The Compliment

I have four siblings, very close in age. There’s about a year between each of my sisters and me; my brother came along after a three-year gap. My parents were very unusual in that they took us on Sunday afternoon drives to watch the barges go through the locks on the Mississippi River, and for long vacations in a borrowed camper or our two-toned van with a sliding door named Betty. When we were quite young, they took us to out to eat as a special treat. I’m not sure how they did it, but they put the fear of god in us and we were very well-behaved in restaurants. To be fair, we weren’t perfect by a long shot, but we knew it was a privilege to go, and we also realized that many of the kids in school were never taken anywhere because “they wouldn’t appreciate it.” Initially, the waitresses would look at us with dread, but almost inevitably, would compliment my parents on their children’s good manners.

While on the tram the other day on one of my frequent pilgrimages to the bazaar, a tall man with three small children boarded at the Tophane stop. His girl must have been about four, the boys three and two. There weren’t enough empty seats for them all to sit together, and no one was giving up theirs. The man guided his children to three separate seats while he stood in the aisle between them. He spoke gently, and his children obeyed without a fuss. The girl was wearing her brand new, bright pink coat and all of the other pinks in her wardrobe. She wore very thick glasses. Without them, one of her eyes probably would have crossed to the center. One of the boys had his hood pulled down over his forehead. All of them were thrilled to be riding the tram and smiled so broadly their cheeks must have hurt.. They didn’t yell or even talk to each other, but giggled quietly in their own seats. The smallest was very taken by his reflection in the Plexiglas guard in front of him. As adjacent seats opened up, the man shepherded the kids to the spaces next to each other.

As I watched this family, I thought about the waitresses who complimented my parents. My Turkish vocabulary doesn’t include "well-behaved," (though it should so I can better speak to my students’ parents in their own language) so I thought that “These children are very sweet” would sufficiently carry my message. Before I exited, I approached the man, looked him in the eye and uttered my carefully rehearsed sentence. He looked at me oddly. While I was mentally reviewing my pronunciation, he replied “I don’t know English” in a thick accent. I think he thanked me when I quickly retranslated my little speech back to English, but I had to jump off the tram and couldn’t be sure.