Patrick Meadows and Stephanie Shepard Memorial Site
It was inevitable, thought we didn’t know it at the time, that we should meet Bulent. Mari and I flew from Izmir to Ankara where we spent the night. Then the next day by bus to Adana. Sounds like a simple statement, but it was not so simple. The two-propeller plane took off from what […]
This is another autobiographical story with a familiar theme–Patrick and Mari’s journey to Izmir, Turkey. I’ve made only minor edits. About nine o’clock in the morning, Mari and I stepped down from the train onto the platform in Istanbul. Beside us were the two bulging suitcases I had wrestled from Luxemburg to Paris, from there […]
Achilles stumped about in this dust,Beneath these walls. Those poppies are less redThan petals bled by Trojans and GreeksFor Helen and the rest. Priam’s surging lustWas small beside this rise and fall of land,The snake of river slipping out to sea,The Dardanelles, lying at the kneeOf Turkey, a girl stretching on the sand. The tendons […]
Patrick sent this story to me, along with several others, on 25 Dec 2013. This one tells the story of the Zambak, chronicled elsewhere indirectly. Billy Bielmeyer and I were sailing in the Bay of Izmir in his tiny Pirate dinghy. The hills of Izmir rising up on all sides from the deep blue sea […]
Another autobiographical story from the files. This one is fairly lengthy–the ODT document was four pages long, tightly packed. It ends abruptly but perhaps that was Patrick’s intention. The last edit date was 17 April 2012. When Fred heard the bad news about the Zambak, he wrote from Rome: “Well, if we can’t trace the […]
Here’s another incomplete autobiographical piece that Patrick wrote about his adventures in Turkey. The earliest version of this file was dated 6 April 1997 and the newest was from 16 February 2011. The latter is what I used below. I suspect the title relates to Billy’s band, but I haven’t checked all the other writings […]
Here’s a letter from Fred to Patrick in which he remembers some of their earlier adventures together. I found it in a Word document dated 1 Dec ‘5, but I don’t know when it was actually written. My guess is that it’s from the early 2000’s, after they had established an e-mail connection, since I […]
Here’s a photo of the Zambak, a newspaper clipping (incomplete) about the episode with a picture of Mari on the cover, and some e-mail exchanges explaining more of what happened. There is a fuller story he sent me on 25 Dec 2013 that you might enjoy. Patrick wrote the following back-story: Here is the boat […]
The Black and Marmara seas breed gypsy soulsAmong the Turks. The brown and umber shoalsOf shade, beneath the parrot green or blueFeathered waves, shivering to spewOnto land with raucous breakers, flicker darkAnd light like wrinkled, laughing eyes. The bladesOf sun in slashing arcs like Dervish swordsGo mad in colors that the nomad hordesHad never dreamed […]