LALATOWN LIFE

“Enough. Stop. I am not your emotional dumping ground.”

I hung up.

It took me a very long time to find myself again.

Not long ago, I realized that I hadn’t eaten watermelon even once this summer.

I love watermelon. Especially the sweet, crisp kind.

As if YouTube had somehow read my mind, recipes for watermelon sherbet kept appearing on my feed.

So I thought, why not make some?

I wasn’t exactly in the mood for making watermelon sherbet. And this house doesn’t exactly feel like the right place for it anymore.

But for now, this is still my house too.

So I made watermelon sherbet.

I bought a tub of vanilla ice cream, slightly froze some cut watermelon, blended the two together, and froze it again. Glass jam jars came out of the cabinets. There was a whole production.

It was ridiculously good.

This year, as I began closing the first act of my life—a thirty-year marriage—I started doing something.

I started eating ice cream after meals.

Was this a new habit?

I never really thought about it.

And then recently, it occurred to me.

Oh.

I’ve always loved ice cream.

When I begin Chapter Two of my life, I am going to buy myself an ice cream machine.

Nothing fancy. Maybe one of those reasonably priced ones from Costco.

I love ice cream that much.

And with my own machine, I can decide how sweet it is. I can decide what goes into it.

My own ice cream.

Not too sweet.

Exactly the way I like it.

The photograph I’m posting today is of my maternal grandfather.

What?

What kind of photograph is that?

Well.

My grandfather was a tenor.

Yes.

A man educated in Western music a very long time ago.

He died more than twenty years ago. I think it was around 2000.

He adored me.

I was a tiny baby, about 2.6 kilograms when I was born. And apparently I cried relentlessly.

I wouldn’t eat this. I wouldn’t eat that.

But when my grandfather held me, I stopped.

Just like that.

Somewhere along the way, I ended up spending much of my childhood at my grandparents’ house.

Why am I telling you this?

Is this going to become some sad story about a little girl from somewhere in Asia, carrying the sorrows of the East?

No.

Everybody has something, one way or another.

I just want to tell you a little about my grandfather.

Because I think my love of ice cream probably started with him.

He bought me a lot of it.

My grandfather had grown up as the son of a very wealthy family. His father was a doctor—a doctor of Western medicine—and when he returned to his hometown, the family lived very well.

From the stories my mother told me, there were more household servants than she could count. They lived in a huge traditional tiled-roof house.

Unfortunately, there was also a first wife, my great-grandmother, and other wives.

My grandfather was the second son of the first wife.

He was able to study in Japan, where he studied Western music.

Then came marriage.

Then came the Korean War.

Eventually, he became a music teacher at a well-known Korean high school. And because English teachers were very rare at the time, he taught English too.

Is that all?

No.

There’s something else I want to tell you about him.

Whenever he felt low, or whenever something inside him began to move like waves, he would close the door and go into his piano room.

He would play the piano and sing.

Songs I couldn’t understand.

Italian, perhaps.

I think there was always a part of him that wanted to be on a stage, singing.

His ideas always seemed to be about ten years too early.

He eventually left teaching and started a business.

The business failed.

Ten years later, that exact kind of business boomed.

That was my grandfather.

And sometimes, I miss that cheerful man very much.

Every morning, when I was very small, he took me hiking.

I climbed mountains wearing little jelly plastic sandals.

I must have been around three years old. Definitely long before elementary school.

He was such a cool grandfather.

He never pulled rank.

He never needed to remind anyone that he was the grandfather, the elder, the authority.

I have probably had a nosebleed fewer than five times in my entire life.

But I remember one of them.

I was very little, trying to reach into a container for ice cream, when somehow I tipped myself forward and practically fell into it.

My nose started bleeding.

My grandfather looked startled.

And then he laughed.

Not a polite little laugh.

He laughed with delight.

I still remember that.

So today, I’m eating my watermelon sherbet.

And not long ago, I finally said something to someone I know.

Enough.

I am finished being the person who endlessly holds someone else’s emotions.

Finished hurting because they hurt.

Finished giving up my own things first.

Finished always making room for somebody else.

That part of my life can end here.

And I’m going to eat my watermelon sherbet.

It is very, very good.