Go with your gut!

Everyone who knows me I go with my gut feeling a whole lot. One example is meeting a guy on a dive boat, having the feeling that he is not going to be some serial killer but a nice and a loving man, and ending up marrying him. Yes, I go with my gut a lot. Unlike this time!

On my regular morning walks to the harbor I was stopping by at a bakery to pick up a fresh loaf of olive bread (to die for!) and a chat with the owner, our friend. There are always customers at that hour, people coming to grab freshly baked pastries for breakfast, some sitting down with a cup of tea, some rushing on to get to work.

On a few occasions I have met an elderly man at the bakery having his breakfast there. It turned out he ran a car fixing business around the corner and the whole neighborhood adored him. Hikmet is about 70-75 years old, has one eye and a missing finger. He quickly spotted me as a foreigner and we chatted in English a few times. I was interested in his life story, he was interested in something else, but we will get there later.

You have to imagine a man with a beaten up appearance telling you how after the war his property and his business in Limasol (Greek part of the island) was ruined and he never got the money back, so he had to work hard in the UK to make some more money to come back to Cyprus and start his business. To my question if he was married, his good eye welled up with tears (which made me feel horrible) and said that his beloved has passed away. At some point it seemed strange to me how curious he was about me and my life, because normally older people love to talk about their lives. Well, not if you have a made up one, then you don’t!

It still didn’t hit me at that point and as we were sitting there I saw many neighbors stopping by and patting Hikmet on the back and making some jokes, you could tell people loved him. So I thought, what a great find – a new friend and already you can see he is a decent person! Lucky me!

The next morning he offered to give me a ride home. I thought why not, we have been chatting a few times already and everyone seems to think he is a great guy. I asked our friend the baker just to be on the safe side if he thinks it’s ok to what he said that of course it is, Hikmet is wonderful.

So I hop into his truck and he drops me off at the apartment and then he looks pensively at me with his one eye and asks if he can come up for a coffee. I said ‘gee, I have to work, but ok, one cup of coffee.’ The man has parts of the body missing, for Pete’s sake, I was afraid to hurt his feelings!

I won’t keep you guessing any longer, (be ready to gag!) - he tried to kiss me on the lips. How disgusting and gross is that? At first I thought it couldn’t be true, it was a mistake, you know when someone gives you a peck on the cheek and then kind of misses the cheek? Well, yeah, he definitely tried to kiss me again to what I just played stupid – he was already in my kitchen. I always worry how the freak is going to behave after you say no. So I chose to play stupid. After he drank his coffee, he got a phone call and had to go back to his shop. I stayed there feeling incredibly stupid and disgusting.

A few times when we spoke I got that nagging gut feeling saying ‘he is a dirty old man, dirty old man’, but no, I thought, give him a chance he is already beaten by life so badly that maybe what he needs is a good ear. Well, apparently my intuition was right; too bad I decided to shut it up this time.

Next time I am with any of you my dear friends and I say someone is a dirty old pervert – believe me! I also found out that Hikmet’s wife is alive and kicking, bless her heart.

Today I had a chance to thank my intuition and be rude to someone who deserved it. I was waiting for a bus when a taxi pulled in from the parking lot, the driver said he’d take me to where I needed to go. I politely declined. (Taxis cost an arm and a leg in Cyprus, you never take them.) The driver then insisted I’d get into the car because someone called him and didn’t show up and he was either thinking I was the person who called and didn’t show or I looked that stupid to get into a cab I didn’t call. After a few broken English phrases I saw he wasn’t getting the message, to what I said in Turkish ‘istemiyorum, ya!’ it only means ‘I don’t want to’, but when you say it with the right intonation and throw your hands up in the air like the Turkish women do – the fancy Mercedes was speeding along the highway in the blink of an eye.

‘There’, I thought to myself, ‘the gut would be happy now that the balance is restored again.’



Greetings from the Island of Love,

Your Tanka Lou