LITMIR.BIZ

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and then passed through powdered glass. If the glass-treated string could be made to cross the taut string of the other kite, then given a sawing motion, it might cut that other string and send the opponent’s kite floating helplessly away.

      Archie and I watched such contests with fascination. Once or twice we were able to recover from one of the trees on our compound a hapless kite that had been cut away. But the memory I want to share was of nothing that grand. It was early in our kiting experience. I had made a very small kite, following the very maneuverable Korean design, and Archie had built a similar, but larger one. It was a bright, breezy Saturday morning when we boldly took our kites outside the compound wall, near its far end, to a place where the land fell away in a wide, grassy slope. There were already other boys there with their kites—not foreigners like us, of course.

      My small kite would only spin erratically in the breeze. Archie took off running with his, and I was left with this useless thing on the end of the strong thread I was using as a kite string. Then one of the boys, about my age, came up to me. Smiling, he took from a pocket in his short, Korean cloth-jacket some scraps of paper and, in a heavier, folded piece, a lump of rice-flour paste. He put together a paper tail and pasted it to the bottom corner of my kite. Smiling again, he had me try it, and the little kite took to the air, holding quite steady for its small size. I thanked him, with the phrases of Korean that I knew, little thinking that more than ninety years later, as I write, his warm, shy smile and his finger rubbing the flour paste—the spontaneous kindness of his gesture—would still be with me.

      Another memory that my brain still holds brings in our dad. The scene is the lower corner of our yard—again, a late spring evening. The family Model T Ford is there, with the engine hood lifted off. There is some problem, and Dad is conferring with a couple of men about it. In the era of this memory, trained auto mechanics were not available as yet in Korea—just those who had been learning by experience. Dad was a person of caution and persistence, and in this case, it showed in a very long discussion.

      Archie and I had been standing by. Whether he understood anything of the conversation, I don’t know. I did not; but as long as he stayed, I would stay, too. What persists in my memory, after Archie had found some place to sit, is that Dad went around behind the car and brought an empty gasoline can—one of the five-gallon cans that were the only way, then, of transporting the fuel. He placed the can kindly for me to sit on it.

      I was used to following Archie’s lead, and to his getting attention in any sort of manly, adult-type matters; so, Dad’s thoughtfulness toward me made an impression, deep enough for that memory to live on. Archie, as I’ve mentioned before, was only a year and five months older than I, but much of the time I was definitely the “kid brother.” He was more outgoing, more sociable, and he proved to be much more athletic. It was exactly right that he should be named A.G. Junior, and that, as I said above, he should follow Dad into medicine and a career as a missionary doctor.

      Many years later, I am remembering a photo of him and Dad. Both are wearing appropriate academic regalia. As a Canadian and still a British subject, Dad had qualified to be inducted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. Now he was a US citizen, and he and Archie, in the same ceremony, were both being named Fellows of the American College of Surgeons.

      Growing up, I was more domestic than Archie. I enjoyed being where Mother was—listening intently when she read, although infrequently, from one of the American poets, perhaps Whittier or Longfellow. I remember that once I suggested to her that Archie and I were like the Biblical twins Esau and Jacob—Esau the hunter and outdoorsman, Jacob a man of the tents. Mother didn’t like the comparison and immediately discounted it. Probably she was thinking of the conflict between the brothers, after Jacob tricked their aged father into bestowing on him the paternal blessing of the firstborn. I gathered very clearly that there should be no more talk about Esau and Jacob.

      In effect, I always felt close to Archie, respecting his strong points. We roomed together through boarding school, and also at Princeton, when I joined him there. I made an unsuccessful effort at soccer as a freshman, but Archie was on the varsity team and before he finished was named All-Eastern halfback.

      I gladly remember one of the last times we had together, just the two of us. He was a first-year medical student at Columbia in New York City. He invited me for a weekend visit, squeezing a cot into his tiny dormitory room. I enjoyed sharing, at night, his view of lights festooning the George Washington Bridge. And I recall, some five years later, when Martha and I were newlyweds, how he visited us and laid on our dining room table the returned ring of his first engagement, which had been broken off.

      *****

      For many of us there come moments of a personal epiphany—whether in childhood or later in life—when our spirit spreads its wings, testing the air. I carry from my childhood, even now, a clear impression of such an experience.

      Members of Taegu Station used to gather on Sunday afternoons for an English-language service. Most of its members were involved elsewhere on Sunday morning, and perhaps evening as well, in services in Korean. The afternoon gathering was an opportunity for sharing and mutual uplift in the language and traditions that were our own. I was still very young, not mindful of much of this; but one Sunday Mother sang a solo, choosing a hymn of very personal faith and devotion. She was not a trained singer but had a pleasant voice and was just taking her turn.

      A day or two later I was playing alone in our front yard near sunset. We had a Weeping Willow tree there, and the low, golden sunlight came slanting through its trailing branches, which were just beginning to sprout their tender leaves. I stood still, with the melody of that hymn and my mother’s voice filling my head. Even to a child, the situation, the sound, the whole late-sunlit scene were powerfully, transcendently poignant. There was an awareness of Spirit, of Reality quite beyond; but for that moment, intersecting my simple, day-to-day reality.

      I was perhaps six or seven at the time. I had no language to express such an epiphany. I still don’t, really, but am profoundly grateful for that unspoken Word that let me spread my spirit’s childhood wings. That was God, touching me.

      Of other childhood epiphanies, I am remembering just two. For one of them I was probably a bit younger, because there were more children on the compound, including a couple of “big kids.” They had organized a game, maybe some sort of war game. There was a patch of tall grass, and I was told that I was to lie there. I must remain very still—just lie there until someone came for me. Perhaps I was supposed to be one of the wounded; I don’t know.

      The voices moved away, and everything grew still. Where I lay, I could look up, between some stems of tall grass, into the sky—a deep, tranquil sky of mid-afternoon. There was a small, white cloud moving slowly across it, and then another. I had never before felt how deep the sky is. I was lifted out of myself, out of my world, received and absorbed into that serene vastness.

      How did the experience end? Did someone finally come for me? Apparently, the bigger kids had forgotten this wounded casualty. As I remember, I at last got up and went looking for them.

      The other childhood epiphany I am calling up takes me to a different venue—Sorai Beach, a missionary resort on the northwestern coast of Korea, where our family had a summer cottage. The cottage stood on a bluff, with a zigzag path that made a steep descent to rocks and a bit of stony beach below. We mostly went to the community beach, a beautiful stretch of sand at a ten-minute walk; but this day Archie, Elsie, and I had taken the steep path down to explore the rocks. I was probably seven or eight.

      We found a place where the tide had left a small pool in a deep cleft of rock. That pool was a microcosm of the sea world, with green moss on the rock, a few strands of seaweed—even a couple of sand crabs scuttling nearby—while the warm sun lit up its clean water. I was fascinated by this miniature seascape. Then I happened to look up. My gaze took in the zigzag path up the bluff. At the top was a shape, one corner of our cottage roof thrusting out and beyond it, the crystalline space of sky. For that moment, it wasn’t sky. It was Beyond—Spirit—what is ineffable. I had—and have—no words for it. My spirit felt, for that brief, timeless moment, its reality.

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