Reflecting

I've been listening to Christmas music for the past week.  What can I say?  I have a teenage crush on Mister Joshua Groban (by the way, word on the street is that he's moving to New York!  You know, WHERE I LIVE?).  I had him streaming through my computer speakers at work Monday when I was all by myself and it was, how can I say this eloquently...?  DOPE.  Even when the afternoon finally came around and folks started to trickle into the office, I kept playing his tunes on repeat.  I let the teasing and joshing around (pun!) roll right off my back.  Let the jolly holly spirit move us because, well, why the heck not?

Last night, I talked to my mom on the phone for two hours, fifty-eight minutes, and nine seconds (thank you, Verizon, for keeping track) which got me to bed somewhere between two and three in the morning.  Now.  It's been a looooooong time since I've carried a proper conversation with my mum.  I'll just say that the tides are changing.  Anyway, she had just gotten back from her trip to Korea and had a lot of news to share.  It was nice to hear her gab about her family's antics.  I could tell she had fun, which doesn't happen as often as it should.

Uhmmah came to the States in the seventies and has since gone back to see her family a pitiful four times: once when I was a toddler, again when her father suddenly died during my freshman year of college, another in 2005 for a school reunion, and now this trip.  Last night, I was pleasantly surprised to hear her declare that she should make a trip every year.  Well, duh.  I've been telling her this for as long as I can remember.  I was shocked that she finally came to her senses.  It only took thirty years.  The way that I see it, you only live once and have just one family...so you should do the best you can to keep it real while it lasts, 'naw mean?  Uhmmah's turning sixty in a few months - I imagine this has a lot to do with her newfound interest in making this trip annually.  Also, my grandmother, her mother, while mentally still quite sharp, is indeed aging.  Slowly, her health is declining and although my mother doesn't say so, I'm sure she's aware that her time could come quickly and suddenly.  That's how she lost her father whom she greatly admired and loved.  It would be very sad if she didn't make it out there as frequently as possible to spend time with her mother at this point.  I know a big part of her misses her siblings, too, because well, I would, too, if I moved half a world away and went without seeing them for decades at a time.  Our mother made the decision to adopt America as her new home all by herself.  For that, she's one ballsy lady, but sometimes I wonder if it was worth it.  She has essentially lived her entire adult life alone - emotionally, that takes an incredible toll on a woman.  I know she finds comfort in staying connected to her siblings; if that were to involve seeing them in person once every year, that would be nothing but good for her.

She shared a wish of hers: schlepping it out across the Pacific together with her children to visit her childhood home, to show us all the lineage books her father and his forefathers carefully assembled (evidently female names weren't included - what the eff?), but especially to the mountaintop where her father's buried.  He was the eldest son in a long line of men; all the first sons are buried on this one fantastic mountain, the highest one, in these magnificent graves that look like miniature hills along the mountainside.  It's quite a steep climb up, but the views are magnificent and a lot of the impressive stonework up there was done by my maternal grandfather.  That would be quite an experience, wouldn't it?  All of us standing there on that remote mountaintop together?  The most amusing part would be the ridiculous efforts to communicate within our family.  Picture all of us pathetically butchering what little we know of the Korean language stitched together with the most juvenile English words we can muster.  It would be crazy funny and kind of embarrassing at the same time.  But whatever.  You only live once, man.  It's just this one time around...