Category Archives: Family

Leaving today…

We are finally heading out to rejoin my husband and son in England today. My oldest son and daughter have been mooning around the house for more than a week missing their brother. My son, in particular, has surprised me by the depths of his melancholy. He keeps asking to see my phone so he can look at the photos of his brother my husband sent by text. I am reminded of when my oldest sister left for college. All that first year my mother would stare out the window as she washed the dishes, sighing mournfully with large tears trickling down her face.

“Is he missing me as much as I’m missing him?” he broods as he stares at the photos. Just in case, the other day he handed back my phone and said, “Here, take a picture of me to send to him.”

On Saturday after gazing wistfully once again at the photos we’d received so far, he started laboriously pecking away at the minuscule keyboard.

I’ve learned my lesson. Our time together is too short. We will never travel separately again, if we can help it.

And now, at long last, we are on our way! I’m looking forward to having the time to write at reasonable hours while we are away. (I winced a little when I realized the photo would reveal the embarrassing hours I tend to keep). I hope I’ll be able to send dispatches from England and Scotland. Until then, I hope every single day is wonderful!

The Caterpillar

Last Friday morning I was in a big fat rush. It was going to be a busier day than usual at work. I woke up stressed out about all the documents I needed to crank out, the emails I had to answer, and the presentation I was going to give that still needed fine-tuning. I wanted to get the kids to our neighbor’s house early so I could get to work.

To my frustration, instead of letting me drive them there, the children begged to be allowed to walk. I didn’t have the heart to say no, but I warned them that they would need to hurry. I drove the short distance myself, passing them as they walked. I parked the car at our neighbor’s house and waited for them. While I stood there waiting, acorns turned into mighty oaks, mountains eroded into plains, and species evolved.

I was reminded of my son’s first tee-ball experience. During one of his games I was standing behind the fence right behind his two coaches. Whenever it was time for the two teams to switch sides, they would tuck their chaw into one cheek with their tongues so they could yell out, “HUSTLE, BOYS! COME ON! HUSTLE! HUSTLE! HUSTLE!” as they stood there with their arms crossed over their beer bellies. All the little four year olds would run across the field as fast as their little legs could carry them. My son would lope along at a gentle pace a few yards behind the pack. At one point, one of the coaches turned to the other with a look of disgust and spat, “That boy don’t know the meaning of hustle.”

As I waited by the car in front of our neighbor’s house I could see my children slowly ambling along the road and thought, “Come on kids, hustle, hustle, hustle!” As if in perverse response to my mental plea, I saw them slow down instead, and then drop to the ground to inspect something.

“Come here, Mom! You have to take a picture of this!” my son called to me.

For a second I thought about scolding them and reminding them that I was in a hurry. For some reason, (OK, probably because my son so adroitly played to my photo obsession), I grabbed my camera and walked back to where they were.

To be honest, I was kind of disappointed at first when I realized they were just looking at a caterpillar. But they were both so completely entranced that I crouched down to look at it myself. I could see their point. The translucent lime green skin! The perfectly segmented body! Those curious speckles!

The caterpillar was a cosmic gift. For a moment, the mere fact of its existence arrested time, that most precious commodity of all, and we were wonderstruck. Oh, to always have the open heart and reverent eyes of a child…to slow down enough to see the abundant miracles around us and to know instinctively that appreciation of these wonders must always take precedence over lesser concerns.

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This is my mother…

When we were in Arlington this weekend, I noticed my mother was having more trouble than usual getting into the car. Upon closer inspection I realized she had a bruise on her chin.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oh, well…I fell the other day,” she said reluctantly.

“WHAT?!” I gasped in horror.

“I fell outside on the stairs that go to the basement and I couldn’t get up.”

The old “Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” commercial immediately came to mind.

“Oh no! What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, since I couldn’t get up, I just stayed there on the ground for awhile.” My heart was breaking into a million splintery shards as I pictured my elderly mother face planting on the cold hard ground.

She started to grin and continued, “And then I noticed there were some weeds right where I’d fallen. So, since I couldn’t do anything else, I started pulling out the weeds. After a little while I could get up again.”

Yep. That’s my mother.

Mom gets her banged up leg bandaged.

My sister bandages my mom’s banged up leg.

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The Golden Screw

I’ve been at the hospital with my daughter for a couple days. She suddenly fell ill on Saturday while we were visiting with our family in Arlington. She has an as-of-yet unidentified infection, which is causing her to have a fever and headache. I’m hoping she’ll be discharged on Monday. I’m really hoping that she’ll be fully recovered by Friday, when she, her brother and I are supposed to fly to England to reunite with the rest of our family, who flew there ahead of us last Wednesday.

Being in the ER and at the hospital brings back so many memories…Last night when her gurney was wheeled into the room where they do chest x-rays, I had to laugh a little despite the situation.

“Do you remember the last time you were in this room?” I asked my daughter. She looked at me blankly.

“Remember when you swallowed the ‘golden screw’?” I asked.

She glared resentfully at the unwelcome reminder. (Kind of like this):

A few years ago, she came to me with a scared, guilty look on her face. She informed me that she had accidentally swallowed “a golden screw.” After this initial confession, her gut survival instincts kicked in. She worked out a story and she tenaciously stuck to it as if she’d been schooled by the US Special Ops on how to withstand brutal interrogation tactics. That day, scores of doctors, nurses, technicians, and family members asked her variations of the same, obvious question: “Why did you swallow the screw?” At first she was patient with her interrogators. She responded in a brisk, unapologetic, business-like tone: “It was an accident.”

People would insist on pressing her for a little more information, “But how did the screw get in your mouth?” or “Why was the screw in your mouth?” The girl never wavered from her version of the events. “It was an accident” was all anyone ever got from her, though by the end of the day her patience was wearing thin. She could no longer hide her exasperation with the relentless repetition of a question she had already answered so clearly and conclusively. When asked the same irritating question, her little shoulders would heave with an exaggerated sigh. She would reply for the umpteenth time, “IT. WAS. AN. ACCIDENT!” Although she didn’t actually tack on the word, “Dumbass!” you could tell that was exactly what she was thinking.

We have swallowed a golden screw. It’s been a rough couple of days, but there have been some sweet moments. I have been filled with gratitude for so many things and for so many people. When we arrived in Charlottesville at 9 pm on Saturday, my son urged me to take his sister straight to the ER. He reassured me that he would take care of our dogs and that he would be OK, even if it turned out that he would be left on his own if she were admitted. I was so proud of him. The ER attending happened to be his Sunday School teacher. He offered to swing by our house to check on him on his way back home when his shift ended at 1 am. In the morning our fairy godmother neighbor swooped in to bring Nicholas over to her house and took care of him until another friend came by to take him swimming and then back to their house so he wouldn’t have to spend another night alone. Other friends and family members have generously offered their help. At the hospital we have gratefully appreciated the kind ministrations of nurses, whom I wholeheartedly worship as higher beings.

Although the circumstances are lousy, it’s been good to have this time with my girl too. After she endured the traumatic experience of getting her IV put in, she said through her tears: “I feel so sorry for really little kids who have to get IVs.”

“You’ve been one of those little kids, too,” I pointed out.

With all the weight and experience of her seven years my daughter replied, “Yeah, but I’m not little anymore.”

Today we watched the men’s Wimbledon final. The most entertaining part of the game for me was listening to Tatiana’s expert running commentary. She reeled off stats and filled me in on the human interest backstories like a pro. She conked out from exhaustion before the game ended. When she woke up again we turned the television back on to see that Andy Murray had won the Wimbledon title. We cheered for Murray and expressed our sympathy for his opponent. I made her giggle when I said, “Oh look at that. Poor Djokovic only gets 1.2 million.” We’ve commiserated over the lousy hospital food. We’ve had chit chats about this and that. And tonight I sang her to sleep with one of our favorite old lullabies, Loch Lomond, in honor of Murray and our upcoming trip to Scotland.

Independence Day

Today Colin and Teddy land in England, the country whose yoke of oppression we shrugged off 237 years ago – the very event we celebrate today! Teddy is celebrating independence of his own kind. Colin will drop him off at his parents’ house in England and will move on to Edinburgh, where he will be singing with his early music chorale group, Zephyrus. For the first time ever, Teddy will be without anyone else in his immediate family for an entire week. That’s a lot of independence…Maybe even a little too much independence for my taste. I decided I would feel better about the whole situation if I wrote up my own Declaration of Independence for him to sign before he left:

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They’re off!

There they go!

My husband and son are flying across the ocean to England tomorrow morning. I’ll take the other two kids and we’ll all meet up in a little over a week. It’s 10 pm and we’re all preparing in our own little ways. Colin is blithely pecking away at his computer without a care in the world. Tomorrow morning he’ll toss a few clothes into a suitcase. Meanwhile, I’m wringing my hands and will be up until 3 am doing a million loads of laundry as I try to get my son packed. His siblings have been fretting all week about missing their “middlest” brother, and are camping out on his bedroom floor tonight to maximize their time together…

Weekend Snapshots 6

Around his thirteenth birthday a few months ago, my son was waxing expansively about how it would be less than three years before he would get his learner’s permit to drive. It’s true that somewhere, somehow, some crackpot, who was smoking weed or was in some other way mentally impaired at the time, deemed fifteen and a half the age at which children could get their learner’s permit to drive in the state of Virginia. Of course, I hastened to disabuse my son of the notion that he would be getting his license at that age.

In as neutral a voice as I could muster I said, “It’s not just about how old you are. We would have to see that you were really ready for the responsibility of driving. We’d want to make sure that you were mature enough to handle that responsibility.”

This silenced him for a few moments. I could see that he was performing some mental calculations before coming to an obvious, but unpleasant conclusion. Finally, he erupted, “If T (his eight year old sister) is driving me around when she’s fifteen and a half, I’m going to be really, really mad!”

It may be years before he ever gets behind the wheel of a real car, but this weekend we went Go-Karting at Windy Hills Sports Complex in Richmond, Virginia for his little brother’s belated birthday celebration and we all did some driving:

Clearly, my daughter was unimpressed with her mother’s driving:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!
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Dad’s Books

My dad has been losing his vision to diabetic retinopathy. He can no longer drive. He misjudges distances and he sometimes stumbles. Worst of all: his ability to read has been seriously compromised. He has consulted with specialists on two different continents. He’s had laser treatments and injections. He has bought pair after pair of new glasses in the hopes of improving his vision enough to be able to read again with ease. He has tried reading on the Kindle and the iPad without success. Lately, he has decided he will no longer seek available treatments.* Still, every morning he spends a couple hours hunched over his beloved books with a powerful magnifying glass, laboriously trying to make out the letters, which stubbornly, traitorously remain blurry.

My dad has suffered terrible losses in his life. His father died when he was just a child. He lost siblings to the privations imposed by war and invasions. He has always lived modestly, never indulging himself in anything other than the books that are his treasure. He would think nothing of giving away cars, furniture, clothing, before each of our many moves, but his ever growing collection of books always went with us across continents and oceans. Despite my mother’s vociferous objections, he would not be parted with these. When we finally settled down in Virginia, he built his own bookshelves and filled them with his cherished volumes of Heidegger, Machiavelli, and Kant. He lovingly fashioned suede covers to rebind his most cherished books that were literally read to pieces.

My husband, a scholar who appreciates the same kind of literature, was perusing my father’s bookshelf one day when he suddenly burst out laughing. He had spotted my dad’s copy of Goats and Goatkeeping interspersed between two volumes of philosophy. On the bottom shelf was a space devoted to the inevitable porn stash every dad has hidden away somewhere. In my dad’s case, his porn consisted of many, many, well-thumbed issues of Dog World magazine. What can I say? His interests are wide-ranging.

When my parents moved back to Virginia after many years of living in Korea, they took stock of their belongings. Before they had left for Korea, they had a shed built in their backyard just to house my dad’s books. They never expected to be away for as long as they were. By the time they returned, the books had been languishing in the shed for over a dozen years. Some did not fare well. Mice had nibbled the pages of some. Others had suffered from water damage. I’m sure it broke my dad’s heart to discard these books. What he did with the ones that survived broke our hearts. To our shock and horror, he boxed up the vast majority of the books that he had collected over a lifetime and shipped them to the university in Korea where he had been working all those years, as a donation to the library.

My siblings and I had grown up with these books as the only constant part of our landscape. Many of them predated our own existence. To us, it was as if my dad was sending bits of himself away. It seemed like a surrender to old age and to his loss of vision, it seemed like a farewell to his life of scholarship. We said nothing to my father, but amongst ourselves, we mourned for all of these losses.

Now I realize that we needn’t have worried. Lately, every time I go to Arlington to visit my parents, my dad presses a piece of paper into my hands upon which he has scrawled in his illegible handwriting a list of the books he wants me to hunt down for him. Little by little he is replacing the books he regrets having shipped to Korea, the books that had to be discarded, and the books that are falling apart from overuse.

“And please try to find them in hardback so they’ll last longer,” my 78 year old father says in his quiet, gentle voice.

“Sure, Dad,” I say. As I hunt online for Summa Contra Gentiles by Saint Thomas Aquinas or Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, I am filled with peace and joy.

*Just this month I was excited to read about a study that’s been going on at the University of Virginia. Researchers are investigating the promising use of stem cells to treat and perhaps even reverse the effects of diabetic retinopathy and are getting close to the clinical trial phase of their study.

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Weekend Snapshots 5

We’ve had many family celebrations here over the years…

Peking GourmetThis unprepossessing restaurant in a sightly shabby strip mall in Falls Church, Virginia is a D.C. institution. The walls of Peking Gourmet Inn are covered with framed, signed photos of illustrious guests such as presidents, senators, and generals. The restaurant’s reputation rests on its Peking duck, brought whole to the table, expertly carved, and served in pancakes with scallions, cucumbers, and hoisin sauce. This weekend we noticed that one V.I.P. had been bumped from the most prominent spot on the wall in the lobby area for a far more important personage:

PSYYup. Psy.

Our family gathered there this Saturday for the first birthday celebration of my cousin’s daughter:

For the doljabi ceremony, she did a wardrobe change into the traditional hanbok first worn by her aunt and then by her cousin for their first birthday celebrations:

After lengthy deliberation…

…she finally decided upon:

The pen!

It was a lovely occasion:

Happy Birthday!

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Happy Birthday to my middlest!

My sweet, soft-spoken, steady, steamed dumpling, “middlest” child is 11 today!

In the background you’ll hear recordings I made of him singing when he was a toddler (as well as quite a few squawks from his far more clamorous siblings)…