Golden girl

Angus Hamlin

“我”的母亲来自一个传统、保守的家庭，因而她很少做疯狂的事情。但是，接下来她的改变让“我”和“我”哥哥大吃一惊。

My mother looks just like many grandmothers. She is short, fat, and white-haired. She comes from a traditional family. She didn't do crazy stuff.

That all changed a few years ago. She began to surprise my older brother and me with her “independence”. In early 2015, the year she turned 75, she informed us she'd booked a seven-night trip to Turkey alone. There was no way my brother and I could allow that. A vulnerable little old lady wandering the streets of Istanbul on her own, not speaking a word of Turkish, with no knowledge of the laws and customs of the land—it was out of the question!

She paid no attention to us. Off she went. When she returned, she told us it had been a wonderful success. As it turned out, she had barely spent any time alone after hiring a taxi driver to show her around Istanbul for a few days. He introduced her to a rug vendor （小贩）named Mustafa, “a lovely fellow”, and she bought some rugs. The vendor had taken her address details and promised to ship the rugs home. The vendor and my mother apparently （显然） struck up quite a friendship and she had told him to drop by if he were ever in Canada. My mother had big smiles as she told this story.

Some weeks later, her rugs arrived with a lovely note from Mustafa. To our even greater surprise, the following year Mustafa himself arrived, and promptly called our mother to inform her of that fact. “He came by for a cup of tea. They drink a lot of tea in Turkey,” my mother told my horrified brother and me.