<< i tried to leave you, i don't deny / i closed the book on us at least a hundred times >>

the stove is giving us problems.

black tar has started to leak from the chimney pipe that runs along the wall above the cabinets in the living room.

as well, damned if you can get the thing to light. last night the stove was puffing smoke out forever. you'd speak to it in stern tones. then.... *puff.

tomorrow we will perform surgery. some part of the chimney is plugged. angioplasty.

<< and who shall i say is calling? >>

mo and i used the flight back from ankara to make a first high-level blueprint of our stove fuel cell. this design calls for olive pits, parrafin-soaked olive pits, and coal, all of which we have experience working with.



next week, design and prototyping.

Act Two, Scene One

woke this morning to _vivid dreams of kissing this girl i know from yoga, and in my dream she kissed like she does yoga, and she does yoga very well, and in my dream we didn't spend much time doing yoga, and it was very vivid.

after two days of near-impassable mountain roads, we have made it back to mehmet's house in burhaniye.

your protagonist is now in act two. this we can tell both by the calendar -- one month gone now out of three -- and by the story's underlying dramatic structure. the recent trip to instanbul was the protagonist's first challenge. an unexpected event thrust the action in a new direction -- that was the shakedown -- and thus was the protagonist set up for new challenges, to be faced over the course of the second act. after a short period of downward dramatic movement -- that was the blizzard and the thank-g-d-we-can-laugh-about-it drive home -- we return to a point of rest so act two can begin in earnest.

act one is the exposition. act two is the development. over the course of act two the skillful author fleshes out symbols and themes and shows how the protagonist changes in response to the way the plot veered at the end of act one.

the essence of act two is conflict. today we woke with no water and had to struggle to try and thaw frozen pipes. the metal pipes had frozen where the water comes into the house, or so we thought. so we piled burning embers from the stove around and over them til the pipes themselves were hot to the touch. the smooth tile of the front porch was very cold and while using the new set of stove tools -- read on -- to manipulate the hot pieces of charcoal i nearly froze the bottoms of my feet. so i tried to warm them in front of the new infrared heater and i melted my nylon double wick-action socks. and still no water.

the stove tools: today ugur brought us a set of stove tools -- coal shovel, fire poker, cinder broom, and man-fetcher -- and reader, they could not have come at a more perfect time, for they propel us forward into The Stove, Act Two. the story's external conflicts will thus mirror the protagonist's inner conflict. we are going to invent an all-in-one fuel cell bucket for the stove, using layers of olive pits, parrafin-soaked oil pits, and coal gravel. it will consolidate everything we have learned about the stove. it will light with one match, for it will have a fuse. furthermore we now have an ionizing air filter to clean up after smokey misadventures such as we had this morning.

but don't lets get too lighthearted. act two is trial for the protagonist from start to finish. walking through burhaniye today it was mo that first heard the sound of running water from what might have been a burst water main (it was not). until he pointed it out i did not even notice. this is in spite of my line about wanting to learn to listen. furthermore if i were a wild animal, and i want to be much more wild of an animal, the sound of running water is one i could not afford to miss. and it was mo who noticed one single blooming rose on his rosebushes, pink like a ripe berry that the observant omnivore would get as a snack. what is it going to take to get me to play closer attention to the bejewelled world? over the course of act two the protagonist will grow and change in face of unpredictable challenges such as these. only one thing is for sure -- he will have to pass through a moment of utter bleakness before the conflict can be resolved. but what that dark moment will be, only the shadow knows.

the water is back now and coffee is on and mo has brought me a box of turkish delight ("lokum") to go with it -- with one cup of coffee you have one piece. and there are little bananas. mo and i have spent some time planning the sights i will see over the course of the next month, using the maps we got from tourism booths at the trade show. we have food and again we have hot water. and we have finally warmed up the house. act two beckons and the coffee and sweets are waiting downstairs. i have learned a new word, too: lokumgibe -- from lokum -- means delightful. stay tuned.

a thousand and one uses for reclaimed olive pits

we had a bit of trouble lighting the stove today so we had to use a candle to light long tubes of newspaper, then direct the flame down to light the fire from underneath.

the stove was cold. we put the candle on the stove, near at hand, to light the paper wicks. we lit tube after paper tube and seeded the flames from underneath. finally we got the stove to light.

by the time we finished high fiving, the candle was melting and smoking hot wax was running all over the iron stovetop.

mo, though, had exactly the right idea, grabbed handfuls of olive pits from the fuel bucket and spread them over the liquid wax. then we brushed the pits away into a cardboard trough, and the spill was basically dealt with.

turns out mo has used olive pits to contain all manner of chemical spill, diesel fuel, oil, etching compounds, even...

...caustic soda! today we came home with sodium hydroxide to use to clear this house's slow drains. don't worry about a thing. we have beer, and, in case of any spills we have, like, bags of olive pits.

i learned how you make coal gas! (first-hand)

coal gas is produced when you heat up coal without burning it. this releases methane which can accumulate in your stove, if you don't give the fire enough oxygen. then, when you open the vents...

rain in Turkey

this morning woke up to mehmet telling me he had to go in early for work.

he left me a phone and his phone number and after a few minutes of movement downstairs the house went still, i fell back asleep to crazy dreams of pushing paper in the house i grew up in, and bathing in the back of a pickup truck, and awoke an hour or so later to cloudy skies and a quiet house.

thoughtfully breakfast had been left out for me -- bread toasting on the stove, water heating, and in the kitchen soft cream cheese -- really good, very creamy -- and honey to go on the bread. the stove was only just smouldering when i went into the sitting room with coffee. the room was cool but comfortable and i had padded down in my warm clothes.

however.

there was not a lot of kindling wood, just two big logs other than a bundle of aromatic wood tied with red thread that i figured i shouldn't tear into. i went to the wood box outside -- unexpectedly wet underneath my wool socks on the white tile of the porch. no suitable wood there. however there was a lot of newspaper and cardboard leftover from ikea furniture assembly, and a new box of reclaimed olive pits. so i piled up the cardboard and the newspaper and put in one log. everything caught at once. i tried to lower the stove top. the log was too big for the lid to close and furthermore was not burning well. it had however caught around its edges making it impossible to lift out. the cardboard burned with carcinogenic green flame. i poured on some olive pits. the fire choked. smoke billowed.

so i have had to open up the doors and windows to let the air clear. it is hazy in here now and smells of smoke and wet dog (happy to be in from the rain). cold air is coming in, fresh smelling but cold. the room is nor warmer nor cooler, but it is smokier. my socks are damp from the wet outside. how is this all a metaphor for my search for self and the true deal with airline peanuts? let me count the ways.

Türkce dili

today again at the factory.

awoke to find two more people have joined us at mehmet's. one speaks some english, one does not. from downstairs now i hear Turkish and a boiling kettle and i smell dumplings.

i do not have a problem communicating with the puppy, who has enormous paws, nor with the cat. but otherwise i have trying to convey, mostly, please and thank-you.

it helps that turkish uses the alphabet i know, though the letter sounds are all different here, a different timbre of sound. vowels are cleaner than they are in north american english. down with dipthongs! every vowel makes exactly one sound. U seems to be a french-sounding U. A is always a short A. E is a long A. I is long. meanwhile consonants are more clipped. T is always T, never D; F never slips to V. C makes Tse. an accent over an S or a C works like an H -- from S to Sh, from C to Ch. an accent over a G sound drops it in the mouth til it no longer is recognizably a G. so, mehmet's girlfriend's name, phonetically oor, is in fact spelled uğur -- that is, 'uyur,' but reduce the Y sound until it is nearly gone. H's have a little bit of breathiness in them but hardly any. the R sound is not like an english R, not like a french R, nor is it a rolled R. more like an R crossed with an H, just a touch of haspiration.

vowels can have umlauts over them -- not sure how they work yet. some consonants also can have little tails, works like an H -- from S to Sh and C to Ch.

grammar-wise, turkish has a structure like apostrophe-S in english (the genitive case -- gets me hot baby to hear you say those words again after all this time). but this is not just to indicate possession. so, when pointing to canada on a map you'd say "kanada", but to say "i am of canada", you would have to change it from "kanada" to "kanadadan." you'd say, kanadadan geliyorum.

to say hello to someone is Selamin Aleyküm, and when someone says that to you, you say back Aleyküm Selamin, same thing only backwards.

i spent part of today talking with mehmet's uncle, over coffee (kava) and lunch (öğle yemegi), as mehmet saw to business. the uncle speaks french -- so today i spoke almost as much french as english, and, amazingly, my list of turkish words to learn is not an english-turkish list but a french-turkish list. today's words are:

- good morning : günaydin
- good day : iyi günler
- good evening : iyi akşamlar
- good night : iyi geceler
- yes, no, maybe : evet, hayir, belki
- where, when : nerete, nezaman
- my name is : ismim NOTE now i can say a rough approximation of "call me ishmael," it'd be "ismim ishmael"
- me, you, he/she : ben, sen, o. plurals biz, siz, onlar
- please, thank-you : lütfen, mersi (same as french)
- to right, to left : sağ, sol
- hot, cold, neutral : sicak, soğuk, ilik

coffee is kava. tea is čay (think "chai") -- those two are easy. sugar is šigir -- that one's easy too -- cream is krema. and to count to ten from zero is : sifir, bir, iki, üč, dört, bez, alti, yedi, sekiz, dokuz, on.

mehmet tells me i need to work on my vowel sounds -- though, frankly, he says it "wowel."

interesting to be so much out of my element. english is so damn easy and furthermore there is always something to say -- at this very moment outside my room they are doing something with the plumbing, hammering into the concrete, i merely quote bob dylan -- last night across the alley there was a poundin' on the wall: musta been your don pasquale makin' a 2:00 A.M booty call. dig? i have talked in the past about clear and honest communication. it is different here, kinda. what if mehmet and his uncle were gone and no one spoke my language? things would matter more then.

today's pictures are of the classroom above the Laleli store. note how the chairs are all arranged in perfect rows and columns even when the room is empty. at the back, under the windows, are greyblue pots of herbs.



back at mo's house we have taken the chimney apart and are installing a heat exchanger, to squeeze the last drips of juice out of the stove. night before last it was so hot it was making me dizzy and mo was sweating in just an undershirt. we have been experimenting trying to find a way to use processed olive pits for fuel. we burned through a whole box of them. the stove got so hot so fast it started to shudder. the cat fled. it was great.

a tour of the factory

sleep cycle is very confused from travel and having burned the candle at both ends for a week before departing. last night in bed at 8 after going shopping to stock the new empty fridge, and afterwards eating dinner with Mehmet. DID YOU KNOW THERE IS SUCH A THING AS FULL FAT YOGHOURT. to repeat : all the fat. i think that is part of what made me sleepy.

in Turkey they drink not only milk but a kind of yoghourt milk called Kefir, a Russian drink, very good and appeals to me muchly.

awoke this morning at noon, after a night of strange and vivid dreams about keychains, to Mehmet telling me i could either sleep in or come with him to the office. so i got up. from my bedroom window i can see citrus trees fruiting in the front yard of the house across the street. it is bright during the day though the sun sets early. it is the setting sun that comes into my bedroom. the walls are powder blue.

heard Mehmet vacuuming as i brushed my teeth, then when i went downstairs he told me he'd discovered something new about his vacuum -- that you can run it in reverse -- so i watched as he gleefully shut the stove's vents and blew air up through the bottom, making the coals glow whiter-than-orange and pushing clouds of ash up into the air all over the floor and the cat sleeping nearby.

this stove is going to be great fun. "once you start working with it," said mo, "it's addicting. to burn things. like that whiskas bag?" he indicated an empty bag of cat food in the corner. "so many usable calories."

last night we piled the stove full of wood and oak cones thinking they would burn with less heat than coal. they did not. we had to change into t-shirts because of the heat and eventually we fled to the porch, then to the grocery store. strange to recognize american brands brought over into turkey and to be able to recognize typefaces and colours even when the names are different. a visible ad campaign for becel -- this in the cradle of civilization as understood through olive oil -- becel claiming to be a healthy alternative. and of course Coca-Cola : Coke is positioning itself as the perfect way to break your Ramadan fast.

i do not feel too out of place here -- i dress in clothes similar to Mehmet's -- but at the supermarket a father came up to me and asked me to talk to his thin shy daughter in English.

today Mehmet showed me around his olive production operation. we drove here in the Alfa Romeo. the factory is a five minute drive from his house, across from a mosque. Mehmet's uncle was there who speaks French with a European accent. heard a call to prayer while we ate lunch and drank lemonade with lavender while attendents hovered.



a tour of the factory : we walked up past three women who were stripping thyme leaves from the stalks, making the fragrance to leap into the air. olives everywhere, in huge crates, under tarpaulins, in woven baskets such as donkeys would carry, underfoot. organic products all set off to one side and labelled in green. nearby a small workshop for producing aromatic olive oil -- today's flavour was orange. a worker chopped oranges into quarters and added them to the olive feed as they went into the processor. Mehmet cut through the peal of one with a cleaver and handed it to me, juicy and fresh. nearby plastic bins of tangerines for the next batch. then it was in to see the soap shop, hundreds of bars of soap all stamped with the name Laleli which is Mehmet's family name. the workshop is heated by a huge stove beneath. the stove burns olive pits. Mehmet showed me how cleanly they burn -- pure white ash. then he sealed the furnace, pressed some buttons on a digital control, and stood back. then like Hephaestus he opened the door. flame poured out and licked up the sides. Mehmet's eyes widened. from the soap shop up the hillside to see the dark side of olive oil production, the black water and waste solids. but also olive trees, herbs and magnolia trees, and one white fig tree.



then the vinegar workshop which i recognized immediately by the sting in your nose, and in the same workshop a personal batch of wine being fermented, perfume, and two vats of kosher vinegar wrapped in cloth and sealed with tape like police tape only it bears the letter K. through to a larger olive processing area where someone was experimenting coating lemons in mineral wax to preserve them in storage. lastly to the bottling compound where the floor is white tile and if you merely shift your weight your feet slowly start to move under you since the on floor there is oil everywhere. Mehmet got two little glasses like sherry glasses and had me taste olive oil right from a spigot that would go into the bottle.

"Doesn't get much fresher than this," he said. can't say i've ever drank olive oil before. unexpectedly spicey.



at present sitting in Mehmet's office above the bottling area, while my host attends to some business. noise of heavy machinery in the background and the smell of olives like they can grind up the smell itself to better saturate your nose with it.

i understand now a bit more how things will work. the kitchen i was told about is in fact the cafeteria for the farm workers. soon Mehmet will turn it into a restaurent, once they sort out the menu. in the meantime we can use it for cooking projects that are too grand for the little kitchen in his house. above the kitchen is the classroom area which is like a meeting area and also used for training his staff. so, if i want to, i can use this space to run some english lessons and earn my keep a bit while i am here.

on the wall of Mehmet's office the awards his olive oil has won: the Gold Medal at the Concours de Paris, Primo Classificato at Biol 2006 at Andria, silver and bronze at the L.A County Fair.

i am looking for today's "aha" moment before i make this post -- but who knows. i have just been brought a cup of coffee but it is instant coffee. the sun is setting now over the hillside. the walls, floors, tiles, everything is white here, with dark wood furniture, makes the whole room to softly glow.

figs and cream, coffee, beechwood

it is late at night in Burhaniye Turkey and i am beat.

near full points for getting out of London this morning on British Airways -- one bureaucratic snafu that they made out to be much more than it actually was and that made me sweat for a moment. but going through passport control in turkey was less involved than ordering a happy meal -- seriously, sixty seconds end to end, no forms, no questions, not even one word out of the passport guard who stamped my passport, then looked at its information, then handed it back. and now i am in turkey staying in a house that is heated with coal.

like, actually heated by burning coal in a stove, not heated by a powerplant that uses coal to turn turbines and generate electricity and power electric heaters.

mehmet has just moved in himself and is still setting things up. his girlfriend Oor is here as well.

i have not seen much of the town since it was night when we drove in and i was groggy besides. we had dinner in Izmir with the mayor of Burhaniye who was there with mehmet when he picked me up. i had my first olive within fifteen minutes of landing -- purpley, salty. we stopped for dinner in Izmir at a fancy restaurant such as the mayor of the town would eat at.

"what would you like to drink?" asked Mehmet.

"coffee," i said, since i always drink coffee. then i realized. "unless, unless you have coffee after the meal here."

Mehmet said something to the waiter in turkish. i understood the word for coffee and the word american : negative. and a word that must have meant filtered. also negative.

Mehmet looked at me. "it doesn't work that way here."

"then i'll have what you are having," i said, so we shared some wine.

then our waiters brought around a big tray of appetizers in little ceramic dishes and mehmet told me, choose. so i chose one. but in fact for appetizers you choose like six and even if i'd known that, do you just grab the dishes yourself (you do not, they pass them to you), and besides, what is what? so the others at the table chose as well. we had palm hearts, fava bean spread, couscous, artichoke spread, a salad made from the tops of a vegetable like a raddish, and bread.

normally i eat quite quickly. but people eat like they make love and did not come all this way not to learn a few things. i tried the bread first, a soft brown round loaf. i tore into it, no butter at the table. even under my fingers its texture was different. i tasted some. lots of flavour, salty. i was like, ok, this is your new life, don't gulp. then i was like, this is just the bread. then i was like, exactly: this is just the bread.

it was good. dinner was good especially the giant roasted green bean, also brussels sprouts, broccoli, and tomato.

desert was figs stuffed with walnuts and rich cream and sprinkled with pistachios, those were delicious and we finished with coffee in tiny cups and turkish cigarillos with beechwood tips.

then into the car where i slept the whole rest of the way in spite of myself -- i am tired -- though i did see a truck packed full with bunches of leeks, eyes painted on the back bumper. then in to Mehmet's house past the warehouse/factory where the olivemagic happens. another building on that site houses a kitchen suitable for preparing weekly feasts. much bigger than the kitchen in mo's house. it is equipped with all sorts of restaurant equipment and gas ranges and the pantry is well-stocked with everything fresh and local. evidently they feast often in turkey and soon i will too. above the kitchen is an empty loft space with hardwood floors where mehmet tells me i will teach yoga, though he did not specify to whom. i am also told i will be teaching english and french.

a cat lives in this house that looks like my Marianne but is considerably fatter. there are grape vines strung to shade the backyard. the porch looks onto a street and if you cross the street and walk down you are at the aegean sea, and you can swim to the greek island of Lesbos (says mehmet -- it is too dark for me to see for myself). the walls are brick and concrete and the floor is tile. my room is small.

bedtime now -- i have made it. the cat is purring in a fattish way.