Please Look After Mom Read Online Free PDF Page A

table like old times, quietly eating a simple meal of rice and panchan, side dishes of water kimchi, braised tofu, sautéed anchovies, and toasted seaweed. When Mom wrapped a piece ofseaweed around some rice, as she did when you were little, and held it out, you took it and ate it. After dinner, to digest the food, you and Mom walked around the outside of the house. It was no longer the same house you grew up in, but the front, side, and back yards were still connected, like before. In the back yard, on the ledge, there were still so many tall clay jars. When you were young, they were filled with soy sauce, red-pepper paste, salt, and bean paste, but now they were empty. As the two of you walked, Mom sometimes leading and sometimes falling behind, she suddenly asked you why you’d come home.
    “I went to Pohang.…”
    “Pohang is far from here.”
    “Yeah.”
    “It’s farther to come here from Pohang than from Seoul.”
    “Yeah, it is.”
    “What made you come here from Pohang, when it seems like you don’t ever have time to visit?”
    Instead of answering, you grabbed Mom’s hand, desperately, as if you were grasping for a lifeline in the darkness, because you didn’t know how to explain your emotions. You told Mom that in the early morning you had gone to lecture at a Braille library in Pohang.
    “A Braille library?” Mom asked.
    “Braille is what the blind read with their fingers.”
    Mom nodded. As you circled the house, you told Mom about your trip to Pohang. For a few years, the Braille library had been asking you to visit, but each time you couldn’t because of a previous engagement. In early spring, you’d received another call. You had just published your latest work. The librarian told you that they wanted to publish your newestbook in Braille. Braille! You didn’t know much about it, except that it was the language of the blind, as you told Mom. You listened to the librarian impassively, as if you were hearing about a book you hadn’t yet read. The librarian said they wanted your permission. If the librarian hadn’t said “permission,” you might not have agreed to go to the Braille library. That word “permission” moved you: blind people wanted to read your book, they were asking for your permission to recreate your book in a language only they could communicate through.… You answered, “Sure,” suddenly feeling powerless. The librarian said that the book would be completed by November, and that Braille Day was also in November. He said they would appreciate it if you could come that day and participate in the dedication ceremony for the book. You wondered how things had gotten to that point, but you couldn’t go back on your “sure.” It probably helped that it was early spring, and November seemed far away. But time passed. Spring passed, summer came and went, fall came, and soon enough it was November. And then that day had arrived.
    Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual—if one thinks about it, it’s really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn’t think things through. Your trip to the Braille library and the events that occurred there were all things you could have predicted if you’d really thought about the Braille library. But you were busy in the spring, summer, and fall. Even on the day you headed to the Braille library, you weren’t thinking about the people you were going to meet there; you were worried that you would be late for the ten o’clock meeting time. You barely made it onto the 8 a.m. flight, thenarrived in Pohang, took a cab to the Braille library, and went to the waiting room. The director sat down facing you, with the help of a volunteer. He greeted you politely—“Thank you for coming all this way”—and held his hand out. Trying to mask your nervousness, you shook it, saying brightly, “Hello.” His hand was soft.