ECG

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ECG

The day is only halfway done, and
The man is hungry and tired and worried.
It took two hours to drive through the snow to get to work today
The beltway – a junkyard littered with cars and ablaze with screaming sirens.
He moves the wand against the child’s skin, trying to capture her heartbeat on the screen.
In this dark, windowless room, there’s no telling if it’s still snowing out there.
God, he thinks, it’s going to take forever to get back home tonight
To an empty apartment that’s too cold and
Yesterday’s congealed takeout, and

Halfway through this appointment,
The little girl is thirsty and tired and bored
The man squeezes warm gel onto her chest and tells her
She might feel some pressure, and then utters not a single word more.
Staring at the screen, he glides and presses the wand around the electrodes on her skin.
The black and white images look like dancing ghosts, she thinks
Then wonders what she’ll order at the café downstairs
Where her mother has promised to buy her a drink
Before the next appointment.

In a few hours they can head back home
For now – the room is dark and quiet, but for the tapping of keys
The man freezes images of a beating heart that exists somehow on the screen
And also inside this child with solemn eyes and black curls falling on her perfect cheek
The mother gazes back and forth from the flickering ghosts on the screen to the child before her
The veil has been torn and just for a moment she peers into the Holy of Holies
And is witness to the sacred mystery that animates each blink, each breath
She should have fallen on her knees in wonder, she thinks to herself
All through the night, on the long journey home.

I spent the first two days of this week taking my daughter from one medical appointment to another for her routine biannual checkups. (She is absolutely fine)! I’ve always been amazed by equipment such as x-rays and ultrasounds that can reveal hidden mysteries inside the human body. My daughter had an ECG for the first time, and it struck me as miraculous to be able to see inside of her beating heart. It seemed absurd that something so ineffably wondrous could be happening in a banal hospital room, and that this miracle could be translated into a series of measurable sine waves.

The Other New Year’s Tradition…

We drove up to Arlington on New Year’s Day. Like all good Koreans do, we came to pay our respects to our elders. We came to have New Year’s Soup. We came to start the year off right, by spending the first day of 2015 with the people we love most in the world. Most importantly, we came to play the annual, cut-throat, no-holds-barred, winner-take-all, fight-to-the-death Monopoly tournament.

This year’s winner, and our very first two-time champion, has made a career of shrewdly buying up the slums of Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues and studding them with a lavish and deadly combination of houses and hotels. With this winning strategy, he once again systematically and ruthlessly picked off his sister-in-law, wife, and children one by one to win the highly coveted trophy:

Slumdog Millionaire
Make it rain, baby!

New Years Past and Present

For years we rang in the New Year with friends of ours who have daughters close in age to our boys…Our kids have grown up with each other. Every year we would have a sleepover so that the kids could hang out until their bed time, and the parents could play after the little ones went to sleep…

2003
2005
2006

Although the two-year-old was busy taking important phone calls, we still managed to include her in the annual New Year’s photo.

We were finally able to prise her away from the phone to have some cake…

2007

For one reason or other, this cherished tradition fell by the wayside. We were delighted to be able to have our friends over to celebrate the New Year together again this year.

We prepared with a thorough cleaning – inside and out!

My husband made his famous lasagna…

and we ordered a galette des rois from MarieBette, the new French bakery in Charlottesville. Délicieuse!

Look what I found!

I got to wear the crown!

Crackers…

…and games until it was time for the countdown to 2015!

Get ready, kids, because next time we’re going to recreate the pajama photos!

2014

For the past four years or so, we’ve been making holiday videos in lieu of sending Christmas cards. This year, I had serious doubts that it was going to happen, but here it is after all…Our rather rough-around-the-edges Holiday video for 2014, featuring every single member of the family playing an instrument, pretending to be an instrument, beatboxing, whistling, singing, etc. etc.:

 

Happy New Year!

Our Christmas Story

In days of old, it was foretold that, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”

And it came to pass that people traveled great distances…

“And all went to be taxed every one into his own city.”

Every one came to adore the new baby…

“Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes…”

The shepherds came with their sheepdogs…

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.”

There were three kings…

“…there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem.”

…and although it is not widely known, there were a couple of queens too…

There were gifts…

“…when they had opened their treasures, they presented…gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”

And a multitude of heavenly host sang, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men“:

Holiday Snapshots

MONDAY

Quiz Time!

In preparation for the upcoming holiday season and seeing our extended family, my sister and I decided to give the kids an after-breakfast quiz. “What is your Grandfather’s first name?” “What is the name of your cousins’ new dog?” etc. etc.

The kids decided we should be quizzed too. After lunch they gave us questions that included: “In which month are most babies born?” “How much does the earth weigh?” “Why can you not take a picture of a man with a wooden leg in British Columbia?” (Answers at end of post).

Having been roundly humiliated by this latest set of questions, we decided to up the ante with new questions of our own, relating to our work: “What are the ingredients of a roux?” “What is the purpose of a Form I-765?”

The kids were not amused. The next round, a math quiz, continued at the shabu shabu restaurant we went to for dinner…The kids posed questions along the lines of: “What is the cubed root of 512?”

Here was the final bonus round…

Adding only mathematical symbols (NOT numbers), make the three numbers to the left equal 6:

0              0                0        =      6

1              1                1        =      6

2              2                2        =      6

3              3                3        =      6

4              4                4        =      6

5              5                5        =      6

6              6                6        =      6

7              7                7        =      6

8              8                8        =      6

9              9                9        =      6

My sister and I, English and Russian majors respectively, looked at each other blankly.

“Here! I’ll even do one for you as an example,” my son generously offered.

2     +      2     +     2      =      6

My sister and I puzzled our way through almost all of them, but were stumped by the last few.

Again, my son tried to save us from utter humiliation with what he thought was a huge hint.

“Factorials.”

Alas, this did nothing to shed light upon our benighted ignorance.

“What’s a factorial?” I asked my sister. She shrugged.

Quiz Time is not over. Not by a long shot. We’ve already got the next round (“The Etiquette Round”) queued up and ready to go.

TUESDAY

The National Gallery

Wow, I’m short.

WEDNESDAY

Princeton

Proud Grandma and Grandpa
Meeting Daisy

The rest of the tribe arrives tonight…

Answers to Round 2 Quiz questions: August, 1,000 trillion metric tons or 6 sextillion, You can’t take a picture with a leg.

 

Making Music and Merry

Many years ago, in one of my darkest and loneliest of hours, I made a friend who became like a sister to me. I was living alone at the time. Every night I would cry myself to sleep in a grim, rat and cockroach-infested apartment in a welfare hotel that was gradually being converted into graduate student housing. I know this sounds maudlin and over the top…like something out of the 19th century Russian novels I was reading for my degree at the time, but it’s true.

When my friend and I decided to become roommates, we lucked into that rarest of commodities – a beautiful and affordable sublet in an elegant pre-war building in New York City. It was a sign. For one magical year, we lived in an apartment with a fireplace and a large turret window overlooking Riverside Park. That year it seemed like anything was possible and everything was going our way. We spent many a night talking and laughing into the wee hours of the morning. We threw lots of parties. We started a graduate student singing group. Two of the people we auditioned were already friends who knew each other from another choral group. They sang their way into the group and into our hearts. A few years later, we married them. Many more years and six kids later we live a few hours away from each other, but we try to get together as often as we can.

My friend still knows how to throw a great party. This weekend my husband had to stay behind to fulfill his professional singing obligations, but the kids and I drove up to Maryland to attend the party of the year. …a cozy affair with just my friends and all of our kids.

While the kids decorated cookies:

I wandered around feeling nostalgic as I looked at Christmas decorations I remembered from our old Riverside Drive apartment…

I admired some new ones too:

After dinner, we played a game that involved drawing winter scenes on paper plates…

while they were perched on top of our heads!

We opened Christmas crackers.

They contained whistles that played an entire musical scale…

So naturally we played a few songs…

under the direction of our very able conductor:

We played dreidel:

This boy may have lost the dreidel game, but he’s a triple crown winner nevertheless:

We opened gifts:

We were sorely missing one of our tenors, but my favorite part of the evening was singing Christmas carols:

How lucky I feel to still be making music and merry together all these years later with these dearest of friends.

I am a monster.

When my son was very little he asked me to pose for a portrait. I have to admit, I was flattered by the request. I sat very still as he labored over his masterpiece. He took the whole enterprise very seriously. For a very long time, he would study my face intently and then return to his drawing to add more details. At last he was satisfied with his work. He put the finishing touches on the portrait and then finally released me from my pose.

“Can I see it?” I asked.

He turned the sketchbook to proudly reveal his portrait to me:

portrait

portrait

“Wow!” I said. I was aghast, but trying to be sensitive to my budding young artist’s feelings, “Is that how I look to you?”

“Uh-huh!” he replied nonchalantly, “Looks just like you!”

I recalled this incident a few months ago in the midst of an extremely complicated day…

My son’s school was out for the day, but his school team’s soccer game was still on. To complicate matters, he had made vague plans to go to a friend’s house for a sleepover after his game. My husband had left town for a conference the evening before, so livery service was all up to me. As I left for work that morning I asked my son to be ready and dressed for soccer, to have his bag packed for the sleepover, and to get his friend’s cell phone number so we could find each other at the designated pick up spot at a high school on the opposite side of town. After dropping him off, his siblings and I were going to meet up with friends all the way back on the other side of town. Is your head spinning? Mine was.

I went home during my lunch break to pick up my son and bring him back to my office. I left work a little early to drop him off at his soccer game on time, and then headed back home to pick up my daughter from the babysitter’s house and to pick up my other son as he got off the bus. Together, the three of us drove back to watch the rest of my son’s soccer game. After the game we drove on to the meeting point where he was going to get picked up.

“So you got your friend’s number?” I asked.

“I tried to ask him for it, but he never sent it to me.”

“Well, did you figure out exactly where at the high school we’re meeting?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere around the football field, probably.”

It was twilight when we arrived at the high school. We drove around the parking lot nearest to the football field, looking for his friend.

“Do you know what kind of car they drive?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“No, but just let me out here, I’ll find them,” he said with his hand already starting to open the car door as we circled the lot.

“Stop! We’ll just drive around until we see them.”

“Just let me out here,” he insisted, growing agitated, “You can go now.”

“I’m not going to leave you here to wander around the school all by yourself at night. Relax!”

“Fine! You can stay here in the car if you want. Let me out and I’ll come back to let you know when I’ve found them.”

“It will be much easier and quicker for me to just drive you around. Why are you acting so squirrelly? Are you embarrassed to be seen with me or something?”

“YEAH!” he said far too readily, and in a matter-of-fact tone that cut like a knife through butter. “There are people here! I don’t want everyone in the world to know my mommy had to drive me here.”

“Uhhhh…you’re 14. Everyone knows your mommy has to drive you everywhere. It’s kind of obvious. How else would you get here?”

How I see myself…
How my son sees me.

By now he was really getting his panties in a twist.

“Just let me handle this! This is so embarrassing!”

I think of myself as a reasonable person. I’m not zen by any means, but I’m not crazy, either. But there comes a moment when one is pushed a little too far.

“You want embarrassing?” I snapped, “Because believe me, I can unleash all kinds of embarrassing, Buster!”

And thus commenced an epic hissy fit…One to go down in the history books. I was a grey-faced, slavering Harpy, winging into Athens with unsheathed talons and a crazed glint in my eye. I was Krakatoa, spewing volcanic ash and incinerating everything within my path. I was Enola Gay releasing the atomic bomb.

I’m not exactly sure what I looked like in that moment of terrifying wrath, but I imagine it was probably something like this:

My son’s childhood drawing of me.