You can order any or all of my 3 books in my Blurb Bookstore. The following is an excerpt from my first book, Just Another Day:
A week
before arriving in Istanbul in late summer of 2004, a series of bombs
credited to Al Qaeda tore through Sultanahmet - the popular tourist
district where we had our hotel reservations. As Lance and I drank
beers in the Athens airport while waiting for our late night flight
over the Aegean Sea, we killed time with crude male banter rather
than talk of bombs and terror and the unknown. What was there to
talk about, really? Tickets were bought. Hotels were booked. We
were going to Turkey. After a short flight of not much more than an
hour and a hard landing at Ataturk International, we raced a taxi
into town, checked into our hotel, and then stepped guardedly out
onto the recently terrorized streets of Istanbul.
There weren’t many people out around our hotel. Mostly just Australian tourists lounging lazily in cafes puffing on hookahs and making up their own rules to backgammon. We were hungrier than we were brave, so even though it was quite late, we decided to stray from our neighborhood in search of something to eat. The streets were getting darker and we thought that maybe we were headed in the wrong direction, but as we turned a corner, the road opened up in front of us into a brightly lit square bustling with people. We stumbled upon some sort of music festival, and although the amplified police presence was obvious, it was the color of the dress, the smell of grilled corn, the unfamiliar acoustic rhythms, and the domes and spires rising on all sides that helped us start to substitute those news headlines from TV – BOMBS IN ISTANBUL – with real life impressions of a city and its people – children, parents, and grandparents together - celebrating on a hot summer night.
The trip to Istanbul, and then afterwards to Greece, turned me on again to the idea of traveling. I had spent the previous eight years moving back and forth between California and Italy, two comfort zones in which I knew the customs and didn’t really have to stretch myself too far to understand what was going on. Going to Turkey, though, brought back that feeling I had when I first went to Italy. Like being a child struggling with that first exposure to a new word or flavor or human interaction. You could make mistakes again and it was understandable. You could reset everything you thought you knew and try it a different way.
The festival continued day and night for the entire week, and in the afternoon heat, the crowds would head to the expanse of public gardens that stretches between the Hagia Sofia and the Blue Mosque in the historic center of Istanbul. Mothers were huddled together on benches in the shade while their kids ran through the park and splashed in the fountains. This is where I found these three women taking refuge from the August sun under a row of pink flowering oleander trees. I immediately saw them composed as a future painting but I didn’t want to be intrusive. So I snapped a few photos of them from the hip as I was passing and luckily, one of them took. It was skewed and blurry but I was confident that this short visit had impressed enough upon me to help me fill in the rest.
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