अ Novel

Episode 19: A Great Symphony Orchestra



On a dawning hour today (December 13, 2010) father materialized before me. He was not the one who had been deceased in 1993, but the very stout person in his early fifties. Odd thing was our eyes did not meet, with me giving a distant glance at him doing his job. He was wrecking with his two strong arms the fence of mine which had been deemed very loosely built. Seeing the wreckage in my dream I was having an inward glee thinking that dad was getting it redesigned.

I was trying to sever a contact with coffee. Looking back, I am surprised at myself. I have had a three-decade- long duration of coffee intake. I wonder why I have been practiced to the long duration of coffee drinking. I think it's time I stopped the habit.

I am in a mood of some sort. The habit of drinking coffee has me thinking about the habit itself and its originality and its improvement. It occurs to me that the habit has naturally been connected with air, river, ship and border. In short, the habit is not inborn, but outsourced.

In other words, coffee and its transmorphosis as a caffeinated beverage is foreign and comes from abroad. A visit to Starbucks or something is a learned practice just like high fives. Of which we the South Koreans have not been aware until very recently.

It has been less than ten years since we knew high fives or something. When we the Koreans had had chances of expressing joy, we used a choreographic gesticulation of pounding and raising one leg after the other and raising one shoulder after the other. High fives have been so common that nothing is awkward with the local folks doing them.

Where the custom of a decent coughing and bowing has disappeared the odd custom of shaking hands and hitting high fives in the air has taken its place. It's been a really perplexing experience for my juniors to have attempted the queer gesticulation on me.

Where has Mr. Barak Obama learned that? Why does he always put his left hand on the shoulders of senior world leaders, particularly those of the small countries or the developing countries, say, on the shoulder of President Lee Myong Bak of South Korea, even patting it several times as if paternalizing him? Had he also put his left hand on the back, or the shoulder, or the back neck of the Emperor of Japan? Hadn't he kowtowed to the emperor standing one meter before him, bending his upper body?

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To the earnest readers of mine, who are still inquisitive over the whatabouts of the judicial test for which I'd been preparing, I'll say I failed and I was not recruited of course. I'll add one more idiocy of mine that I had been so stupid that I'd once again been made a mockery of by the overblown expectation which might have been worked out by the monk himself.

On the test day morning, I started early for a taxi stand near my apartment house. On my way to the taxi stand, I was able to catch an early taxi-cab, whose number plate showed No. xx16. On arriving at the place of test, Dongguk University, the number of my candidacy guided me to a classroom, whose designated room number was 16. I had been flattered. I surmised I might be listed on the top as one of the successful candidates.

On the fourth night, on which the four-day eight-subject judicial test had been done, I had had two chapters of dreams of which the first one indicated that I would assuredly fail the test and of which the second signified that I would be comforted greatly for the failure.

In the previous chapter of dreams, I had been climbing up the steepy cliff with hands and feet, but, alas, on the last moment that I was about to make it to the roof of the cliff, the two women of uncertain identity were grabbing my two feet and dragging me down, with me failing to get there.

In the second chapter, I had been led to a symphony orchestra or something where I had been being soaked to the blood vein with a great music of the night. Everything was gorgeous--the stage, the music, the musicians, the ambience and all that scent surrounding me.