath, and it became quiet. One officer asked, not in an unkind way, how we came to be in Manavgat. I tried again in broken Turkish to tell the story of sleeping on the beach, the two soldiers who arrested us, the two students also arrested, our arrival at the Side jail...

Side! Paul recognized the word and jumped up from the table. "Oh, Side!" he shouted. And like a gyrating player in a raucous game of charades, Paul re-enacted the violence from the night before. The officers watched, stunned. This was no joke. Paul grabbed me by the arm, yanked me to his side, and fake-slapped me across the face, once, twice, three times. "Side!" he shouted again. He dropped to the ground, got on his back and told me to show how they tortured. I pantomimed the beating of the stick on his feet and Paul howled in mock pain. "Side!" he cried, rose to his feet and punched the air, wild-eyed in a fury. He then turned to the officers. "Side," he said in a low, solemn voice. "Very, very bad."

I translated: "Side cok, cok fena." Paul sat back down with hands trembling. The officers looked back and forth between us. All the high feelings were buried. They became deadly serious. They were jarred by this performance. We had been horribly wronged, it was clear, and by extension they had been wronged as well.

"Kumandan Yildirim?" asked one of the grim-faced officers. Yes, that was the name on the kumandan's shirt, I said.

Standing to leave, they had revenge in their eyes. We were told, and Ali was told, that we were free to leave Manavgat. We were to go home to Ankara right away for it was illegal for Americans to travel without passports. We stood and shook hands. They boarded their jeep and made a u-turn onto the road that would take them to Side.

*        *        *

My guess is that Ali, if he is still alive, has always remembered that day with the two forlorn and unusual young Americans, our running joke, how we befriended his superior officers at a picnic table, and how we came to be released. We said our good-byes, "Gule, gule... Allahsmarlidik," and Ali kissed Paul and me on both cheeks. Was that a tear I detected in his eye?

It was mid-afternoon. Paul and I took a spot by the road out of Manavgat to hitchhike back to Antalya to catch a bus back to Ankara. We were free. There was little traffic but it didn't matter. In a booming voice, Paul proclaimed, "Let us go, then, you and I!"

We hitched the hour-long ride to Antalya, past Side and westward along the open Mediterranean coast. I thought of Kemal and Mehmet and wondered if they were hobbled from the flogging the night before.  We'll never know why the kumandan stopped short of beating Paul's feet. Maybe it was because we were foreigners or maybe it was because he feared retaliation. In any case, there is satisfaction in believing the kumandan suffered humiliation when his two superior officers from Manavgat came calling.

Paul and I arrived at the bus station in Antalya and bought tickets for Ankara later that night. I fished Kemal's phone number from my wallet and gave him a call from a phone booth. He was overjoyed to hear from us, and we arranged to meet at a nearby restaurant, Mehmet included. An hour later, Paul and I climbed the stairs to a large second floor room at the appointed restaurant where Kemal and Mehmet were waiting for us.

The boys lit up as we approached their table and we shared hugs all around. We had only parted ways that morning, but it felt like reuniting with long-lost friends. Such is the kinship that binds comrades who have suffered a shared fate, I suppose. They were eager to learn what had happened in Manavgat. Paul and I gave them a blow by blow account with Kemal translating for Mehmet as we went along. Paul was animated and loved telling it. When he described how the officers headed off to Side to throttle the kumandan, Kemal jumped up from his chair with a victory whoop. Standing there, he translated the details for Mehmet, who also rose and raised his fists like a champion.

We asked how they were feeling, if they could walk okay. The boys seemed to downplay these concerns and made fun of their lingering limps. "Gecmis olsun," I said, the standard phrase you offer a Turk who is enduring any sorry straits. May it pass quickly.

I asked how their parents reacted when they told them about the beatings. Both Kemal and Mehmet looked at each other confused. "No, my God, Tom, we say nothing," Kemal said. "I don't want, how you say, double beating. My father... no, no, no, I say nothing. Would be very bad." He allowed a laugh and shook his head at the thought. The boys had taken it all in stride. Theirs was a culture where you came to accept certain things, certain violent and inhumane things, that we coddled Americans knew little about.

"We will drink!" sang Kemal.

"We will drink!" mimicked Mehmet, also in English.

There were only a few tables occupied in that large dining room. There was a group of men sharing a bottle of raki at one, and another table being served a round of beers. My throat tightened. My mouth watered. My heart jumped to a faster beat.

That I might drink a beer? For all I had been through, to be assaulted in a Turkish jail, where was my relief, my reward? After all this? Would it hurt if I celebrated a little? By God, I deserved to celebrate! All resistance dissolved.

Kemal shouted to the waiter across the room. "Dort buyuk birra!" he cried. Four large beers! I said nothing. There would be no turning back. The flood gates opened.

Kemal, Mehmet, Paul, and I celebrated with glass after glass. Mehmet made a toast to Bridgette Bardot. All hail! I made a toast to Private Ali. All hail!  "And by God, a toast to the kumandan!" I cried. "To everlasting hell for the kumandan in bare feet!" Loud toasts and loud laughs with our young Turkish friends. The more I drank, the more I loved them. We were free, Paul and I.

On my second or third beer, I sat staring at the golden liquid half-filling my glass. Lively bubbles of carbonation rose to the foam. Tiny trickles of condensation ran down the glass. The beer was mine. I was the beer's. "I so love thee," I whispered.

I stood and raised my glass. My comrades stood and joined me. "To Freedom!' I shouted.