The Weeder

As a child I would wonder what all those adults did “at work”. I would see legions of them walk into an office building in the morning and walk out at night, diminished somehow, as if they’d been hollowed out.

The Internet has changed all that, allowing networked employees to work out of the virtual office anywhere and anytime but I suspect it will not be that easy. Like or not, many people find that the workplace fulfills a basic human need: the need for large infusions of cash. No, no, of course I mean companionship and where would we be without that? Most likely alone on some secluded wharf explaining to the rock crabs why superior life forms have skeletons on the inside. Better to be at work in an office I say and leave the crustaceans alone; alone with their pitiful, inferior exoskeletons.

I think we can all agree that seeking companionship amongst our business associates is a poor substitute for the real thing. The office does force us into close proximity with people, but perhaps these are people we would otherwise avoid. “Fight or flight”, our inner caveman screams, but in our civilized shells we can do neither. Thus, strategically placed chairs and tables provide us the means to remain stationary for long periods of time, a requirement for non-stop memo production and ceaseless meetings.

I think I just realized what it was that all those adults lost.

Food I took a visitor from Singapore to an Irish pub in the Westin Chosun Hotel. It is called O’Kim’s, for which it is awarded my prize for Best Name.

One of my Korean business associates took me to a restaurant where one of the set menu items was “Dragon”. As it turned out, this was their reference for a 17-course Korean meal so-named because, if you finish all 17 you’ll be dragon your sorry butt all the way home. (Ed. sorry)

Then I thought, what if in some other dimension restaurants served mythological animals? So you could order Unicorn Flambé, Griffin Over Easy, and Roc Eggs Benedict. But then I thought some more and realized that this would never work. The Roast Phoenix would keep flying out of the oven just before being served. I hate it when they do that.

Vitamins

Our family is a big fan of vitamins, suspecting that somehow we will not get sufficient nutrition from the food we consume, even if we manage to catch and eat the elusive Phoenix. I’ll be the first to admit that food supplements *might* be required if we dined exclusively on Korean rice cake, the food-like material used in the space program and road repair, but otherwise we’ll be OK. Nonetheless we ingest many pills, some with suspect ingredients like testosterone, fish heads and jellied sea cucumber, a redundant term if ever there was one. There’s one of these things, Vitamus Gigantus (literally ‘horse pill’), that is so large I swear it forms a visible lump traveling down your esophagus. After you choke one down you curl up motionless for a week like an anaconda digesting a water buffalo.

Memory

Memory allows us the luxury of time travel without the instruments of paradox found in science fiction stories. Memory brings us not the history of great people and monumental events, but *our* history, an accounting of the small events that shape our lives.

I close my eyes and I am “Weed”.

My older brothers bestow this name upon me because I am “always popping up where I didn’t belong”. It becomes a part of my persona to the extent that I have a license plate made for my Schwinn bike. “WEEDER”, it proclaims. This nickname is an obvious source of embarrassment for me, but strangely it also affords a kind of perverse recognition; much preferred over the stealthy silence of anonymity.

The three boys are playing American football on a field of grass awash with the light of a phosphorescent blue sky. The youngest hopes to be seen as an unlikely equal in his brothers’ eyes yet is hesitant to join. He feels he cannot compete with them; they are too tall and swift. But they insist he play because he is their brother and this is a matter of blood and kin. In a flash of compassion, they conspire to allow him to run untouched to score. As he raises his arms in triumphant, in that moment he realizes he is free of the The Weeder. What his brothers have given they have surely taken away and left in its place, brotherhood.

I open my eyes to the present, to the men we are today, separated by half a world and more than half a century, watching our children grow and sharing in their exquisite vision. We live our different lives and dream our incomplete dreams, but should ill fortune demand we stand together as one; to run under an endless sky on the green fields of our youth, we have but to close our eyes.

And remember.