4:15 p.m. Local Time

The One About the Neighbors

Photo by Rohan Reddy on Unsplash

Istanbul, Turkey, the European side. Where I lived from 2000-2002

One of the hardest things for me to do as an ex-pat was to stop transcribing the time of day.

You know, when it’s 12 p.m. where you are, what time is back home, sort of a dilemma.

In my defense, the first place we lived as American Ex-pats on the dime of a Major Car Company was in Japan, which was easy to transcribe. Twelve hours difference meant you were eating lunch while everyone back home was sound asleep, or very near to it. Some folks back home, including my father, never could quite parse that, and the number of calls I got at 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. from him were evidence that he refused to accept that I was, indeed, in Japan (a substack for another time).

After a brief stint back in the States in Central time—which somehow throws me off more than anything—we were airborne as a family once again, this time to Istanbul, Turkey. We arrived there in August, 2000, amidst utterly sweltering heat and without the soft landing, super organized assistance we got in Japan. We were a tad spoiled for extreme organization when it came to Being Ex-Pats. And we were about to have those rosy glasses ripped from our faces and stomped on by a whole different sort of culture.

Needless to say, our time in Istanbul involved a fair bit of patience— on our part, and on the part of the kapıcı (pronounced “Kah-puh-juh” the Turkish i without the dot sounds like the “i” in the English word “bird” and the “c” pronounced as an English “j” I soon learned), the doorman who let us into our ground floor flat in the Etiler neighborhood on the European side of the Bosporus Straights that day. He came around, once I learned enough Turkish to speak with him, and we…well, we learned a whole lot about ourselves as a family, and my hubs and I learned a fair bit about ourselves as a married couple. Again, a substack for another day.

We lived in Istanbul for 2 years, which meant we were there on September 11, 2001.

I started with my obsession with constantly transcribing time zones in my head as a busy mom of 3 small kids who all had to be fed, sent to school, socialized in a foreign country for a reason. It was our second go at the whole Ex-pat thing which was a lot harder, but also easier in some ways, than the first time around. In addition to being a polar opposite of Japan when it came to organization, time-wise, Istanbul is either seven or eight hours ahead of EST which is damn hard to transpose in your head as much as I tried to do.

Which is why, for me, the “4:15 p.m.” moment is my 9:15 a.m. moment, when it comes to what happened on 9/11/01.

I was at a friend’s flat that day, with the kids, post-school. Kids were playing in another room, the boys using the tv for video games, while their mom and I — a lovely German woman whose family had moved around a bunch for her husband’s job in Big Pharma and who taught me a lot about the value of being a trailing spouse—had tea. I got a call from my hubs that I ignored at first. These were early adoption days of phones. They were not Smart. They made calls and rudimentary text messages and social media was not, thankfully, the behemoth of news mongering that it is today.

He called again, so I answered it. He asked if I’d heard the news. I said I had not, and continued sipping my tea, listening to the kids play, while my friend got up to get more cookies. As he was telling me something about some “crazy person” who’d “tried to run a plane into the Empire State Building” our call was cut off. I didn’t think much of it.

Then he called me again, told me to turn on the tv “now” and asked me where I was. It was 4:15 p.m., local time when I shooed the boys off the video game and clicked it on, attempting to locate the one place (CNN International) where I might see what was going on. When her husband called her, she grabbed the remote from me and found the station. We sat on the end of the bed in the room where the tv was located, and stared as events unfolded.

Then my phone began to ring, mostly family back home claiming I should “pack up and get home right away,” by which they meant I should leave the country I was in and get on a plane headed for the United States as soon as I could. I remember watching the towers fall in real time and saying “I think I might be safer here, on the ground, right now,” before I began to get really scared.

The ensuing days were a blur of meetings that the consul general organized (we hosted one in our flat), families back home insisting that we leave a 98.9% Muslim country as fast as our legs could carry us, and of us trying to explain to our kids, ages 9, 7, and 2.5, what exactly was going on that had everyone so freaked out, including their mother.

The school my kids attended, Istanbul International Community School (IICS) had local students whose families were willing and able to pay for the International Baccalaureate degree their kids would receive upon graduation from it. It was also attended by pretty much every ex-pat kid in town and there were a lot of them. Istanbul was where many/most international companies parked their execs who were responsible for Eastern Europe. It was also the school where the children of consul generals went, since Istanbul was home to consulates for a lot of countries. Needless to say, one of the first thing that happened once school resumed was that now, instead of “just” armed guards at the doors of the school they now rode the buses. Armed guards being one of the first bits of culture shock that one must cope with upon arriving at Istanbul. They were ubiquitous and kind of tough to get used to, until you did, like most things as an Expat.

Living in Istanbul was amazing, challenging, fabulous, horrible, incredible, the worst thing ever—and you could experience all six of those things inside of any random hour and a half. It’s a teeming, vibrant, exuberant, loud, deeply historic city that gives you sensory overload from sun up to sun down. But honestly, the one thing I remember most is the kindness and warm-heartedness of the people.

A few hours after we arrived back at our flat (In Europe) after I herded the kids out of their friends’ place at my husband’s behest while he sped home from his job in Asia (i.e. on the other side of the Bosporus) I had an endless influx of neighbors, and even my more than a little grumpy kapıcı at my door — or more specifically my windows which were thrown open to the cool fall evening while I tried to create some semblance of a normal coming home time for my kids. They brought tea, cakes, water, pizza, and plenty of concern about who I might know who’d been directly affected. I knew no one personally but as the horror piled up and we were treated to videos of people leaping from the collapsing buildings, and stories about day care centers, gyms, restaurants, and offices that were destroyed, it was hard not to simply nod and mutter Teşekkürler (thank you) over and over again as the stuff in my kitchen piled up as if we had, indeed, lost a close family member.

The weeks and months after that …. well, they’re hard to recall. Like most of you, I had to get back to my life. One that included grocery shopping, homework, day-to-day plans, and one that was padded by extra security for my kids at school, not to mention the continuous chorus of “come home where it’s safe” from family. We didn’t. We left Istanbul the next year and headed to England for a few more years before resuming life as Americans in America.

The inflection point of the day that France declared “we are all Americans,” affected the entire world. And it’s hard not to personalize the inflection—to say this was me before, this is me after. Of my three kids, only my oldest really remembers much about that day, but all three of them knew that the world had changed thanks to the efforts of a group of people made to bring harm to a country that seemed, up until that point, somehow immune and protected from anything so awful. But while the kindness of near strangers, people who had no reason to like us or even give a rip about our presence among them as foreigners, throughout the night of 9/11/01 and into the next day didn’t exactly soften the blow, it taught us all that while bad people with bad intentions are everywhere, you can say the same about the good, both in people and in a culture that’s been vilified as a monolith before that, and even more ever since.

Hug your loved ones tight. And help your neighbors whenever you can.

Liz