Day 579, February 1, 2022

Happy Seollal

My father used to fry sliced rice cake, the sliced ovals blistering gently in the heat, then he sprinkled them with sugar and a dash of soy sauce. It was like Korean fry bread, unleashing an insatiable desire, and my father, of course knowing it was nothing good, made only a small batch at a time. My brother and I were hungry lizards leaving him only the ones he could eat while cooking.

A yard a few days after a snowstorm is a testament to a man’s routine, the paths worn into the snow crusted earth, 

to the chicken coop, 

the compost, 

the woodpile. 

Like the yellow dog stains, the path is packed and pressed tight here, loose and indistinct there. One can almost count the passings as a tracker might. 

No one speaks of empty nesting, how a box of cereal lasts an inordinately long period of time until you are so tired of the sugary flakes and can barely stand to tolerate another bowl. Ice cream remains forgotten in the freezer until the carton is thick with frost like a hoary mold. It is hard to cook in small portions. What do you do with half an onion, half a can of baby corn? Sometimes I stop buying vegetables because there are not enough mouths to eat an entire bag of spinach, a bundle of bok choy. Limp and yellowing remnants litter the back of the refrigerator drawers.

I used to envy my brother’s zodiac, the dragon. I was born the pig, the boar, the one that was easy to laugh at on the paper placemats at the restaurants in Chinatown. When there is nothing left to read, we will read anything, and that way we all became experts at which animals were compatible with which animals, and which years would beget prosperous children, and who was damned, but intelligent, or thoughtful.

Before there was H-Mart, there was Chinatown with its streets smelling of cigarettes, fish, and dried things. Five gallon buckets lining the sidewalks filled with squirming, swimming, paddling things. All the loud voices. Stores where you could buy anything imaginable, in the square footage of a double garage bay.

My favorite treat from the ice cream truck that used to ply the streets of Quincy, was the push up pop, the one that came in a cardboard toilet paper tube that you had to work the plunger up exposing the ice cream out the top. But really, it was the whole thing that was appealing. 

The almost imperceptible sound of the jingle playing in the distance, 

the dawning realization leading to a mad scramble to find my mom her purse, 

the agonizing search for quarters, 

loose change, 

and then the mad dash to the street, 

where always there was the threat of being too late, 

catching the taillights as they turned up another block. 

All the sticky wrappers melting on the ground or stuck to fingers. 

One of our neighbors used to babysit me. An older Irish woman with two sons. They had a Six-Million Dollar Man doll where you could look through a hole in the back of his head and everything you could see was magnified. The mother was mad at her son one day and yelled, “I bet even Leo knows how to spell soap! Spell soap,” she demanded.

I stammered and offered, “S-O-P?”

I was always the bad speller.

In this neighborhood it was fashionable to carry plastic Tommy guns, shiny Colt-45s that hammered red tape caps, tiny ribbons of gunpowder that exploded with a fragrant tuft of smoke. And grenades, that you could also set with a cap to explode when dropped on the pavement. 

Just barely louder than the metal hitting the asphalt. 

One of my friends had a dog who was always digging holes in their back yard. Their yard was cratered with the maniacal holes, each a foot and a half deep. My friend flung himself from his swing set and landed in a hole, breaking his leg. I think they got rid of the dog, or it ran away, or maybe it was put down, or maybe nothing happened to the dog and they took the swing set down. I remember visiting their house with my mom like we were visiting a dying person, the woman who knit my brother and I sweaters before she succumbed to lung cancer. I had never been in my friend’s house before. There were little shoes cast in metal on the mantel. Plaster casts of little hands. I wondered if one broke the surface of the brass if little shoes still existed underneath. Maybe my friend was at the hospital and had not come home yet. I don’t remember my friend ever coming back out to play. But maybe he did and I am misremembering. Maybe he was in a cast for a time and then he wasn’t. Or maybe it was just before we moved away and I never saw him come home. The neighborhood was lousy with children. Always, it seemed, there were children in the street, and like clockwork, on a designated day, the ice cream truck would come playing its low fidelity cheery tune.