I visited Peter in 1995 at his new home in Montreal. He was living on one of the residential islands just north of the city. It was a beautiful location, a large older home, in a very small island community, surrounded by the St Lawrence river, yet only 20 minutes from downtown.
When I arrived with my son I had been fasting for 40 days, no food, only water. I did not tell Peter and kimiz I had been fasting because I did not want them to make too much of it as many people do. I later learned, when I spoke to them again over the phone a year later, they thought I was sick, suffering perhaps from some deadly disease. I was so skinny, I had dropped to 150 pounds. I assured them there was nothing wrong with me.
On this only visit I met for the first and only time Peter’s oldest son, Kemal. Except for the previous problem of impotence this was not really a surprise. On my first meeting with Kimiz, she told me, “I want to have children. My first husband didn’t want kids. I dumped him.”
This created a rather high expectation.
Peter did not say anything about wanting children, but if he was with this woman, it was obviously expected?
I had been very very concerned when he said he was impotent. How was he to provide the babies?
Obviously he succeeded. He had another son a few years later.
That , March or April 1995 was the last time i ever met Peter. I did not hear from him again until he contacted my son through Facebook in 2014.
We wrote to each other by email. He was very friendly and I was very excited to be talking to him. Hew told me how he was making lots of money from home and promised to teach me how to do it (He never did.), and that he had much to talk about and many other things.
I poured out my heart in several emails. His emails were much shorter but he promised to tell me much more soon. He mentioned his son had been accepted Full Scholarship for graduate studies at Princeton in Physics.
I congratulated him. there was talk of getting ready for that and the June wedding of his son.
Then a subsequent email told me there was a change plans. His son was now going to go to college in Dallas, Texas.
It is certain I should have kept my big mouth shut but I have been in and worked in most state in the US. Most states were friendly. Texas was the only state I was in that was downright hostile. I was repeatedly pulled over and harassed by the police. I was harassed by the clerks at interstate gas stations for using the washroom before I purchased. The picnic grounds were barren and hostile, without washroom facilities. Laredo, and all the other towns I was in, were unfriendly. Most of the state seemed to be barren semi-desert.
I conveyed some of this to Peter and suggested maybe his son would be better off going to Princeton as previously planned, than going to grad school in a hostile racist unfriendly state like Texas. I pointed out, and this is where I think i offended him, that as his son was half Turkish, Kimiz was born in Turkey, Texans were likely to be hostile and racist towards him. For me the whole atmosphere in Texas was racist, and I suggested his son might be better off without that experience.
Peter wrote back greatly offended and furious. He said I didn’t know what I was talking about, He had worked and been in more states than anybody, and he listed them.
I apologized repeatedly, but after that he wrote to me in very cursory emails.. He had said my offense was “nothing forget it,” but then he never got over it, and did not write to me any more.
I did not hear from Peter again till I posted on Facebook one weekend in August 2016 I was losing my sight in one eye and I was panicking. i was in Nicaragua, it was a weekend, no doctors were available. If it was the retinal detachment I thought it was it had to be dealt with immediately. But this could not be done.