grandfather monk and the nursing home

now, is this the face of a grandfather or buddhist monk?

so, as a previous posting alluded to, this past weekend was lunar new year in korea. on saturday, the so-called new year's eve, i went with my in-laws to visit my father-in-law's mother at the nursing home at which she stays. she is in her early 80s now and has spent the last several years slowly succumbing to alzheimer's disease. her husband died about 6 or 7 years ago, up until which time both of them still worked daily on their small farm down on nam-hae island, which is in the far south of korea. even after the old man died, seung-hee's grandmother continued to toil alone on the farm for a couple of years, living alone in the house that she'd lived in for decades because she had always been a tough, alert, hardy, and healthy woman. it was not until a couple of years after her husband's death that it was realised she was beginning to suffer from alzheimer's and could no longer be alone.

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anyway, so it is in this condition that i've only been able to know her. it certainly has to be tough on my wife and her family to see grandmother this way, but they handle it as well as can be handled. grandmother has been told numerous times about me and about who i am, but she, of course, doesn't remember. my first meeting with her was in the months leading up to our wedding and she continually kept asking my poor brother-in-law, ik-doo (she wouldn't ask anyone else), if i were an american GI and, if so, why i was visiting her. she must have asked ik-doo a dozen times about me. and, then, the last time i saw her, back a few months ago, she wasn't feeling particularly well and pretty generally ignored me. this visit, however, was much different...

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she looked much healthier than the last time i'd seen her and she was much less morose and much perkier and she zeroed in on me from the start. in fact, she didn't acknowledge my wife's presence for about 15 minutes. however, once she got going, no one was spared her hysterically incisive and repetitive questions, save for my mother-in-law. first, she kept referring to my father-in-law's continued life of living at the beach (he's lived in seoul, which is NOT near a beach, for more than 35 years); she kept asking ik-doo if he wasn't married (he isn't, yet); but she saved the majority of her questions for seung-hee and me. though i was sitting next to seung-hee, grandmother kept asking where i was. no answer would suffice, as grandmother kept referring to the fact that i was travelling on a boat out on the open seas, or that i was at home on the coast fishing (thus, prompting questions of why i hadn't come to visit), or that i was living abroad, or that i was home tending the farm. then, after all these questions to seung-hee, she would ask me or ik-doo who i was. of course, it's heartbreaking, but it's also fiendishly funny and just befuddles us more about how the brain works.

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however, the humour of the day didn't come from grandmother, but from the other side of the room and another little old lady, also looking like she was in her 80s, with whom grandmother shared her room.

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we had been visiting grandmother for about 15 minutes, when the nurses wheeled in the other old lady confined to her bed. a few minutes later, as we were sitting listening to grandmother ramble on, this voice popped up from deep in the recesses of spacetime: "hello, american grandfather!" (in korean, of course). we all kind of stopped and looked at each other as if to say, "did we just hear what we think she just said?" the moment passed, none of us responded, and we kept going. a few minutes later, the salutation came again: "hello, american grandfather!"

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now, i have a bit of a goatee, which i admit isn't a very full one because i just can't grow a big, bushy one like i'd like to. however, the most noticeable thing about it isn't the raggedy-assness of it but the fact that it's mostly white, but with a mixture of blonde, brown, and red. however, it's the white that people notice, which, along with my shaved head, often prompts students and kids unknown to me to think that i look like a grandfather, so i'm used to it. however, i was (fake) indignantly shocked to have an obvious grandmother refer to me as one of her peers. she was gently told that i was not a grandfather, my looks notwithstanding. she seemed satisfied, but her momentary silence was obviously spent in contemplation of what possibly could a white man with no hair and a nearly-white goatee be. when it finally dawned her what i could be, she wasn't about to hold back...

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"hello, american monk!" because, with no hair, what else could i be if i weren't a grandfather but a buddhist monk...

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she was incredibly cute, needless to say, but she saved her cutest for when we were leaving, for when i said goodbye to her in korean, she responded in kind by saying goodbye--in english!!!