Category Archives: Life reflections

Don’t Look a Gift Potato in the Eye

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I was gardening out front of the shop when one of our favorite customers pulled up. IMG_4190

“H’lo, dear!” Ms. X waved a hank of fuzzy cloth. “I was yard sale-ing and found this jacket and said, ‘This looks like Wendy.'”

Hence the favorite thing. Not only does she do nice stuff like this all the time, she’s always right. I liked the pretty jacket instantly. Cost her 50 cents, which she did not want back.

Ms. X is one of many people around here who takes life by the horns that tried to gore her, and headbutts it. She and her son, both chronically ill, have no insurance; he has a crappy job. They live carefully in a house that labels them legally homeless, frugal to a fault with secondhand sales, day old baked goods, and the daily, considered creativity of what’s for supper. They don’t fish or garden for fun. But they have fun fishing and gardening.

“They’s sweet potatoes in Appalachia,” Ms. X winked as she departed, a couple of value paperbacks under one arm.

That’s not some mysterious Southern code. About every six months, in a little town two miles over, some person or persons unknown dumps produce under an abandoned gas station’s awning. Word of mouth goes out, and those as want it, go get it. Often it’s sweet potatoes, sometimes bananas. (When that happens, banana bread becomes currency and Huddle House runs a month-long “banana breakfast biscuit” special.) Rumor says once “the dump” was Hershey bars.

quick get in!I’d never availed myself of “the dump” before but my friend Elissa’s dogs LOVE sweet potato treats. Knowing she was busy helping another friend run a yard sale, in a fit of mischievous humor I grabbed a tea cozy, the back scratcher we use to turn off the kitchen light, and a role of tp. Racing to the sale field, I leaped from my car and shouted to Elissa, “QUICK, GET IN! I’LL EXPLAIN AS WE DRIVE!”

I probably should have remembered that Elissa is a news photographer. While everyone else stared, dumbfounded, with a swift flick of the wrist she held up her cell phone and snapped. And now I’m a meme on the Internet.

At the dump we got two bags for Elissa’s rescue dachshunds–who will waddle through this week in plump yam repleteness–and a bag each for friends we knew were busy. I asked Elissa, born and raised here, about the dump’s origins and she said rumor suggested some wealthy individual who’d made good elsewhere did it for his hometown. No one knows who, or why. And no one really questions. Why look a gift potato in the eye?

I imagine sweet Ms. X and her son sitting down to buttered baked yams, she saying, “…and for breakfast tomorrow there’ll be fresh sweet potato muffins.” On the counter sits a steaming potato casserole she’ll be taking to the church social.

Go by, mad world.

Reading People

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Arabic is read from right to left, European languages left to right. Some Asian languages read in columns, while others are like pictographs; get all the info, then go back and build the meaning of the sentence (sort of like German, when you have wait on the verb).

With many ways to read books, can it be a surprise that there are even more ways to read people?

Sam (Samet) worked at our hotel in Istanbul; he used the book analogy when we had a lengthy conversation about the hospitality industry, its economic engine and the subtle nuances of human relations that meant the curtain between “you paid me to be a servant to you” and “how are you enjoying your stay” had to stay down–no matter what accents, expectations, or accidents.

“It is like, every person who comes in this hotel is a book, and you must read them, but not all the lines. They have a whole life elsewhere, but here they want maybe something similar, maybe something different. You have to read very specific lines, look for the messages that are important, and not be distracted by the rest,” he said–in amazing English.

(Sam’s a smart kid, age 25. He’s also tall and movie-star handsome with curly hair, so you can just imagine what the population of wealthy retired world-traveling women who frequent his hotel offered him to read. Jack and I got a real kick out of watching him in action.)

IMG_3876His insights were echoed by Mustafa (43), the carpet seller across the street who willingly spent hours with us recording interviews. From the outlying provinces, “Moos” had been in Istanbul only 18 months. “I was born on a carpet. My mother made them, my father sold them wholesale. My brothers and sisters and I, everything we knew was carpets.”

It became evident as we talked that Mustafa regretted for himself the university education he intends his son to achieve, but also that he and his cousin (and business partner) relished being “cultural ambassadors. We teach the Middle East. We know carpets, how they made, the dyes, who is making them. We teach people every day, we are not just taking money. But we must have money or the shop closes.”

Behind this, Mustafa and Ahmed actually relished discerning who was inside the customer standing before them, what he or she wanted from the whole experience of buying a carpet. “Some people rich. They want a carpet only to prove they rich. They don’t touch, just ‘what is most expensive? OK, that one.’ Some people see a color, they fall in love, some people you talk into buying, some people you can never talk into buying. It is half work, half fun, this talking.”

IMG_3925Selling books, Jack and I read the customers who present themselves, trying to get them right. Back to front, straightforward, any hidden messages? It seems that, in every country, no matter the product, reading people is what makes a good shopkeeper. So Jack and I traveled 5,000 miles to find mirror images of our daily life in the people we met and the work they did.

We kinda like that.