THE END OF THE STORY II

 

THE END OF MY STORY II

This has been my story 

most of the chapters

remembered

and 

pages

imagined

I wish i could have sung it

through my life

and to you

But I could never sing

except for a discordant lullaby

Ahmet Cafer Celebiler

January 12, 2024

GETTING THERE

 

AGING AS AGING 

At Almost Eighty

Recuperation, Declination, Deliberation and Respiration

Can i dare to place a limit

Is it an age?

or a state of mind?

Mine or just that of others?

Who decides, enough is enough?

spouse, children?

when intellect becomes insult

when perception is a nightmare

climate becomes only temperature

of feelings

and attitude

using heat and cold

mockery and demands

life remains short

nay, shorter

than a few days to visit a Spring house and 

cats and flowers 

and grass 

that smell like me after rain and mowing

but for so little

so memorable

a fortune 

to hope 

found too much for this age

that only real family deserves

and the age may not hope or enjoy

with so much joy in its past

none of which  carry forward 

below the TOTAL line

which has only numbers

undecipherable

even if its ink  

and meaning 

have not disappered

Ahmet C.Celebiler 

May 16, 2023

TALES OF CHICAGO

 

CHICAGO OF YOUNGER DAUGHTER 

AND MY PREHISTORIC LIVES

 

Something I wrote and posted in2017

 

  This time around, I will first post some of the photos before I get to the drivel, just for increased confusion.

Graduation Location in Millennium Park

Ceylan receives School of The Art Institute of Chicago diploma

Was she elected among classmates to waive something pink?

Unabashedly giving vent to feelings

I have been frequently visiting Chicago since 2001, not considering one visit in the depths of history, possibly in 1970 and another old one in 1986.

Many of those trips were before I earned my "Other"ness, but I have not let that prefix get to my head and can actually be quite truthful in reminiscing.

The first was because a friend was driving this way from Denver and I tagged along to experience his new Mazda with the rotary engine. However, he would not let me drive and also was adamantly against my eating anything in his new car. So I remember only the negative feelings of that trip and nothing of Chicago.

The second trip was as a friend and advisor to the GM of the national reinsurance company of Turkey, to help in negotiations with a liability reinsurance broker which had suffered and caused Milli Re to suffer due to the asbestosis catastrophe. We flew in, rented car, dove to the Drake to check in, climbed up Sears to see Chicago clouds and then drove to Evanston next day for our successful meeting to get out of the reinsurance treaty with an acceptable loss. I had a chance to show off my ability to sense places and directions by not once getting lost or missing our target even in Evanston in those pre-GPS ages.

The trip back could have been more pleasant if I had not taught a version of two handed bridge to my friend who proceeded to win $17.45 during the short flight to our stopover in London.

What does all this say about Chicago?

How do these two trips relate to the future ones?

Was that broker in Evanston acquired by a company I partnered with to open an office in Turkey, or was it acquired by another one which resulted in the forced sale of my shares in that company?

What caused me to find School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a possible university for my second daughter.

Come along, to discover Chicago, its people, architecture, life, food and universities from an alien perspective.

 

•  
• Report Abuse

  otherchelebi  on Jun 20, 17 at 9:33pm

  The fact that Chicago is one of the American cities with good architecture had nothing to do with my shortlisting SAIC as one of the schools DD2 would apply.
  3 schools of art and one good standard university with a well known architecture school was my solution to her desire to study in an artistic environment.
  
  We managed to visit SAIC and Baltimore School and MICA (Maryland Institute College of Arts) in her senior year on a three day weekend with one of her like minded classmate in tow. Savannah School of Design we had seen the previous year when we were visiting DD1 at Virginia Tech and an old friend at Atlanta.
  
  She was offered small scholarships from all three art schools and an acceptance from Syracuse. DD2 was adamant to spend her four years in a large city and Baltimore was definitely out of the question after I managed to lose my way the evening of our arrival, finding ourselves in the Baltimore zoo reading instructions for Penguin gate or orders to not feed the animals. I think a sign which said something about lions scared us enough to exit the zoo and find ourselves on Johns Hopkins University campus.
  
  My excuse is that I could not follow my well studied plan to drive to a Hilton Garden Inn in a park just outside Baltimore because of road works which led us to a number of diversions which would have fooled a foreign army. The hotel restaurant was closed, there was very little nearby and our visit to a MacD was a disaster when the two girls were introduced to loud applause by some of the other female customers who cheered them for some reason.
  
  The two uninterested Turkish students we were introduced added to DD's negative feelings which the great offer of the school in giving her six credits to start, couple of K per semester grant and the chance to force any class she wished could not alleviate despite the great crabs of different local species.
  
  We also had to have time to visit  Bloomingdales to pick graduation ball gowns for both girls in Chicago. They found their dresses and I found out that shopping with two females compounded the difficulty of shopping with one.
  
  Come August of 2003 we were at Hotel Burnham (currently The Alise) and the two girls at dorms on State Street just a block over.
  
  This was a great place because of the park in front which had a great weekly market, the monumental and mystifying department store Carson Pirie Scott which was the last large commercial building designed by Louis Sullivan, a Marshall fields and a Sears.
  
  Today, Sears is  Walgreens, Marshall fields is Macy's and Carson Pirie Scott is who knows what. The old ones did not grow or mature like DD but disappeared like people who have had their days. Rather sad but possibly with a moral that I cannot quite understand.
  
  The excitement of the girls was contagious enough that we had no river cruise, On-Off bus tour or long walks to places like the Navy Pier or even Millennium park. Neither were the Blues and Jazz scene in our agenda. It was a time of rushing to a Southern  Target store and the under construction Ikea and somehow putting together some furniture and things.
  
  Eser and I loved the feeling. It was totally different from doing similar things in Blacksburg, Virginia five years before. Chicago seemed warmer and friendlier although the school building where DD would have most of her classes resembled a run down official building of Ashkabad, Turkmenistan. The large imposing building, you see, was the museum of the school and not the school itself.

   

   

  Walking between Randolph and Monroe last week to remember the old days,
  I realised what a great loss was the park on Washington street, where some new high-rise buildings clutter up the already massive concrete and glass structures dwarfing the older and friendlier ones.
  
  I do not remember if the farmers market of over ten years ago at that space was as expensive as the Tuesday and Saturday farmers markets I visit these days in front of the Modern Art Museum and the children hospital where DD2 is employed as an assistant project manager and at Division and State just a couple of blocks from our condo.
  
  Were we afraid to leave our barely 18 year old in the city of Al Capone and the highest number of deaths by hand guns, interesting Democratic conventions of olden times, notorious mayors, ghost herds of cattle?
  
  No! We trusted the self-assurance, practicality and defence mechanisms of our DD2 to withstand the bohemian, mostly older, mostly semi-professional/part-time, different partner preference schoolmates she would meet. We were correct. She was among the 15% of her freshman class who graduated in June of her fourth year and went on for a graduate degree, thereby depleting most of our family nest-egg, but also finding happiness in marrying a young lawyer from Michigan and now giving birth to our grand daughter Arya.
  
  Abandoning her dorm in her sophomore year, she moved to a large four bedroom town house in the old town with three classmates. The fame of this party house may have crossed state lines not only because of the girls but also because of the pool table in the basement.
  
  We figured that if she could pass all her courses with the minimum B average required for her to keep the small scholarship that year, she could overcome any problems. And apparently it was so, because the next apartment, still in the old town, fully exposed to the EL and burgled twice stayed a favourite of hers, and would have graduated her if we had not flown in after the second burglary and forced both girls (the original two I had brought on the selection trip) to move to an apartment at Chestnut Place with its award winning lobby which fell victim to the greed of new owners last year.
  
  Other nice things about chestnut place were, the twenty-four hour open Tempo Cafe and Potash supermarket across, two pizza restaurants, one on each side, cleaners and car rental on premises, reasonably priced parking for visitors, not to mention a sex shop very close but absolutely ignored by all of us. One pizza restaurant and the cleaners are gone now as well as the reasonableness of the parking, but the others are staunchly in place, although the entrance is now on Chestnut rather than State and the lobby looks like any other.
  
  DD2 now lives in their own townhouse half a block away, enjoying her big city with all the conveniences of her location.
  
  I think we were there for all her moves as a student, but fortunately not the two after her marriage.
  
  We suffered Summer heat and Winter glaciers and even renting a U-Haul to move some of her stuff a few days before we drove to Cleveland for my cardio-thoracic surgery. We were gone less than two weeks, flying back on the seventh day after my double by-pass, to spend three weeks recuperating, walking a minimum of two miles a day, before I would fly back to Istanbul.