The squirrel ran across the path I was jogging on in Prospect Park. It was pure white. I’d never seen a white squirrel before, and I thought, I felt, “White will appear again today in a significant way.” And what I really meant was, there was meaning in the universe, all I knew to the contrary notwithstanding.
On leaving the park, I passed a grove of pear trees flowering in white profusion, petals falling like snow. It was springtime in New York. The trees were beautiful, even if their display of snowy exuberance was not necessarily rich in meaning — only perhaps a coincidence I had been looking for. Besides, having studied folklore in college, I knew that these things, to be magic, had to come in threes.
As the day progressed, I gradually forgot my intuition. At least, my immediate consciousness let it go, and I did not actively seek a significant recurrence of the color.
That evening, at the urging of my boss, I attended a lecture on architecture at an elegant New York social club. I had been working as an editor of architecture books, and here was a gathering of professionals, architecture historians and lay enthusiasts. When the lecture ended, guests were invited into an opulent chamber with large windows on West 43rd Street for cocktails, hors d’oeuvres and conversation.
A man, perhaps 75, stood alone by the window — the only one alone in the crowd, except for me. I went right for him.
Saying hello, I soon learned that he was Turkish by birth and had lived for decades on the Upper West Side. Unable to resist the urge to brag, and to demonstrate an interest in his motherland, I recalled the handful of Turkish words and phrases I had learned more than 20 years earlier as a young traveler. Çok güzel (very beautiful), çok deli (very crazy) and my favorite, Karadeniz’de gemilerin mi batti? (Why do you look so sad? / Did all your ships sink on the Black Sea?)
He was generous and indulged me. He laughed and managed to understand what must have been a horrendous butchering of the language.
I loved the writing of Orhan Pamuk, I continued, holding on to our connection, and asked what he thought of the great Turkish author. I’d been on a cruise ship once and had a Turkish server who said, in response to the same question, “We, the Turkish people, do not like him.” But the man by the window that evening did. Indeed, he had a funny story to share concerning the famous Nobel Prize winner.
The man and his wife, who had now come to join us, had a cat they’d named Pamuk. Sometimes they took it for a walk in their neighborhood, where, he knew, Orhan Pamuk also lived. It was his worry — and as well an amusement to think — that one day he would call to his cat, and Orhan Pamuk would turn in response. Wouldn’t that be something?
But why had he called his cat Pamuk? Was he such a fan of the author?
Yes, he said, he liked Pamuk, but it was not for this reason that he had so named his cat. In Turkish the word has meaning, he explained. His cat was wonderfully white and fluffy, like cotton. And that was the meaning of the word.
Douglas Curran, an editor and writer, is founding principal of Hedgehog Editorial Project Mgmt. His essays and stories have appeared in this magazine, as well as in American Letters & Commentary, Exquisite Corpse, The Frogmore Papers and elsewhere.