HISTORICAL HOMECOMING . . .

Dinner at home is always sort of an event. I try to get home once a week to chill with the parentals, and it normally goes like this:

1. Chill with Omma and set the table.
2. Eat with Omma and Gran; have great conversations.
3. Appa comes home, so sit with him while he eats.
4. Be totally ignored by Omma and Appa while they talk and giggle about everything under the sun except me.
5. Wash dishes while Omma and Appa continue to gaze into each other's eyes and talk. Why did they want me to come home for dinner again?
6. Do miscellaneous things for Omma and Appa: reset computer passwords; download the latest iTunes; reset the heating system programs.

But dinner on special occasions, like last night, are a totally different experience. For on special occasions, Appa prays for the meal, out loud, for all of us. And you haven't heard anything until you've heard my father pray for a meal, pray for his family. It's not just because he prays in Korean -- formal Korean -- and everything just sounds better in formal Korean. I can't describe it ... it's just amazing and never fails to move my heart around the universe and back.

And then there's the birthday card. (Or, in the case of my father, who has only recently discovered the sheer joys of email, the additional birthday email.) Both my parents are suppressed writers, and their craft emerges in the birthday cards they write to Cheech and me. And so I haven't yet mustered up the heart, the courage, the Kleenex boxes required to read what they wrote to me in this year's card. But I did open an email from Appa, and once again ... I can't describe what I felt.

I can't realize your 30 years of life without thinking of our family's hard trying to settle down in this country.
Your 30 years' life exactly represents our family's history here.

My heart is too full.