Mr. Janus, You Rascal
…New Year’s Eve, 2011…
I began 2011 without a clue. After a chaotic New Year’s Eve day, in which a conversation with a very interesting Turk in Istanbul nearly caused us to not cross the Bosporus in time to get our flight to London. (As Mrs. Tragos might tell you, I have a tendency to get lost—very lost—in conversations.) We made it, just in time for me to kiss Mrs. Tragos at midnight as the Thames flowed by and fireworks exploded. And then to watch my underwear spill out of my luggage onto the middle of a road en route to Mrs. Tragos’s mother’s house.
A few days later we were in my hometown, San Diego, where we discovered, lo and behold, there had been three of us celebrating the new year next to big city big rivers. A Baby Tragos was on the way. Whatever resolutions I’d made the week before, whatever expectations I’d jerryrigged, they were nothing but a pleasant joke at that point. Three weeks later, our bags packed with prenatal vitamins, Mrs. Tragos and I made our way back to Ankara, with a stop to visit friends and family in London along the way. (Best of all: we got the chance to meet Byronic and Mr. Byronic!)
In February, for Valentine’s Day weekend, we took a train to Istanbul, where, without planning it, we ended up staying in the same hotel room Hemingway did when he reported on the war in 1922. Events were a hell of a lot friendlier in 2011. Mrs. Tragos and I wandered the city, and returned to sip on whiskey in the lobby bar (well, me the whiskey, Alexi the fizzy water) where we conversed with the hotel’s parrots and our bartender.
That spring, I finished off my first year teaching in Ankara. I had a fine time. I learned a hell of a lot more from my students than they did from me, which is more often the case than many are willing to admit. Ask Turkish students to apply the ideas of Machiavelli’s Prince to their country’s foreign and domestic politics, and you will see. Fascinating. The semester was interrupted with a short work trip to Vancouver, where I took severely jetlagged runs along a severely misty waterfront and regrettably missed Walk While Reading by a day. I ate irresponsibly large quantities of Asian food, and hoofed it across the city in search of a particular set of boots to be found in one store and one store only. Mission accomplished. Mrs. Tragos and I made monthly visits to downtown Ankara to see our doctor, and, always amazingly, our daughter on a tiny black-and-white screen.
The summer. First we met Father Tragos and Uncle Tragos in Istanbul, and after adventures ferrying up the Bosporus and wandering around the city, we lit off for the plains, exploring underground cities and ballooning over Kapadokya. Back home, the first family visitors gone, Mrs. Tragos and I did nothing more than read and listen to horrific pop music at our local pool. My great hope is that by the end of 2012, I will have forgotten the horrors of Selena Gomez’s improbably titled “I’m Going to Love You Like a Love Song” and Maroon 5’s equally evil “Moves Like Jagger”. I spent a lot of time swimming this summer. The majority of my time in the water? Dreaming of various tortures in hell for Gomez and 5. Fire or ice? I let Frost decide.
In July, I was a lucky man. Brother Tragos arrived in Ankara for a visit. After celebrating his birthday on our balcony, he and I took off for a venture to the Black Sea. To Sinop in fact. Sinop: birthplace of Diogenes the dog, the cynic, the man who reputedly told Alexander the Great to do him the favor of not blocking his sunlight. To which Alexander was reported to have said, “If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes.” I myself suspect that the reason Diogenes took such a snarling turn for the cynical is that he was forced to leave his hometown, which my brother and I endorse with great confidence. Brother Tragos and I talked, drank beer, ate fish, swam in the Black Sea, hiked with cows, and survived the hazards of Turkish roads. It was a fine, fine time.
At 9:11am on September 11th, my daughter was born. Hours earlier, we learned that our incredible Turkish OB/GYN, whom we had grown to love and admire over the spring and summer, grew up where? Ankara, Istanbul, İzmir? No, Ann Arbor, the small town in Michigan where Mrs. Tragos and I had lived for the seven years before our arrival in Turkey. We moved half way across the world, and our baby was delivered by a Wolverine after all. I hope this bodes well for the team on Tuesday. Baby Tragos Hails to the Victors indeed. In December, we received another visitor, Mother Tragos, who came all the way from San Diego to meet her granddaughter. The second my Mom walked in the door, Baby Tragos smiled.
Aside from a recently reported single train venture to Istanbul and back, the fall has been unremittingly domestic, as in the best life is. A friend of mine who had just had a son told my brother that having a child is like traveling, but way better. He was talking about the way ordering a coffee or doing the laundry becomes an adventure when you’re doing it in foreign lands, and in a language you don’t know well. My friend was right, even if in understatement. Baby Tragos intensifies every day and every little activity in ways that constantly surprise. Travel all you want—sap those miles accruing in your frequent flier account—but you will never be as happy as when you’ve found a way to make your three-month-old daughter giggle.
On New Year’s Day, 2011, Mrs. Tragos and I were in a bed on a dark cold day in London wondering what the hell to do with our exhausted selves. We were a bit overwhelmed by the looming mystery that was our idea of the year ahead. We really did not know the half. Tomorrow? 2012? Lesson learned. I will play with Baby Tragos, prepare to cheer the Wolverines on Tuesday, prepare a little frittata for Mrs. Tragos, prepare for work a bit, and read more of Father Goriot and The Art of Fielding. An episode of Parks and Recreation might make an appearance. But the future? The twelve months ahead? You tell me Monsieur Janus.
