After a few days in New York, it was on to Pittsburgh.

In the ten years since I’d been away, many things had changed at home. My father, after nearly four decades, had retired from Caterpillar. He now worked as a driver three days a week, just to get him out of the house. My younger brother and sister had both grown up, and moved out. My parents, empty nesters, had sold the old house.
Also, I was not the only one who had been away. My oldest brother, Mike, who lived in Ohio, was also making it home for Christmas for the first time in many years.

After so many years away, changes were to be expected. Would everything be different?

Thankfully, we all settled fairly quickly. We’ve always been a close family, despite everything, a pack of comedians and “kumquats,” as my grandfather would say.

Everyone was curious to meet Ozge, my new bride, and they had lots of questions about our life in Turkey. Was it really safe over there? What was the “situation,” given all the reports about the civil war in Syria, and the general instability surrounding Turkey?

It was quite an adjustment for Ozge as well, her first time in America, meeting my side of the family.

“It’s your turn,” I joked.

The summer before, when we’d married in Istanbul, I was the foreigner, introduced to all of Ozge’s family and friends. Now, she was in the same position. Fortunately, Ozge’s English is much better than my Turkish. She had little problem adjusting. As for my folks, once they figured out how to pronounce her name, they were fine.

“We’ve just been calling her ‘O,” my sister told me, which irked my wife a little.

“So shall I call them ‘J’ and “S?’” she asked.

When everyone heard this, they laughed.

“Touche!” my father said.

It was Christmastime, the perfect time to have come home. We have a large family, on both sides, and are pretty stretched out — from Virginia, to Georgia, to Florida, to Istanbul. This year, almost everyone had made it back, so it was shaping up to be something special.

Mike, my oldest brother, had had a heart attack a year or so before. So, it was really good to see him, looking well, and enjoying being home. Together with our younger brother, Andy, and my sister’s son, Colin, we went to see the new Star Wars movie. This was one of those full-circle moments — back in 1977, as kids, Mike and I had watched the first Star Wars at the old theater in nearby Vandergrift, and growing up, with our often difficult relationship, Star Wars was one of those things we could both agree on.

These days, Mike works at a restaurant in Southern Ohio, and seems happy. “Ever think about coming home?” he asked.

“Well, my wife lives in Istanbul,” I said. “My life is in Istanbul. You?”

He was comfortable with his life in southern Ohio — his job, his girlfriend, the small town life where the routine stays more or less the same.

“Gotta hand it to you,” Mike said. “Living where you’re living, that takes some guts. You’d never get me to live in that part of the world, you’d have to be crazy!”

“Well, we like it.”

“You must.”

Over the next few days, we made the round of visits to relatives — the grandparents, all in their eighties now, slowing down, but doing well overall; all the various aunts and uncles; the cousins — many of whom were still kids when I left, now married and with kids of their own. For Ozge, it was quite the chore keeping all the names and faces, and all the different relationships, straight in her head, but she did fine. Everyone loved her.

“She’s lovely,” said my cousin Leslie, when we went out to the balcony together for a cigarette and a bit of catch up time. She was the only member of the family who had visited me in Prague, and on the same trip she had made a trip around the Continent, and traveled to Turkey. She enjoyed practicing her remembered bits of Turkish with my wife.

Along with getting to know the family, Ozge was also faced with the enormous task of dealing with American eating. Food is a big part of Turkish culture, sure, but the type of food, and the size of portions, was a different proposition altogether. And it was Christmas, and you know what that means … turkey, ham, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn hash, green beens, cranberry, apple pie, pumpkin pie, cookies, fresh-baked bread … And all the left-overs.

Plus, since Ozge was in America, she wanted to try things that were not as easy to find even in cosmopolitan Istanbul. One night we ate at a Chinese buffet that boasted no fewer than seventy different options; then it was on to Pittsburgh staples like kolbasi and perogies, followed by authentic Mexican (something I’d especially missed).

“Seems like all we do is eat!” she moaned, after the first couple of days.

Christmas day came and passed.

Ozge was treated to the Tressler family gift-opening marathon, which took several hours (we have a tradition where, starting from the youngest to oldest, everyone opens their gifts one at at a time, allowing for running commentary on each individual gift, its merits and such. That’s all well and good, I suppose, but for an observer, the process can be excruciating. “For Christ’s sake, just open them!” said our neighbor Ray, who after observing patiently the first couple of hours, was forced to take a half-time break).

My nephew Colin got, among other things, a drone (drones and hoverboards were all the rage this year — who’da thought? Another sign I’d been away too long. Before I left, it was all X-boxes and maybe mp3 players). Also, my mother Jan got one of those Apple i-watches, another sign of the times.

Ozge and I got lots of belated wedding gifts — primarily cash, which all newly married couples love and need most. With the favorable dollar-lira exchange rate, by the time we were through we’d more than recouped what we’d spent on the trip thus far.

The day after Christmas was Saturday. Time to make a trip to Pittsburgh proper. As much as she enjoys the simple home life, Ozge was getting understandably restless. Being back in America, one realizes again how you can’t get anywhere without a car, and after ten years, my license had long since expired. We were used to Istanbul, where you can step outside and grab a bus every two minutes. Where my parents lived, there wasn’t even a bus to the city.

“I can’t believe there aren’t any buses,” my wife said.

“Well, as you can see, everyone here drives,” I said.

We packed into two cars and headed “dahntahn.”

My father and Andy, my youngest brother, did the driving and tour guide duties. We drove into the center to where the three rivers — the Ohio, the Allegheny and Monongahela — meet, and parked near Heinz Field, home of our beloved Steelers. Ozge, not a fan but a good sport, wanted to go to a match. But the Steelers were heading to Baltimore that weekend. We walked over to the Jerome Bettis bar not far from the stadium, and had Iron City beer and perogies. Then, hopping back in the car, we drove over the Roberto Clemente bridge and headed past the theater district to Station Square.

Here, one sees the old and new Pittsburgh merge: The neo-rustic look of the shops stands alongside preserved machinery from the steel mills, most of which are long gone. My father explained some of the equipment to Ozge, and told her how his father (my late grandfather) came back from the Second World War and worked in the steel mills for some forty years.

In those days, the city was dirty, a perpetual brown haze hovering, and the rivers were red with rust. Nowadays, one is struck by how clean everything is, especially the air and the rivers. Of course, the city has also lost a measure of its vitality — it’s about half the size it was at its peak in the mid 1950s, when Pittsburgh produced virtually all of the world’s steel. (I told Ozge, for example, that the Empire State building, which we’d visited in New York, and many other skyscrapers all over America were in fact built with Pittsburgh steel).

Nevertheless, the city has retained much of the richness, especially the multi-ethnic neighborhoods — Polish, Italian, German, Slovak, among others — that distinguishes it from many other bland U.S. cities. And going into places, it was refreshing to hear the old Yinzer accent of native Pittsburghers. “Whatchyinz doin’ dahntahn? Yinz gonna watch the Stillers tom’ora? You betcha!”

We took the incline up to Mount Washington, where Ozge could have a panoramic view of the city.

“It’s really nice here,” she said, impressed.

Indeed, it was.

The next day the Steelers managed to find a way to lose to the hated, lowly Ravens in Baltimore. For all of us, who’d had such a wonderful Christmas together for the first time in many years, it would have been icing on the cake to have the Steelers come out with a win.

But you can’t have everything.

###

Our last day arrived.

My parents wanted to take us to breakfast at DeLuca’s, one of the best diners in all of Pittsburgh, and Ozge and I wanted to visit the Andy Warhol Museum. My brother Mike had already left to go back to Ohio the day before. He was needed at work.

There was a line waiting to go into DeLuca’s, but it was worth the wait. If you ever visit Pittsburgh, and are in need of a good breakfast, you can’t do any better than DeLuca’s. Ozge and I were pretty stuffed at this point, from all the eating, but we made room in our bellies for this one last special breakfast.

“We’re going on a diet when we get home,” my wife said.

After breakfast, we headed over to the Warhol museum. My cousin Leslie, a talented artist and graphic designer, had advised us to go up to the top floor and work our way down. So from the seventh floor, which catalogues Warhol’s early drawings, we proceded down, through the Fifties, Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. There were his famous silkscreen portraits — the soup cans, the Elvises, the Marilyns, the Maos — as well as a delightful room full of the floating silver balloons.

My nephew Colin, who would have much preferred to be playing with his new drone, was aghast.

“How is that ‘art’?” he protested, pointing to a drawing entitled, “Constipated Women,” which showed a rather vexed female squatting over a crudely rendered toilet.

“Why is not ‘art’?” I countered.

Colin is sharp little fellow, for when I posed this question, his eyes widened, and he returned to the picture and studied it with renewed focus. Later, when asked what he thought of the exhibits, he said he “rather enjoyed it.”
He wasn’t the only one.

“All this time,” Andy remarked, “I’ve been coming dahntahn and I never knew this place was here! I mean, I knew it was ‘here,’ but I’d never actually gone in.”

Andy may as well have been speaking for all of us.

Back in the late 1970s, my parents left Pittsburgh, taking us kids with them. In those days, the steel industry was dying, and for young people like my parents, the city’s horizons seemed hopelessly limited. We settled in Austin, which was set to become the trendy boom town it eventually became. And later, I moved on to Northern California, where a wealth of education, friendships and opportunities awaited. Pittsburgh was just a place we came from, and where once a year we visited family, usually at Christmas or in the summertime. Those visits were always crammed with relatives, and short sojourns here and there. We’d seldom, if ever, really taken the time, as a family, to just venture into the city itself.

Come to think of it, it’s one of those curiously American eccentricities that you notice, that haunt you throughout your life, especially when you come back. Throughout history, we have these constant shifts, from the Westward movement on down to the Sun Belt craze. We are a migrant people, a transient race, to the point where questions like “roots” or “background” become moot at some point. Where do you come from, friend? I happen to come from Pittsburgh.

And nowadays, you have more and more people like myself, who for reasons of work, or opportunity, marriage, desperation or just plain wanderlust, have pushed the boundary even further, making our homes from Prague to Istanbul, from Dubai to Shanghai.

Which is fine, I suppose, as long as you can make it home for Christmas once in a while.

Anyway, it was a real treat, with my wife Ozge, and all of us, to take the time and have a proper look around. You could say that I was seeing it for the first time just as much as she was. Maybe we all were.

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James Tressler, a former Lost Coast resident, is now a teacher and writer living in Istanbul.