Making a Tentative Reappearance on the Internet.

So you all know about Yalım, my lovably nerdy Turkish cousin who stayed with us for a summer and stranded himself in the middle of a lake while kayaking in Ontario. And you’ve all heard about the incredible age differences in my family, so that my father is two years younger than my grandmother and my other grandmother is younger than my great-grandmother. It isn’t too surprising, then, that Yalım is actually not my first cousin but my mother’s; his brother, Cağıl, is younger than my brother.

Here’s when the new details about my family come in. My grandmother has one sister and two brothers. The older of the brothers – the serious, nervous one – is the father of Yalım and Cağıl. My mother’s other uncle – the youngest of the family, the trickster, now the jolly uncle who speaks a grand total of perhaps fifty English words – also has two children: Eray (if that is how you spell it…) and Özge. Like my only set of legitimate first cousins (on my father’s side), they are two years apart, each in their early twenties.

They’re pretty awesome characters. Eray, 24, is much like his father: short, outgoing, and funny. He’s the sort of person who could probably blow cigarette smoke rings at fourteen (he certainly can now), the sort of person who didn’t know and couldn’t believe that we don’t have mandatory military service in Canada. Özge, 22, is a little more subtle: much shorter, understanding, and also funny. She’s the sort of person who doesn’t seem to mind that I only half understand her (probably very amusing) stories about Anglophone children she has met, the sort of person who wages long battles with the gearshift every time she tries to back the car up. Neither speaks English.

You made it through those three paragraphs; you really deserve some kind of story at this point. Unfortunately, I think most of the story has already been implied. Last night, the two of them decided to take their awkward, nerdy Canadian cousin out for a bit. Eray laughing at me for throwing a popsicle stick into a garbage can was a pretty good moment, but it doesn’t come close to the perfection of Özge attempting to explain how to open and close the electric windows of the car.

‘If you want to open it, you press down here,’ she informed me. ‘Pull up on the button to make the window go up.’

Well, we do have those in Canada.

Y and C are coming next weekend. Yalım’s in university now, and apparently has a girlfriend. Fingers crossed for him not to have become too cool.

I’ll post again about my favourite parts of this country: the landscape, the ruins, fragmented suggestions of an ancient time. I’m still gathering material.

Haunting memories of times you never knew in life.