Politics, Culture, and Other Wastes of Time

Thursday, March 6, 2008
6:29:00 PM EST
My father, or 'baba' as I referred to him, Mehmet Tolun Gokbudak (1921-1983) came to America in 1957.
It was not some kind of  poor immigrant comes to America story as my late grandfather Fuat Gokbuak (1892-1957) had been a distinguished member of the Turkish parliament when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was president in the 1930s, but Fuat bey had alas succumbed to a gambling addiction and thus gambled away the family fortune in the casinos of Istanbul.
The financial void from that situation perhaps ultimately allowed my father to contemplate leaving Turkey which was going through economic turmoil at the time.
It has always been challenging to come to the terms with my father's sudden death from a heart attack because it happened on March 4, 1983_ which was also my 13th birthday.
But, now that the 25th anniversary of that very painful day has come and gone, I feel comfortable talking about my father and what he meant to me.
We didn't always get along. In fact, he was often upset with me when he found out that I watched tv shows like "Happy Days" because they showed in his word 'children talking back to their parents.'
Nor did I tell him that I saw "Tootsie" at Tanglewood Mall in Roanoke, Va., back in 1982 because most assuredly a Turkish man would not approve of a man pretending to be a woman, though in recent years the Turkish pop singer Bulent Ersoy did in fact undergo a gender-changing operation to become a genuine diva!
I found this quote from the late, great American playwright Lillian Hellman of "The Little Foxes" fame which perhaps most articulates not only my own relationship with my father, but any such parent-child relationship that faces either a cultural or a generational gap:

"My father was often angry when I was most like him."

In our case, we faced both, but more often than not, we found a way to overcome such differences.
I still think of him whenever I see or hear a Turkish man playing a 'saz,' a string instrument which is often heard in music from the region, which is perhaps why I find the music of the late Turkish musician Asik Veysel, a saz master, so appealing. 
Veysel, who was popular in Turkey some 50 years ago, was also among my father's favorite musicians.
Even though Asik grew up as a poor boy in a rural village near Sivas in eastern Turkey and my father grew up in a wealthy Istanbul family, his songs always remind me of my father.
One of Veysel's classic songs is "Dostlar Beni Hatirlasin" which literally means "I Hope My Friends Remember Me." I guess very few people think of their fathers as friends, but as the years go by in a surreal way that seems to be how we see them regardless if they happen to be living, or even, as it is in my case, if they are no longer with us.


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