Today is my 49th birthday. Here is what I was doing nine years ago. Wow. The world has changed. My life has changed. And my daughter? She has changed into an awesome nine-year-old. I’m super grateful to still be around and to have her around. I’m grateful for my life in this crazy world of 2020 that I never saw coming back in 2011.
A Moment in Istanbul
This is all real life you know. Whatever that means. Sometimes I forget and for that, I’m sort of thankful but sort of confused. I’m not even sure how I feel about that. Or what it means.
What I know is that my wife, who I love and miss, is in Morocco looking for a house for us while I am working in Istanbul, staying in a small apartment that looks out on a city state of ships at rest in the Marmara Sea waiting for their chance to go up the Bosphorus and reach the Black Sea and the many Russian and Central Asian ports it holds.
As dusk comes, the lights on the ships come on and instead of hundreds of ships on a sea, it begins to look like a city. Amazing. I miss swimming every day. I miss being in the water, but being able to see the water when I wake and when I go to sleep, even if it appears as a city populated by all the countries of the world, is a fair trade.
And so I work while my wife carries our daughter who will hopefully be born healthy and sound in a few months. Both of us doing our part to make the family we will have in the future a reality. I wonder what things would be like if I were more responsible. What if I’d simply gotten a job after graduation…
Well, then I wouldn’t have met my wife. What if I would have stayed in Morocco? Well, what if? I didn’t. Here I am. There she is. Where we are. And that is what we will have to see. I do wish I were independently wealthy, born into wealth, or lucked into it, or even had the connections to make it big. I didn’t. I don’t. But that doesn’t preclude it from happening sometime in the future. And, since the Ayzan just begain, I should point out that my wife says that whatever you are saying when the call to prayer sounds is supported by God…so, there is always hope.
I’m watching this international maritime city come to light and my wife is looking for an apartment for us for when I finish this job…meanwhile our daughter is growing and becoming more real each day and hopefully, she will understand all of this more than I do….to be honest, I understand less every day, but then maybe that is the way it is suppossed to be.