Author's Note: The few of you out there deserve to know what has happened to me since I last wrote in this blog. If you would rather skip to the health antiques pictures from my trip, you may just want to jump down to the images now. I understand.
Columbus; Magellan; Daniel Boone: nobody has ever planned for a trip more carefully, with greater detail, than my daughter, Gwen. If she ever gets hired by an invading army, you're done for; just surrender right away. Her ability to plan for every issue, every contingency, is unparalleled. (If she has one weakness, it was overpacking for every possibility ... we went to South Korea, but we had enough with us to make it to Mars.) She was the brains behind the whole plan; I was the clearly inept sidekick who occasionally asked, "Are we there yet?" and who frequently whimpered about my weak knees ... and I played my role masterfully.
Yet no amount of preparation could have prepared us for our fallibility - our all too human shortcomings - okay, yes, mine. In my poor defense, I was carrying 29 more years and let's just say significantly more kilograms (better spelled kill-o-grams) than Gwen, but still, I was the weak vessel in this team.
I had no idea that there were seven levels of Seoul. We traveled around the city by subway, but the many lines on the route map (so many that all the primary colors get broken down into light and dark shades of each color to cover all the map routes), they formed a crisscrossed, prismatic cobweb that looked as if it was created by a seriously intoxicated spider. I stayed very close to my pathfinder genius daughter because if she accidentally (or intentionally) left me behind, I'm sure I would have spent the rest of my life lost deep in the bowels of the Seoul subway system, huddled in a dark corner, pan-handling with my baseball cap. Occasionally we found an escalator or even an elevator that would bring us up or down one level; then I would stare at the Korean maps on the walls, and all those Korean language characters, as if my total ignorance of Korean was somehow helping provide my trailblazer daughter some make-believe assistance to read them, take my arm, and show me where we were to go next.
Even when we found the topsoil of Korea, I was a stumbling fool. The great palace grounds were rutted and paved with stones suited to llamas and mountain goats and the Buddhist temple was built on ocean cliffs - need I say more? Shorter, thinner, and much older people looked like Olympian figure skaters, floating effortlessly over all of it. I was out of my element, out of shape, and out of my mind. Over our eleven-day trip, my phone's pedometer told me we walked 128,000 steps ... I think that's more steps than I have walked in the last eleven years. But we expected to come back home with all the good memories and able to share the tough experiences by laughing at them, like I hope you've been able to do with this recollection. The problem has been that our return home has been a very difficult time for both of us and we're still getting over it. We're back in Texas, but not yet home; things have changed and a part of us can never get back to the home we left.
Two days before we left South Korea, I got sick, then the next day, Gwen also felt sick. We both assumed it was something in the air getting to us more easily because our bodies were worn down from all the trekking. A few days after our return, my oldest son, Nick, came downstairs first thing in the morning, telling me he needed me to take him to the Emergency Room. He felt and looked terrible, like he did ten years ago when he had suffered a heart attack. Twenty-four hours later, his heart was cleared, but the doctors announced he had Covid and he was admitted to the hospital. Suspicious, Gwen and I took at-home tests and learned that we, too, were positive for Covid. I reached out to my doctor's office for guidance and learned that our family physician of almost 30 years had suddenly died two days earlier, at age 58. Pure coincidence, but unsettling and disorienting, as well as making me feel all the more mortal that the person I turned to for doses of advice and compassion would never again be able to give them.
The next day, it was clear that our beloved family cat, 14-year-old Booger, was having even more trouble with his medical issues than usual, so we brought him to the vet, behind our Covid masks, and they did all the tests that I had hoped my doctor was going to do for me. The next day, we got the crushing news that he had several terminal health issues, led by cancer in the lungs. Not wanting him to suffer through his last days on earth, we gave the vet the instruction to have Booger euthanized. I sat in the little office with my wife and daughter, our big black Covid masks doing nothing to hide the tears and pain we were feeling as the vet put Booger to sleep. We brought him back home in the special sealed box the vet provided and, in the pouring rain, we buried Booger in the backyard, next to Dobby, his buddy.
Gwen and I are starting to recover from the Covid virus we feel certain we picked up somewhere in the heavily populated, heavily congested conditions we experienced in Korea. Gwen is blessed to be able to work from home, in quarantine, recovering from Covid and the loss of her cherished furry friend. Nick is now back from the hospital but was hit hardest with Covid and will have a longer and more difficult recovery. My wife, Gail, has not tested positive for Covid but patiently wears her mask at all times like she's ready to go hold up a bank. And I am also still hiding behind my masks of health and humor, trying to prevent others from catching my virus or to know how much I worry about my wife, son, and daughter's recoveries from their health challenges and the loss of their cherished cat.
A Few Korean Health-Related Antiques from My Trip: These are all photographs I took in the National Museum of Korea, which is an amazing facility - apparently the Korean equal to the Smithsonian here in the U.S. I will share the few things I have learned, limited to the Google translations of the info they had in Korean descriptions of each item. I'm presenting them in reverse-chronological order, from the most recent (c.1910) to the oldest (c.700 BCE). It's a very fast sleigh ride in nine photos:
I enjoyed reading this entry although I am sorry for all the health issues and the passing of Booger.
Nice wrire-up Andy! I don't see how you put in all those steps! Glad to have you back and heading up our educational components at the FOHBC Houston 2024 National Antique Bottle & Glass Exposition.
That thunder god looks quite the sight! He looks like he needs medical attention with all those growths on his arms and legs... lol!
I love that cuneiform piece - a remedy for being afflicted by the hand of a ghost... just awesome!