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  • Bob Dylan of Kagizman, Turkey

    http://maviboncuk.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_archive. html

    FEBRUARY 23, 2005

    Bob Dylan of Kagizman, Turkey

    Mavi Boncuk

    BOB DYLAN CHRONICLES (Volume One),

    Simon & Schuster (Pages 92-93),

    2004 (Copyright)



    When I wasn't staying at Van Ronk's, I'd
    usually stay at Ray's place, get back sometime before dawn, mount the dark
    stairs and carefully close the door behind me. I shoved off into the sofa bed
    like entering a vault. Ray was not a guy who had nothing on his mind. He knew
    what he thought and he knew how to express it, didn't make room in his life for
    mistakes. The mundane things in life didn't register with him. He seemed to
    have some golden grip on reality, didn't sweat the small stuff, quoted the
    Psalms and slept with a pistol near his bed. At times he could say things that
    had way too much edge. Once he said that President Kennedy wouldn't last out
    his term because he was a Catholic.


    When he said it, it made me think about my
    grandmother, who said to me that the Pope is the king of the Jews. She lived
    back in Duluth on the top floor of a duplex on 5th Street. From a window in the
    back room you could see Lake Superior, ominous and foreboding, iron bulk
    freighters and barges off in the distance, the sound of foghorns to the right
    and left. My grandmother had only one leg and had been a seamstress. Sometimes
    on weekends my parents would drive down from Iron Range to Duluth and drop
    me off at her place for a couple of days. She was a dark lady, smoked a pipe.

    The other side of my family was more light-skinned and fair. My
    grandmother's voice possessed a haunting accent - face always set in a
    half-despairing expression. Life for her hadn't been easy. She'd come to
    America from Odessa, a seaport town in southern Russia. It was a town not
    unlike Duluth, the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right
    on the edge of a big body of water.

    Originally, she'd come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across
    the Black Sea - the sea that the ancient Greeks called the Euxine - the one
    that Lord Byron wrote about in Don Juan. Her family was from Kagizman, a
    town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been
    Kirghiz. My grandfather's parents had also come from that same area, where
    they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers.

    My grandmother's ancestors had been from
    Constantinople. As a teenager, I used to sing the Ritchie Valens song "In
    a Turkish Town" with the lines in it about the "mystery Turks and the
    stars above," and it seemed to suit me more than "La Bamba," the
    song of Ritchie's that everybody else sang and I never knew why. My mother
    even had a friend names Nellie Turk and I'd grown up with her always around.

    There were no Ritchie Valens records up at
    Ray's place, "Turkish Town" or otherwise. Mostly, it was classical
    music and jazz bands.


    POSTED BY M.A.M AT 5:25 PM | 0 COMMENTS
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