Red light, green light

I’m on a side trip now and thoroughly enjoyed the interstate, even though the scenery on I-10 isn’t exactly spectacular. Part of the enjoyment, I think, was that there aren’t any red lights on the interstate.

To get to my parents’ house – I guess now “my mom’s house” – you have to take one of the main artery roads in Tallahassee and drive a stretch. The “truck route,” as longtime Tallahasseeans call it, is a heavily-traveled road most hours of the day. And my mom’s house entails several left turns.

There aren’t left turns in Turkey. There aren’t really stoplights at all, really. There are a few, but mostly there are crazy intersections and mirrors, with some roundabouts thrown in. On day, walking to work with a colleague, we got to the five-way intersection that I walked by every day, and he looked me dead in the eye and said: “I’m going to die at this intersection.” There were a couple of mirrors – the intersections are totally blind so without the mirrors it would be a total leap of faith – but that was all. No stop lights, no stop signs. Basically, the main rule, as much as there is one, is “first come, first serve.”

It’s chaotic, but once you look deeper, it’s controlled chaos. Well, sort of. There are rule of thumb – but not really a rule – is that bigger ones have the right of way. “Bigger” can mean either cars or balls.

Istanbul traffic. It makes sense in its own way.
Photo from:
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSJstVmD6fBp_3ylMgQ3ppzvdBw5w9RFw1mlt8g8RjebgVKdjNq

I figured this out driving through that intersection. There were four roads intersecting, but not in a star shape. There was a “main” road, or main road-ish thing, so coming from both directions, then two roads coming off diagonally; you turned one way and there was another road immediately there; it was impossible to tell which one people were aiming for. (Apparently, blinkers are illegal in Turkey.) To top it off, there was a large apartment building with a driveway there.

Taking a taxi home from one direction, I’d have to give the direction, “right,” and then “straight, no straight right, but not that straight right.” The turn was some kind of geometric angle gone wrong, but I usually got it right.

And walking was frightening, but driving no less so. With no stop signs, I felt back on my American mentality, which is, again, wrong in Turkey. In America, people don’t have “the right of way.” Laws, at least in Florida, are written not as “this person has the right of way” but “In this circumstance, this person yields the right of way.”

So silly me, I get to the main “T” of that intersection (meaning I’ve held my breath past one of the roads and the driveway) and to me, I’m on a secondary road approaching a main-ish road, so the main-ish road people have the right of way. However, in Turkey, if I get there first, I am expected to go first. This seemed to me to be even in the case where there were cars coming – quickly, I should add – from both directions. Since I was trying to turn left, this would mean, in America, I have a little wait in front of me before I can turn, because both those guys – as well as the guy behind one of those guys – should have the right of way.

But in Turkey, this is not the case. If you hesitate, like I did, the guy behind you will get pissed off but not honk. Honking is only done when you have no other move, like when you really are at a stoplight and it turns green. In that instance, even if you’re 17 cars back, the Turkish rule is that you lay on the horn immediately, as you’re powerless to do anything else. But if you’re at an intersection and some let-me-yield-the-right-of-way-to-these-two-fast-moving-cars-coming-at-me idiot, the correct thing to do is swerve around the idiot and turn in front of him/her in front of the fast-moving car(s).

As a result of this, although I miss Istanbul, I do not miss driving in Istanbul. However, you gotta say, if those rules work, there’s something to them.

The first come, first serve method would save me a lot of time on the way to my mom’s house. The heavily-trafficked artery is full of left turns, and since there’s so much traffic, you have to sit and wait forever on the green left turn arrow.

Probably 20 percent of my home leave has been sitting at left turn arrows stuck on red. I don’t understand it. I get there first, but I have to sit and wait for minutes on end. Sometimes as I drive up, I can see the darn red left turn arrow from afar and by the time I get there, it’s still red and I still have to sit and wait. It’s especially aggravating at the little tiny crossroads, like the last one I have to cross, because it takes forever for enough cars to pile up to register that it’s time for the light to change.

We can learn from Turkey on this one. First come, first serve, biggest balls win.

Back Home

Back in America for about three weeks now, and so far it’s been pretty shitty. My father died.

#Whataburger celebration. More at
https://www.facebook.com/carol.wartenberg

This, I guess, wasn’t a total surprise, but it was unexpected. He’d been in kidney failure and on dialysis (at home) but in the roughly 10 days I’d been home, he’d been doing better. He had been getting up and making me a little bacon biscuit for breakfast each day.

He died on Monday, 7/9. On Saturday, Zippy and I went to Gainesville to pick up Zac for the next week. He didn’t have a camp to go to so he was going to hang out with us, so we headed down there, met the family for an $80 Red Robin lunch and turned around and came back.

Since the new house has considerably less space than the old house and there’s no Den of Sin, I opted to go over to L&D’s house for the week. They were headed on a road trip to celebrate their 20^th anniversary so I accepted the offer to house-sit and get some peace and quiet.

At midnight, Zippy called and asked me to meet her at the ER because Daddy couldn’t breathe. She’d called 911. I jumped up, got dressed and waited and then she called back because she couldn’t get my car started. I was driving hers and in my car the clutch has to be pressed in all the way.

Anyway, I said never mind, that I’d pick her and Zac up since I felt she had no business driving. She said the ambulance still hadn’t left, but by the time I got there, there was one paramedic-ish vehicle left. Apparently there had been at least three and seven people.

One at the hospital, we were taken to the trauma ward, where we learned Daddy had lost pulse twice up to that point. They’d done CPR and brought him back, but upon arriving to the hospital and checking his records, realized he had a do-not-resuscitate. So it went downhill from there. The first doctor came in and told us about the CPR, stressing that only 3 percent of people who have CPR recover, and warning us that since he’d lost oxygen to his brain twice there was no telling what would happen should he recover.

Who could turn down this face for a tummy rub?

So we waited for a room in ICU, not really able to do anything. Daddy was completely unresponsive and had no idea who was there.  At some point, I took Zac back to the house because all he was able to do was play video games, I brought Daddy back a new shirt because his had been ripped during CPR. Around 4 a.m., a different doctor came in and started talking about “in the days ahead” and listed different doctors Daddy would need to see. At that point, I wondered if I’d misheard the first doctor (whose shift, I guess, was over) because it sounded to me like there would be a tomorrow.

Since that felt a little better, I went back to Leanne’s, reasoning Zippy would stay there and then I’d get some sleep and take over, but, about an hour and a half later, she called and said his heart was failing. I rushed over there but missed – he’d died.

For us, this is really the first death in the immediate, local family and we had no idea what to do, but Zippy had lined up someone at a funeral home so she called her and got that ball rolling. We opted for just a visitation since Daddy really didn’t do much outside the house.

Zippy, though, does, and the visitation was like some kind of reunion for old GCA teachers and ERS employees, plus softball and pickleball players left and right. I mean, I think we overwhelmed the funeral home; we just took over the place.

Since there were so many people and we just wouldn’t leave, someone proposed heading to Whataburger, Daddy’s favorite restaurant, after the visitation. Twenty of us went, which I think freaked them out a bit – a line out the door that came out of nowhere – but the staff was so nice.

Since then, it’s been one thing after another, just trying to get a grasp on what’s going on. Fortunately, some stuff made sense and has fallen into place. Unfortunately, some other stuff hasn’t.

Finally, though, I’m starting to do some of my originally proposed home leave stuff. Last weekend, I went to a martial arts competition to watch Little Bit in her first tournament, which happened to be Tiger Rock’s national event. (Her dojo.) She kicked butt, literally.

Next weekend, I’m doing the crown jewel of home leave – a visit to Universal Studios Orlando to see Harry Potter land, or whatever it’s called. I’m not a fanatic, but I do like HP and I’ve never been to Universal.

In the meantime, I’m fulfilling what Batgirl assumes to be my purpose on earth – rubbing her tummy.