Georgia's Fickle Weather

Around the apartment in Decatur, I show how Georgia's fickle weather went from blustery blizzard to sunny Sunday in just one week.

Score One for Obama

I never thought I’d find myself working the phones in the Barack Obama headquarters, especially on a night the president was set to give an important address to the nation about the financial crisis. But there I was, and I had little other option.

I had gone running that night, and as I was listening to Chinese lessons on my mp3 player and pounding the pavement, I somehow lost my key. This was stupid on a variety of levels. For one, it was completely avoidable. I could have left the key under the mat at my house. I could have tucked it inside the little key pocket in my brand new running shorts. Instead, I chose to hold it in my right hand, along with my mp3 player, both of them swinging by the pendulum of my arm as I jogged.

That’s not to say this type of stupidity is completely uncharacteristic of me. I’ve been known to have a clumsy, idiotic streak. Once in China, I padlocked myself inside a house that had no indoor plumbing. As you can imagine, without getting into detail, the consequences were less than pleasant.

With no key, phone, or wallet, it was almost like being stranded in the wild and left for survival, only with concrete and cars all around. Katy wasn’t due home for two more hours, so I decided that I’d retrace the mile and see if by chance I could see the key gleaming in the streetlights. By now the sun had dipped behind the earth’s curve, and darkness was falling fast.

I figured I couldn’t lose in this situation. If I found the key, I performed a miracle. If I made the loop again with no luck, I had at least gotten another mile’s worth of exercise, which was the point of this whole thing in the first place.

I’ve always felt sympathy for the homeless, but I found a new empathy for them that night. I was scouring the pavement for the tool to give me entry into a nice apartment where Katy and I joke - and I emphasize joke - that we enjoy the luxury life. They often make a similar search for throwaway food scraps to simply keep them alive.

You feel a lot of new emotions when you’re powerless, but that’s a blog post for another day. I’m sure if you’ve read this blog before, you’ve noticed that God often strips me of pride to teach me humility, only to watch me later go after the same self-sufficiency again.

I walked by the railroad tracks and listened to the harsh, metal-on-metal squeal of the MARTA train’s brakes as it pulled into a station near my house. I watched the sun fade completely, and streetlights became beacons to get me home.

Then it occurred to me that Katy might worry about me if I didn’t answer her nightly call as she left work. This realization came to me at the same time I had walked into a parking lot to check out an old tire shop that has been redeveloped into loft space for businesses. In the window of one of the two occupied spaces, a huge blue O with red and white stripes taking up its bottom half was painted on the glass.

People were sitting in a circle in a room plastered with posters in red, white and blue. A Barack Obama quote was written in cursive on the wall. I had found the Illinois senator’s Decatur campaign headquarters.

These folks are doing a fantastic job for their candidate. If you could empirically predict margin of victory by yard signs, Obama would be leading by something like a 98 percent in Decatur. The reason I knew the sign of the O stood for Obama is because I pass a homemade one nailed to a tree on my route to work. On that same street, I was recently following a car with an Obama bumper sticker written in Hebrew.

Despite my political differences, I needed a phone. I tapped on the glass, and a lady opened the door. I explained my situation.

“Only if you vote for Barack Obama,” she said with a wry smile.

She probably thought that was a safe bet in Decatur.

“I can’t guarantee that, but I hope you’ll let an enemy into your camp for a moment,” I said.

I made the call, and Katy was relieved. As I walked home, I thought this was a bit ironic: I had no change, and I went to Barack Obama. He won’t get my vote, but he gets my gratitude.

Cemetery Stroll

I think I should walk in a cemetery once a week. It sounds morbid, but if you came with me, you might understand. Not only is it good physical exercise, but it also gives your spirit a bit of a workout.

What I mean is that when you walk through a cemetery, you can't help but think of mortality. On the surface, that sounds like a bad thing. We should be thinking of life, you might say, and all the opportunities that lie before us. You might recommend that we not dwell on death.

I walked through the Decatur cemetery the other day. The historical marker said that some of the graves predate the 1823 incorporation of the city. There are more than 50 rolling acres filled with graves, old and new. The older slabs of stone have more character. Their inscriptions are cooler, and their mystique is multiplied by the fact that you have to really work hard to read them.

The newer graves are neater and prettier. Less weathering and more precise stone-cutting instruments make it that way.

When you look around, it's really surprising how much life there is in a cemetery. Birds chirp, squirrels call, city employees mow lawns and trim hedges. Cars whir by outside the cemetery gates. Freshly piled dirt and vividly colored flowers show that people were just here to mourn someone whose mortality caught up with them. I even saw a guy (alive, mind you) lying asleep in one of the grave plots.

These signs of life only underscore my point about the power of thinking permanently about our impermanence. They give us hope because even in a place devoted to death, life goes on. And they show that when we're reminded of death, life is easily noticed and cherished. The opportunities ahead of us will be lived more fully if we're conscious of how fleeting they are.

It's kind of like running or swimming. The athlete that knows the last lap is coming will not let up.

We don't know exactly when our race on this earth will end, but it's good to be reminded that it will.

When it does, we'll be judged on how we hustled, even when the finish line was nowhere in view.

Photo: Gettysburg National Cemetery. Copyright Trevor Williams, 2007.

Goin' Ghetto for a Burger

I had heard the rumors about Ann's Snack Shop, an unassuming little joint on Atlanta's Memorial Drive next to a liquor store and two doors down from a Checkers, a burger competitor whose fast-food fare literally doesn't stack up next to Ann's towering concoctions.

Word on the street was that Ann had been serving up America's best burger by herself for more than 30 years from her little stand, which can only seat nine customers simultaneously at the barstools in her small restaurant. And woe unto those who break Ann's strict rules about intrusion (or any of those posted on the wall above her kitchen). Ann's place is sitting room only, and she quickly shoos out anyone left standing up or milling about.

It wasn't until last year that Ann gained national recognition in a Wall Street Journal article for her culinary specialties, but plaques on her dingy walls proclaimed that she'd been at the top of the city of Atlanta's food chain in the burger category just about every year since AOL Citysearch and other sites began rating shops like hers.

But it wasn't the critical acclaim that drew me to Ann's. It was hunger, for adventure and for ground beef. I'd never heard of Ann's place until I drove by one day and saw a wooden sign out front painted with cursive letters that read, "Home of the World Famous Ghetto Burger." The picture on the sign, I found out, is pretty close to life-size. The Ghetto Burger is a veritable mountain of food: two handfuls of ground beef from a smashed onto a commercial grill, coated with melted cheese, laced with bacon and topped with lettuce, tomato, onions, chili, ketchup and mustard. For coleslaw aficionados, Ann offers the Hood Burger, which is basically a Ghetto Burger with some slaw on top. The Hood is actually a bit more expensive, and I guess the extra cost coupled with slaw's polarizing nature as a fixin' has kept the Hood from reaching the Ghetto's level of worldwide fame.

A co-worker and I traveled to Ann's twice. The first time we were left out in a sort of lean-to lobby area for awhile, waiting behind other eager customers who warned us not to try to enter before a seat came open. They also told us that Ann's old-school shop doesn't fool around with credit cards. Sadly, we settled for Checkers.

Our second try was marked with determination, which we would need along with a little dab of patience. We came armed with cash and blocked out an hour for lunch. We wound up needing two.

Nowhere in Ann's rules does it say, "Provide good or even adequate customer service." Maybe it's the product of being the lone ranger of burgers in her neighborhood, but Ann was too busy to worry about being courteous. Although we sat down immediately this time, we were at the bar for a half-hour before Ann acknowledged our presence. Another hour later, after enduring two soap operas on the blaring TV inside, we had two bags of steaming goodness to take back to the office.

The long wait was trying, especially since my breakfast had been small that morning. But I found that the long period of "burgatory" between entry and exit fostered conversation that produced bonds between the customers. The guy next to us had traveled from across town. Every time he came this way for work, he stopped at Ann's. With the long wait, I hoped he didn't get paid by the hour.

Hip hop mogul P. Diddy, Puff Daddy or Diddy, whatever his name is now, had come to Ann's while he was in Atlanta, this guy told us. Our new friend didn't get to see Puffy, but he heard that the star liked his Ghetto Burger.

I don't know of any more appropriate endorsement for something called with "ghetto" in its name, but another guy in the store offered his as well. He came all the way from the United Kingdom to sink his teeth into Ann's specialty, he said. As he thanked her, Ann nonchalantly took his cash and I think - just maybe - managed a small curl of the lips that bordered on a smile.

She took our payment in much the same way, with little outward expression of gratitude. Ann seems to think that seven-plus bucks is an appropriate price for a burger.

After downing the whole thing in one sitting, I'd have to agree.

For more information on the Ghetto Burger and some good photos of the actual burgers, check out The Blissful Glutton's thorough blog post or check out the YouTube video below from Atlanta's ABC affiliate. Sadly, my one-track focus on the burgers caused me to forget my camera that day.

Farzana

If her name tag had more room, it wouldn't have said Farzana. It would have said, "I'm not just a random photo girl behind a Walgreens counter."

After snapping a digital passport photo of me, she took the camera back and started to print out the 2x2 square of paper that would identify me on my visa application for China. The last time I had this done, it was a significantly less technical process that took only long enough for the chemicals in the Polaroids to perform the magically blurry fusion that ends up capturing a memory.

But it took longer than expected, and as Farzana centered my cheesy face in the photo software, we somehow struck up a conversation.

Before my job at GlobalAtlanta as an international business reporter and our move to Decatur, asking someone's nationality would have been an anomaly for me. Now, it's the norm. It's not that I'm a workaholic always looking for story ideas. I'm just interested in the mixture of cultures into the U.S. and how that trickles down to my little street.

Bangladesh was her answer, and it more intrigued than surprised me. Bangladesh, which is enclosed on three sides by a long tentacle of land owned by India, is the seventh most populous nation on Earth. But it doesn't have the space that should come with such a huge chunk of humanity. Imagine cramming half the U.S. population into an area slightly smaller than Iowa, and that's the crowded life Farzana endured before emigrating to the U.S. She estimates that about 20,000 of her countrymen live in Georgia, although the density is probably a bit lighter than back home.

Back home, Farzana was educated. She speaks Hindi and Bengali, and she has only been learning English for the two months since she came here. She'd traveled to Pakistan, Nepal, India and Thailand. She was a lawyer. What need did she have for English? Did I mention she was educated back in Bangladesh?

Apparently, the state of Georgia didn't think she was educated enough. Her law degrees aren't equally valid here, so she's currently saving up her wages from Walgreen's so that she can eventually go back to school at Georgia State University and get a law degree that will enable her to practice here. She's thinking immigration law, something she can relate too that isn't too broad.

Until she reaches that goal, it might seem that she's just a photo girl behind a Walgreen's counter. The more people I meet, the more I realize there's a story behind every name tag.

Colson

We humans are rebellious by nature. We run from God, and in those times, he often has to cripple us to bring us back to him.

For Colson, a homeless man limping his way through life in downtown Atlanta, that spiritual phenomenon recently took on a physical dimension. Caught on the street in the middle of a gunfight between people he didn't even know, Colson ended up with a bullet through his lower thigh that sent him for treatment at a local hospital.

"When you runnin' from God," he told me as he sat in the crisp January night, munching on a muffin at a local park, "He sometimes gotta show you who's boss."

In other words, sometimes God takes you out of the game to make you realize who's really pulling the strings.

Without the few bucks he needed for meds, the smell on Colson's clothes and breath told me that he had turned to alcohol to take the edge off his pain. But even through a semi-drunken glaze, the 41-year-old spoke with the kind of desperate and damaged faith forged by slogging through life at the very bottom of the social totem pole. He sat on a bench wearing a orange skull cap to fend off the cold, and I noticed a long, thin scar running along the bottom of his cheekbone, giving him a rugged look as he stared vacantly toward Atlanta's glistening city lights.

Colson wanted two blankets, and he took a whole loaf of bread, but he wasn't too happy about the fact that the more swift of foot downed the last of the steaming broccoli casserole provided by the ministry that had set up shop in the parking lot. His limp had made him late, and although muffins were good fuel, he would've liked a hot meal on a night where temperatures threatened to soon reach freezing. A steaming cup of cider seemed to placate him, and we began talking.

I offered to pray for his leg, and he obliged, mumbling something about needing all the help he could get. We bowed our heads, and I placed hands on his knee. I felt the bandages through his worn, brittle jeans, and asked God for restoration. When I ended, nothing extraordinary happened. Colson just pointed his droopy, brown eyes back up at the city lights, and he began counting his blessings.

Colson's proof of God was not theological. It was experiential. With all that he had gone through, he felt that just being alive shows God is real, active and powerful. The gunfight could've cost him his life or his ability to move his leg, a near death sentence for a vagabond that relies on his mobility for subsistence. But the bullet hit no ligaments or arteries, and the emergency room wasn't far away.

"He's kept me alive for 41 years. I know he's an awesome God," Colson said. He spoke with a wistful tone both suffused with wonder and certainty but strangely subdued at the same time. As he quoted scriptures and proclaimed the glory of God, it was interesting how little hope he had to translate these abstract qualities into the real-life experience of love, joy and discipline.

"So what's your next move?" I asked, trying to get him thinking about the future. Folding tables squealed and slammed shut behind us and boxes rumbled into their seats as the church packed up to leave. I knew my time was short.

Colson couldn't answer, except to say that he believes in a God of second chances, even when it comes to his use of drugs and alcohol, some of the church's biggest taboos. Listening to his words, I began to feel convicted. Though bruised undoubtedly by some mistakes that he chose to make, Colson showed that he knows the true Source of what little power he had left. I hope it doesn't take homelessness for me to display a similar dependence.

The Kurds

This is the second in a series of profiles of international residents in Decatur. The first installment tracked the story of a Colombian now working at an apartment complex here.

Mustafa can’t read Arabic. A Kurdish Turk from Ankara, the capital of Turkey, where more than 90 percent of citizens call themselves Muslim, it’s almost a given that he considers himself the same. But the nine-year resident of the U.S. and co-owner of Café Istanbul in Decatur is far from fanatical about his religion. He abstains from pork, mostly because disdain for it is so ingrained in his culture, not because he really thinks it unclean. He says all the food at his restaurant is halal. In Arabic, the word means “permissible,” but it has come to describe an Islamic food classification similar to Jewish kosher laws. He serves it not because he believes it imbues his restaurant with holiness. It’s enough for him that it brings in profits from the consumers who want their food that way.

We had come to research the halal phenomenon as a business story for my job. Any city’s ability to attract international business will be directly correlated to its ability to make foreign businesspeople feel at home, and we wanted to investigate the accessibility of halal food in Atlanta. Café Istanbul is close to the office, and it was rated by a halal Web site as adhering to the dietary restrictions on at least some level. The food is amazing, and the atmosphere is top-notch Mediterranean. Customers can choose normal, Western-style tables or opt for a more exotic experience: reclining on posh cushions at low tables throughout two other exotically decorated rooms. Not ones for the status quo, my co-worker, Katy and I plopped down on cushions in the corner in a room with tufted, plum-colored silk covering the ceilings and half-walls and columns separating this middle section from the other two rooms.

After feasting on kebabs and other Turkish dishes, I approached Mustafa and dropped the name of a guy I met at a Turkish event a few months back. He runs a Turkish cultural association in town and told me he knew the owners of Café Istanbul, two brothers who were Turks but Kurdish in ethnicity. Introducing myself, I asked Mustafa to confirm what I’ve heard and told him that we wanted an interview once he finished cleaning a mess left by a party of 10 next to us. He was probably glad they were gone. At first hesitant to puff the hookah, one of the girls persuaded herself to partake by muttering, It's an authentic cultural experience, over and over again.

A few questions in, it was obvious from the rapid-fire intensity of his speech that Mustafa was a passionate guy. He was fiery, and not because he had just demonstrated to the big party how to really suck in and exhale the hookah's flavored tobacco smoke. He had an uncanny way of exuding intensity while maintaining a cheerful disposition, even as he volunteered information about the grave situation underway in his home country. The PKK, a Kurdish rebel group classified by the U.S. as a terrorist group, is fighting against the Turkish government from outposts in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Mustafa seemed to think that such extremism gives peaceful, loyal Kurds like him a bad name in their native country. “They might not like me very much right now, but I love Turkey,” he says.

Mustafa also loves the United States. He came three months after his brother Kamal, who while we spoke picked up Mustafa’s slack, scurrying around the restaurant wearing a shirt that said “Got Hookah?” Kamal had won the green card lottery, but Mustafa had to wait for his permanent resident status. When he first got here, he and Kamal worked in an Italian restaurant, but in a strange turn of fate, the brothers decided to visit a local Turkish restaurant they had heard about one Sunday night. The restaurant was closed, but when the Turkish owner came to the door and saw fellow Turks, he ushered them for some drinks and conversation. By the end of the night, Mustafa and Kamal somehow became the proud owners of part of the building that now houses Café Istanbul.

Now a proud green card carrier, Mustafa can’t believe it’s already been nine years since he first came to America. He already thinks a little bit like an American, and that’s gotten him into trouble on occasion. Some stricter Muslims have taken issue with his decision to serve beer—which is forbidden in Islam—in a supposedly halal restaurant. “It’s not their business,” he says, becoming defensive when I ask how he weighs his customers’ varying standards of piety. “If they want to be like that they shouldn’t come to this country. It’s a free country, you know?”

The back wall in Café Istanbul’s largest room is covered by a painted mural. A portrayal of a large, keyhole-shaped doorway topped with a pointed arch draws eyes to a central point in the wall. I ask if this represents the niche in the wall of a mosque that shows devotees the qibla, the direction of prayer toward Mecca. Impressed that I even knew about the qibla (which was originally pointed toward Jerusalem), Mustafa says it’s just a door, but it does have an interesting story. The mural’s painter, a friend, originally included an Arabic phrase above the painted doorway, Mustafa says, scribbling his best impression of Arabic on a pad. One day, a patron complained that Mustafa could not defame the Qur’an by having such words scribbled on the wall. Although Mustafa thought it was just a generic Arabic name, he asked his friend to come back and paint over it to avoid any more disputes.

The few fits of ire the restaurant has drawn pales next to the fanfare it regularly attracts, especially on the weekends. A lively night spot that features belly dancers, imported Turkish beer, knock-you-down Turkish coffee in a somewhat out-of-the-way Decatur location, Café Istanbul threatens to break fire codes every weekend. Mustafa shuffles back over to a table where he had been calculating figures earlier. Grabbing the guest list for the coming Friday, his index finger trails down the page, passing parties of 10 and 15. It stops on a party of 80. “And that’s just from 7 to 9 p.m.,” Mustafa says with pride. Halal or not, Turkish or American, these Kurds must be doing something right.

The Colombian

He didn’t want to talk about the specifics. All the Colombian would say--and that through implication-- is that his experience with rebel soldiers in his home country was traumatic enough to make him want to leave and never look back. A civil engineer by trade who sometimes worked with the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, the Colombian stopped in one day to ask America for political asylum. Just nine days later, he was dropped in Georgia.

Without any English skills, he wasn’t able to find an engineering job, so he settled for the next best thing for a refugee—using a local connection to land a job as a menial laborer, scrubbing dumpsters at an apartment complex near Atlanta. The work was hard but nothing to get upset about. This was just an obstacle, and he could endure a few setbacks if by them he could escape his past.

He began studying English, and after a few years the owner of the apartment complex recognized his work ethic and asked if he’d like to become a painter. It wallowing in trash all day, so he jumped at the chance, even though he had little-to-no experience with a brush and roller. A few more years gone and his English much improved, the same boss asked if the Colombian would like to sell apartments to Spanish-speaking families.

Two years removed from that promotion, the Colombian now sells apartments to everyday clientele. His Hispanic accent is evident but winsome, and he’s extremely courteous without coming off as fake. He vigorously holds onto this job, which he says has its pros and cons. Just the other day, he had to tell a rowdy tenant to turn his movie down so a pregnant woman could get some sleep, and he’s been refereeing a group of unruly students who treat the complex like it’s the dorm for the college they cross the street to attend.

The Colombian represents an odd twist on the American dream, having come here by an odd confluence of desire and necessity. After eight years in America, he loves his new life, and he says he never even thinks about returning to civil engineering. He could care less that “sales manager” doesn’t have particularly prestigious connotations. To be honest, he’s just too busy reading about Colombian politics or helping customers retrieve their packages that were too big to fit in their tiny mailboxes.

When I ask him what he thinks about Americans who were born here but continually complain about the government even as they rely on it for sustenance, he replies with a pointed but non-judgmental response: “I think that we have so much here and we are accustomed to so much, that if one thing gets taken away, we complain about it.” The flipside is implied in his polite and grateful tone: If you’ve gone from nothing to something, you’ll appreciate all opportunities and the turns of fate and time that afforded them to you.

Photo: The jungle of Panama, the closest I've ever been to Colombia. Copyright 2006, Trevor Williams