Please Look After Mom Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’ve read your book.” A short silence flowed between you and Mom. Mom asked you to go on. You continued.
    When you stopped talking, one person raised his hand and asked if he could ask a question. You told him to go ahead. “Even though he’s blind, he said traveling was his hobby, Mom.” You were stunned. Where would a blind person travel? He said he’d read something you had written a long time ago that was based in Peru. The character in the novel went to Machu Picchu, and there was a scene where a train went backward. He said after he read that he wanted to ride that train in Peru. He asked if you had personally ridden the train. It was a work you had written over ten years ago. You, who had such a bad memory that you often opened the refrigerator door and forgot why you had opened it, and would stand there for a while with the chill of the fridge washing over you until you gave up and shut the door, started to talk about Peru, where you had traveled before you wrote that book. Lima; Cuzco, dubbed the Belly Button of the Universe; San Pedro Station, where you took the train to Machu Picchu at dawn. About the train that started forward and jerked backward many timesbefore starting off to Machu Picchu. You told Mom, “The names of the places and mountains that I’d forgotten about poured out.” Feeling friendship from eyes that had never seen, eyes that seemed to understand and accept any flaw of yours, you said something you had never said about that book. Mom asked, “What was it?”
    “I said if I were to write it again I don’t think I would write it like that.”
    “Is that such a big deal to say?” she asked.
    “Yes, because I was rejecting what exists, Mom!”
    Mom gazed at you in the darkness and said, “Why do you hide those words? You have to live free, saying whatever you feel,” and pulled her hand from your grasp and rubbed your back. When you were a child, she used to wash your face the same way, with her big soothing hands. “You tell such good stories,” she said.
    “Me?”
    Mom nodded. “Yeah, I liked it.”
    She liked my story?
You were moved. You knew that what you’d said wasn’t all that good; it was just that you were talking to her differently after your experience at the Braille library. After you’d left home for the city, you’d always talked to her as if you were angry at her. You talked back to her, saying, “What do you know, Mom?” “Why would you do that, as a mother?” you’d rebuke. “Why do you want to know?” you retorted coldly. After you figured out that Mom no longer had the power to scold you, if she asked, “Why are you going there?” you replied curtly, “Because I have to.” Even when you had to take a plane because your book was being published in another country, or you had to go abroad for a seminar, when she asked, “Why are you going there?” youstiffly replied, “Because I have business to take care of.” Mom told you to stop taking airplanes. “If there’s an accident, two hundred people die at once.” “It’s because I have work to do,” you’d say. If Mom asked, “Why do you have so much work?” you replied, sullenly, “Yes, all right, Mom.” It was difficult to talk to her about your life, which had nothing to do with hers. But when you talked about feeling lost seeing the Braille version of your book, and the mounting panic you felt standing in front of four hundred blind people, she listened as intently as if her headache had gone away. When was the last time you’d told Mom about something that had happened to you? At a certain point, the conversations between you and Mom became simplified. Even that was not done face to face, but by telephone. Your words had to do with whether she ate, whether she was healthy, how Father was, that she should be careful not to catch cold, that you were sending money. Mom talked about how she made kimchi and sent some, that she had strange dreams, that she sent rice, or fermented