A Missed Opportunity

It was 15 years ago that I missed an opportunity that will never come again. My son, Neel, is an archeologist. For several summers he had led a team from Harvard and Holy Cross who were uncovering an ancient city in Turkey. On this particular summer he was going alone to seek out other sites. The GPS was in its beginning stages. This, and his training in seeing the formation of certain landscapes which indicated something was buried underneath, was his agenda. My oldest granddaughter, Sarah-Neel, was 10 years old and begged to go with him. Neel’s wife Candace would stay at home with their 3year old daughter. Neel decided he could take Sarah-Neel and invited me to come along. I was very excited about this possibility, not just for the adventure, but also spending time with my granddaughter at this stage of her life.

Everything was shaping up. I had my passport and had taken the required shots. Two weeks before we were to leave I was in the attic looking for appropriate clothes. It was hot and stuffy so I decided to bring all the clothes downstairs. With both arms full of clothes I made the fateful decision to descend by walking down the pull-up step to the attic—backwards.

On the first step I slipped. The next thing I knew I was lying at the bottom of the stairs with my clothes scattered all around me and excruciating pain in my right arm. Somehow I crept to the phone, called David and blacked out.

At the Emergency Room I was told I had not just broken my arm but fractured and shattered it. The doctor would try to put the arm together with a steel plate.

After the operation and a few days rest, my arm was put in a hard cast and I thought I could still make the trip. However my doctor strongly advised against it and I knew that with the difficult agenda we were planning I would need to pull my own weight, not be an added burden.

Neel and Sarah-Neel left without me. It was soon after this, that the Turkish government forbid Americans from further digs, closed the sites and confiscated all items uncovered.

Science also made wonderful advances which changed the way archeologists now operate. Through advanced photography they can now discover, not only where hidden cities once stood, but can explore what is underneath these cities without destroying layers by excavation. Neel now explores by computer.

The trip had an influence on Sarah-Neel’s life. She is now a student at UCLA studying ancient Turkish Art. This summer she is in Istanbul gathering material for her Doctoral thesis.

And I missed an opportunity that will never come again.