Category Archives: Family

Speaking of jeans…

Yesterday’s post was inspired by my daughter. This is her wearing her first pair of jeans. It was the first and last pair of jeans she would wear for the next eight years of her life:

Nobody puts baby in the corner

When she got old enough to express her own clothing preferences, she became a strictly yoga pants kind of girl. Last weekend when we were out and about getting some things for my oldest son, (who outgrows his clothes approximately every two weeks), she told me she wanted to give jeans another try. Here she is modeling her second pair of jeans:

Sassy, no?

Happy Weekend, Everyone!

Wrangler

When we were children and my parents still hadn’t been in America very long, there were certain cultural short circuits that had to be sorted out. Some customs of the country were so foreign as to seem outlandish to my parents. Sleepovers, for example, made no sense at all to them. When we’d ask if we could spend the night at a friend’s house their faces would register astonishment. They would ask, “Why would you do that? What’s wrong with your own bed at home?” Trick or Treating was another concept they found bizarre. They were mortified by the idea that their children would dress up in costumes to go begging door to door for candy.  And then there was the issue of  jeans. For many years this particular article of clothing did not exist in our wardrobes, because my parents insisted that it would be disrespectful to our teachers to wear jeans to school.

They finally realized that the dress code was different in the States, when they had their first parent teacher conference with my little brother Teddy’s kindergarten teacher. Teddy’s teacher had a long shaggy beard, he often tucked a daisy into his grey mane behind his ear, and he always wore a pair of denim overalls to school. Faced with this incontrovertible evidence, my parents had to concede that wearing jeans to school would be acceptable. It still wasn’t smooth sailing, by any means. My mom decided that rather than buying jeans, she would make them for us. She threw herself wholeheartedly into the project. She even used red thread along the seams and to stitch artful, free-form designs on the back pockets. To give you an idea of how successful we thought this particular DIY experiment was, we would choose to wear our velvet upholstery pantsuit ensembles rather than the homemade jeans.

One day the inconceivable happened. This man, my father, aka the Easter Island Head:

Dad

…emerged from his room wearing a pair of jeans. For a moment the earth stood still. We all stared, blinking, dumbfounded, our mouths agape. And then my sister broke the silence when she started singing under her breath, “Here comes Wrangler. He’s one tough customer. He knows what he likes, when he sees it.”

Telephone Hang-ups

I could talk to someone face to face for hours, but talking on the phone with that same person would fill me with crippling anxiety.  I rarely answer the phone. When I do, I have to take a deep breath before picking up and pretend I’m someone else to get through the experience. This might have to do with the fact that I’ve been burned so many times over the phone.

Just last week I got tricked into answering the phone, because the number on the caller ID was so similar to my sister’s cell phone number. As soon as I answered, I realized I’d made a mistake. When I heard the person on the other end ask for Dr. Colin X, I knew it was our graduate school making yet another one of their endless fundraising appeals. In my politest voice I said, “I’m sorry, he’s not here right now. May I take…” Before I could complete the sentence, I heard a click and then the hang up tone on the other end!

This is not the first, or even the second time I’ve been hung up on by someone who called ME in the first place. On one occasion, a complete stranger called me up when I was a grad student in New York City. I picked up the phone and he introduced himself and launched into his life story. Entirely unprompted, he described the color of his eyes and hair and gave me his body measurements. He told me he was trying to break into modeling. He had just moved to New York from California and he was feeling lonely and wanted to meet people. I was fascinated by this bizarre modus operandi.

“So…you’re trying to meet people by calling random numbers in the phone book?” I asked.

“Uh-huh!” he replied with no hesitation or embarrassment at all.

I thought I was being kind and doing him a favor by suggesting that he try one of those chat lines  that were always being advertised in the Village Voice. He got really huffy, told me I was rude, and hung up on me.

On another occasion, a salesman called and performed the usual preemptive maneuver of speaking in whole paragraphs, thereby preventing me from saying “I’m sorry, I’m not interested” or “Please, stop, I’d rather drive a fork through my temple than buy aluminum siding from you.” I guess what normal people do is to just hang up. I, on the other hand, listened to the whole song and dance as an act of charity. When he finally came up for air and said “So let’s go ahead and schedule your free estimate,” I was able to say at last, “Oh, thank you so much for taking the time to let me know about your fascinating product, but I really don’t need any aluminum siding right now.” At this juncture, I was thinking that if not the Nobel Peace Prize, well then some kind of humanitarian award was definitely coming my way. After all, I had just endured the longest, most tedious ten minutes of my life and had very sweetly refrained from slamming the phone in the poor schlub’s ear. Imagine my surprise, when he became enraged and screamed, “Well then why did you let me go on talking for so long?” And yes, he slammed the phone in my ear.

From now on, I’m going to channel my mother, who always deals with unwelcome solicitations with real panache. Although English is her second language, my mother speaks the language beautifully. When she picks up the phone and suddenly switches into broken English, we know there’s a telemarketer on the other end. “Sorry. Sorry. No speak English,” she says with an exaggerated accent. She even waves her hand back and forth as if they could somehow see this gesture. She always manages to hang up the phone on her terms and with a giant smirk on her face. What I really appreciate is how she’s able to turn these situations into a sort of performance art. Once, some very persistent Jehovah’s Witnesses came knocking on our door. No sooner had they plied my mother with free issues of the Watchtower, than she ran to get her own Bible. “Let me tell you what I believe!” she began, waving the book joyfully, wildly in their faces as she started spouting an impromptu sermon. In no time at all, they were propelling themselves away as fast as their legs could carry them, stealing fearful glances over their shoulders as they ran.

English as a Second Language

I had a conversation with my son this weekend and it was as if he were talking in a foreign language.

While I could more or less understand the individual words, I couldn’t make sense of what he was saying at all. It got me thinking about how confusing it must have sometimes been for my parents, for whom English is a second language, when they talked with us.

My mother began studying English when she knew she would be joining my father, who had come to America to embark on the first of many degrees. She still recalls the stilted and unnatural intonation of the recordings she would listen to over and over again: “I am a boy. I am a girl.” She never stopped working on improving her English. In later years, she always had an old paperback copy of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style stashed in her purse to study whenever she had a free moment. She read it so many times, it eventually had to be held together with a rubber band. The spareness of her Strunk and White-influenced English was enriched by the ornate language of the 19th century novels she also loved to read. From reading Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters, for example, she talks about “countenances” rather than “faces.” But it’s her adoption of more modern colloquial expressions that always takes us by surprise. I was once driving her somewhere when she discovered that she had been sitting on my sunglasses.

“Oh! I was wondering what was poking my butt!” she said.

I started cackling.

“What?” she said with a grin, “Should I have said, ‘I was wondering what was pricking my ass?!'”

After all his long years of study and the countless hours he’s spent poring over philsophical tomes, my dad lightly bandies about words like hermeneutics and teleological with the Korean accent he’s never lost. As children, our own native English skills would be called into service from time to time to edit articles he’d written. I still die a thousand deaths whenever I think of the time I changed all his “Platonics” into “Platoics” in one of his articles. Callow adolescent that I was, what did I know of philosophy? I hadn’t yet gained the wisdom to know that I knew nothing. Native speaker that I am, I will never know the meanings of half the words that are part of my dad’s lexicon.

My dad’s English is also nuanced with phrases snatched from more popular sources, and especially from the television shows that he sometimes watched with us when we were children. His discourse is peppered with phrases like “Aw, shooks.” Thanks to some old cartoon, he says “meeses” instead of “mice.” When my incessant  prattling got too unbearable, he’d interrupt me midstream, waggle his thumb and say like some hoodlum in an old gangster movie, “Hey. Get lost, will ya?” or sometimes just, “Shaddup, will ya?”

The substandard language his own children used also added to the linguistic confusion. I’m ashamed to admit that my brother and I went through a regrettable phase when we used to call each other “booger.” My dad bore it for as long as he could, and then one day he pulled us aside. “Adrienne, Teddy,” he said gravely, “I don’t want you to use that word anymore.” He heroically soldiered on, though it was clear that each word he uttered was causing him pain, “I know you don’t realize it, but it has sexual connotations.” Teddy and I were mystified and also a little horrified as we tried to imagine what kind of monstrous sexual perversion could take place via the nostril. It was only years later that we learned the word he had thought we were saying…bugger.

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Rick Riordan, you’ve created a monster!

My daughter got into the Rick Riordan Percy Jackson series in a big way. She has blazed her way through every hefty volume in record time. She drags them everywhere she goes, reading and re-reading them over and over again until they are literally falling apart at the seams.

After a hard-fought campaign of constant hectoring and pestering on her part, I got Mark of Athena for her last year. At the back of the book she saw that House of Hades, the next book in the series, would be coming out on October 8, 2013. As you can imagine, she’s been pining for that book all year long. She started the countdown back in August. In September she slung me over her shoulder and hauled me to the bookstore so that I could pre-order the book for her. At the customer service desk I asked if it would arrive on the 8th, or be mailed out on the 8th. The saleswoman assured us that the book would be mailed out so that it would arrive at our house on Tuesday, the 8th. She tortured me every single day that she waited for that book to arrive. Only twenty-seven more days until the 8th! Only sixteen more days until the 8th! I wish Tuesday would get here already! Only 53.273 hours until it comes!

I don’t know how the girl made it through the day at school. She ran to check the mailbox as soon as she got off the bus. NO BOOK! She concluded that it would be mailed out by UPS and would therefore be delivered to our doorstep later that afternoon. For the rest of the day she kept opening the front door to see if the mail carrier had left a package on our doorstep. As the evening wore on, I seriously thought about driving to the store to buy another copy just to put the poor girl out of her misery. Sure enough, when she had at last resigned herself to the fact that the book would not be arriving, I received an email notification that it had only just shipped.

The long-awaited book finally arrived on Friday. We all said our good-byes to her knowing full well that she would not be entertaining any further meaningless chitchat from us for as long as it took to read her book, and she disappeared into the bowels of Hades.

When she finally resurfaced on Tuesday, having finished the 583 page book, we all exhaled a collective sigh of relief…

And then she showed us this:

Coming Fall 2014: The Blood of Olympus, The Heroes of Olympus Book Five

Thanks. Thanks a lot, Rick Riordan. You’re killing us here.

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Three and a half poems for Autumn

October

by Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
To-morrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
To-morrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow,
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know;
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away;
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost –
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

The Wild Swans at Coole

by W.B. Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

That time of year thou mayst in me behold (Sonnet 73)

by William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

It’s rather difficult to find an autumn poem that’s not tinged with melancholy. Falling leaves and cooling temperatures seem to naturally elicit somber meditations on the inexorable march of time, ever closer to death.

Today on our walk around the lake in our neighborhood, it was these more serene lines from William Shakespeare’s As You Like It that came to my mind:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

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Best weekend ever

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby

From “April Rain Song,” by Langston Hughes

It’s been cold and grey and wet for three days straight, but I still maintain that it was a beautiful weekend. Because of the rain, my daughter’s soccer practice on Friday was canceled, her game on Saturday was canceled, and my son’s soccer tournament that had been scheduled for Saturday AND Sunday in Richmond was CANCELED! Each text or email announcing the cancellation of these events sent me into a paroxysm of unseemly jubilation. Theoretically speaking, (if I happened to be the kind of person to engage in embarrassing self-revelation), it’s possible that there may have been some fist-pumping, jiggety-jigging in place, and squeals of delight.

What fabulous things did I do with all of that time that was handed to me like a precious gift on a silver platter? We went to the grocery store to buy the pumpkin my oldest son needed for a school project. We went to the shoe store to buy much-needed new sneakers for the younger two. We went to the music store to get my daughter’s violin bow repaired. We went to the pet store to buy the only food that doesn’t make the dogs puke foamy yellow bile all over the carpets. (Always the carpets, never – God forbid – on the far easier to clean tile or hardwood). We took my daughter to get her hair cut. We went to Jiffy Lube. (Every 3,000 miles? More like every 10,000+ miles…). I got caught up on laundry, etc. etc. And yes, a million times YES! It was really and truly:  fabulous.

I didn’t take many photos this weekend, but I did record a couple snapshots in my mind to share with you. They are somewhat related insofar as they both involve food and the sweet, innocent thoughtfulness of children.

On Friday, the Helping Hands group I co-lead met for our first session of the year. This fall, our third and fourth grade kids are organizing a school-wide food drive for the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank. A friend who works at the bank came to talk to us about the problem of hunger in our own community. We discussed how hunger makes people crabby and makes it difficult to concentrate and to work or study. The most powerful moment of the talk came when she told us that the bank serves 26,000 people a month. To give us an idea of how many people that is, she had us visualize a line of people starting from downtown Charlottesville stretching all the way up Route 29 for 8 miles to the airport. This startling image made a big impression on us all. My friend was about to leave after her presentation when one of our students ran up to her and handed her a fistful of coins, all the money she had in her pocket, as a gift to the food bank. It was a lovely moment.

And then there was this moment that revealed to me that my daughter had also absorbed the message about the problem of hunger. On Sunday my husband was feeling a little grumpy and I asked my daughter what we should do to cheer him up. She suggested earnestly: “Maybe we could put a hunk of Jarlsburg (his favorite kind of cheese) under his pillow!”

Finally, I leave you with one actual snapshot from this weekend. This was taken during a brief break on Saturday, when instead of playing/watching soccer, we were checking items off our my list of errands at breakneck speed. First, observe the expressions on the faces of my husband and children. Now look very closely at my reflection in the window. Can you see the maniacal grin pasted on my face?

“What the heck is she so happy about?”

See? Best weekend ever!

Happy, Pt. 2

I am descended from a long line of forbears who, well, forbore. My maternal grandfather survived a massacre of Christians that wiped out three generations of his family in one day. During the Japanese occupation, he was repeatedly arrested and tortured. In his old age, long after he had incontestably earned the right to snooze all day long in a comfy armchair with his mouth hanging open, he would rise before dawn every single day to scale a mountain. He would scramble back down that mountain, plunge himself into a bath with large blocks of ice floating in it, and then head off to carry on the business of running a university.

Mom’s family

My maternal grandmother was also a survivor of war, occupation, and their attendant horrors and privations. She came through the experience as a formidable warrior. She made no secret of her reverence for the Spartan civilization. You know, those militaristic people who would leave sickly infants to die of exposure on the sides of mountains and who would starve and literally whip the small children who passed muster into shape to toughen them up to be soldiers? Yes, those were her kind of people.

Dad’s mother and four brothers who survived to adulthood

My paternal grandfather died young, leaving my grandmother to struggle for survival. Some of her children succumbed to disease and malnutrition. It’s entirely understandable then, that having passed through the crucible of unimaginable hardships, my dad would emerge on the other side to preach the gospel of “Where in the Bible does it say you have to be happy?” on Christmas Eve.

Less comprehensible is how I turned out, given my genetic inheritance. The only explanation I can think of is that the gene for stoicism must have skipped a generation. If you’ve been reading along, you already know that the proximity of a spider is enough to destroy my happiness, (though in my defense, it was a shockingly big, stripy, furry one). My latest tragedy is that the internet has been erratic and agonizingly slow at my house. I’m telling you, it’s been making me gnash my teeth in despair. I can’t pretend to be like my steely ancestors. Me? I yearn for happiness like a lovelorn adolescent. I stalk it like a craven addict looking for her next hit. When I find it, I greedily clutch it to my chest and swat away anyone or anything that tries to snatch it out of my white-knuckled fists.

Just as it doesn’t take much to destroy my happiness, it doesn’t take much to make me happy either. For me, it can sometimes be merely the successful avoidance of discomfort. For example, every time I stay home while the rest of my family goes hiking or camping=pure bliss! (Pretend I’m homeless by sleeping in a tent on the cold hard ground with bugs and no running water or AC when I could be in lounging in the comfort of my own bed watching trashy reality TV? Puh-leeze! That would be messed up)! Sometimes I find happiness in those sublime everyday moments of grace, such as when I finally extract a piece of corn that’s been stuck in my teeth forever, or when I experience the satisfaction of  peeling away a really long strip of dead skin from my heel. (What? Don’t even try to tell me that doesn’t make you happy, too)!

And even though my claims on happiness are really quite modest, every once in a while, it will flip me the bird and flounce off like a faithless strumpet. I’m left feeling bereft and hopeless…It’s in those dark moments, that I have to exert a little more effort to find a way to drag happiness back into my corner. And here, at long last, is where I’m going with this long and meandering, multi-part post…What are your strategies for finding happiness? I’ll tell you mine, if you tell me yours. More on this tomorrow.

Happy, Pt. 1

For many years my dad was the minister of a Korean congregation that was part of a much larger American church in Northern Virginia. Listening to my dad, (a.k.a. The Easter Island Head), give a sermon was always something of a revelation. Six days out of seven, he was a soft-spoken man of very few words. Behind the pulpit, however, he would transform into someone we barely recognized. His voice would thunder, swoop, and dive. He would gesticulate, he would lean forward, he would hiss. Even his silences were mesmerizing. My siblings and I could only understand a few words of Korean here and there, but such was his oratorical prowess that even we would be swept up in the dramatic ebb and flow of his sermon along with his enthralled congregation of native speakers.

One Christmas Eve he was asked to preach to the American congregation. The large sanctuary was overflowing with families dressed in their festive Sunday best. Their eyes shone in the candlelight and their cheeks were rosy as they squeezed into pews draped with ropes of fragrant fir boughs. There was a palpable sense of joyful anticipation as the congregation settled in to hear the familiar and well-loved Nativity story. As for me and my siblings, we were glad that we would at last have the opportunity to understand every word of our father’s sermon!

My dad has always been an iconoclast. Never was this more obvious than on that Christmas Eve, when he eschewed the Bible passages one might reasonably expect to hear on such an occasion for something far more unconventional…No glad tidings of great joy, no babe lying in a manger, no lion lying down with a lamb for my father. Instead, he chose the passage from the book of Revelations that talks about the breaking of the seven seals and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. You know, the one with flaming swords, earthquakes, cataclysms, blood and slaughter? In short: all the ingredients for a heartwarming and uplifting Christmas Eve service! One memorable line in particular will forever be etched into the very marrow of our bones. We invoke it at suitable moments to this day. At the climax of my father’s sermon, we heard in the thunderous intonation we knew so well from his Korean services: “Where in the Bible does it say you have to be happy?!“

Look who’s come back to wreck our home life and destroy our happiness.

As I was leaving for work this morning I found my son cowering in a corner of the garage. He was whimpering in sheer terror because of this:

GAAAAAAAAAHHHH!

Yes. This three inch monstrosity was ever so casually hanging out in my garage this morning, terrorizing my child and laying waste to the sweet innocence of his childhood.

THE HELL?!

I guess I didn’t make it perfectly clear that he’s not welcome around here when I hurled him into the woods shrieking profanities in the dark night the last time he showed up in our lives. Before we could chase him out of the garage he scuttled under the car and disappeared. Don’t think I didn’t try to run over him as I backed out of the garage. Unfortunately, he’d already taken cover in a corner somewhere. There he sits lurking, just waiting for the opportunity to come back into the house. So I guess I won’t be sleeping ever again.