Musings on The Many Colored Land

Consider this a spoiler warning. The first book in this series was published in 1982, so I don't feel too bad about that. In addition, I find that I am rarely bothered by spoilers any more, unless there is some sort of major plot twist being revealed. So I'm not even going to tell you whether or not there are any twists in this series, just that if there are, I will not reveal them.

There are plenty of good reviews of it out there, including plot summaries. I particularly like this one, entitled "Julian May's: A Pliocene Exile is Greater than A Game of Thrones." (The article was written well before the final season of GoT, so it doesn't even take the ending into account.)  I would love to see these books made into a new series. Done properly, it would give Game of Thrones a run for its money, and not only because the series is already finished, including the four original books and the four prequels.1

1 The prequels (The Galactic Millieu Trilogy plus one) don't hit with the same power as the Pliocene Exile, but there is the potential for them to be done as a single season series, or a limited mini-series. I think it would be fun to produce them as a series at the same time as the Pliocene series, so that you could watch them at the same time. The timing would have to be right, but this is getting into geek levels of speculation. Sorry.

You can get the series cheap on used book websites, but the Kindle editions of all four books  are still listing for $9.99 each. I'm taking that as a good sign that there is still interest in them. At some point, I may knuckle down and buy them anyway, as I quickly grow tired of carrying around dead-tree versions of thick books.

It's my 12th birthday, and my family is over for the family birthday party (which I now realize was not so much about me as an easily scheduled reason to get together to eat and talk, which I retrospectively respect more than saluting my 12 trips around the sun).

When my original paperback fell apart,
the replacement had this cover.

Everyone knows that I love books, and I am really into Science Fiction, so my Uncle Tom and Aunt Debbie bought me a book entitled The Many Colored Land by Julian May. I have no idea how they picked it out, but I can imagine asking them: "Hey, Tom, do you remember that book you got me for my 12th birthday, 36 years ago? Or maybe it was Christmas. Might have been 1973 instead, maybe '74. I'm not really sure. Anyway, do you remember how you picked it out?"2

The copyright on this book is 1981, so I'm just guessing that I got a trade paperback in 1982. By '83 it would be bargain bin material... so... it might very well have been my 13th or 14th birthday.

At the time it was the most complex novel I had ever read. It had more characters to keep track of than anything short of Lord of the Rings.3 I don't remember my first time reading it, but I must have been impressed, because I returned to it many times. As I'm reading it now, I find that I am not just following what is happening, but anticipating it. I know the broad strokes, and the scenes. There are times when I have clear images in my head of what is going to happen next, and times when I know what the dialogue will be.

I haven't listened to any audio editions.
I'm saving that for when my eyes give up.

But I am still surprised by it. Surprised by the detail in the descriptions, the beauty in the prose. Surprised at how future society looks through the lens of the late 70s, projected by a woman who was in her late 40s as she wrote it. Her characters use the word "homophilia" instead of "homosexual," and it just sounds funny. (It's similar to the  feeling I have reading Golden Age science fiction: I love the plots, but the attitude towards women is frequently... less than impressive. And the attitude towards people of color is frequently... absent.)

I'm surprised at how strongly this book makes me feel. The character Richard Voorhees, for example, is a complete xenophobe; charming, but unlikable. He may have been influenced by Han Solo, given that TMCL was published only four years after Star Wars was released. Maybe Solo was only likable because we didn't see very far into his thoughts. If we had had any clue that shooting Greedo was easy for him because he considered Greedo to be a filthy alien, we might have revoked his "Heart of Gold" status.

In the prologue, Richard demonstrates that the lives of non-human people are not worth losing money to save. We see not only his actions, but hear his thought processes as he talks his decision through with the A.I. that helps him pilot his ship all by himself.4 He is defined by greed and pride, and it is late in the book before he starts any sort of redemptive arc.

This cover almost perfectly fails to
convey the spirit of the story, not least
because of the big 80s hair.

The thing is, now I'm not so sure that it actually is a redemption. He leaves the future because he hates exotics (the word May uses for aliens)5, he has a horrible encounter with an almost-human exotic woman, in which he is restrained, dominated, evaluated and rejected, but it almost doesn't matter because he can't remember any of it. He helps to kill her later, his subconscious anger giving him the drive to finish her off. It doesn't come across as shady, because the Tanu (the aforementioned exotics) have already demonstrated that they have pretty much enslaved most humans, except for the ones that have latent metaphysic talents.

So far so good, he feels true to character. But the next time he meets an exotic (a Firvulag, who also looks like a human but clearly demonstrates that he is an exotic), he has no reaction. Later he comes into close contact with many of them, and still nothing. No revulsion, rude comments, expressions of fear or acceptance, curiosity. Nothing.

Then he falls in love with Martha. She is not an exotic, but a human woman who had been sexually enslaved and forced to bear children for the Tanu. It's a softening change for him, and it makes him more sympathetic. But it doesn't suggest in any way that he is getting over his irrational hatred for anyone who is not a human. Martha has chronic health issues from bearing too many children, and Richard is seriously injured in the climactic battle scene. Martha dies, and Richard leaves, taking her body completely out of the picture. Sad and romantic, but a very selfish move, as he also takes permanently out of reach a seriously overpowered strategic asset that his friends could have used to huge advantage in the next book.

It is understandable. Martha is the first person he ever truly loved, and losing the ones you love makes you do irrational things. I felt bad for him losing his love, but even worse knowing that he did not really become much better as a person. There may have been potential for him to start working through some of his issues with Martha, but it could have gotten very dark for both of them, given their backgrounds.

In the next book (The Golden Torc) we catch a glimpse of him on death's doorstep, not making any sort of move towards life. And that is the last we see of Richard Voorhees in this series. There is no miraculous return later, no zooming in to take out the last two fighters so that the heroes can blow up the Death Star. He's just dead.

When I was young I found it touching: refusing to go on once your true love is dead. Now I find it to be evidence that he was truly self-centered. If he hadn't had the option of leaving, maybe he would have grown as a character. Maybe he could have become the better person that the story hinted at. Maybe he could have learned to love other people, even Martha. Because I am too old to buy into true love at first sight. Fascination at first sight, yes. Lust at first sight, happens all the time. Happily ever after at first sight? Way too rare to be showing up in books like this. It's a bigger fantasy than aliens and mind powers and intergalactic travel put together.

So my surprise with Richard was on two levels: first, that my point of view had shifted in such a negative, pessimistic direction since my early readings, and second, that I still sympathized with him as a character. Maybe even more than before.

Richard is one of the main characters, but not central to the story. Just memorable. And telling you about him has spoiled a tiny chunk of the complex story happening in this novel.

I found that my attitude towards all of the characters in TMCL shifted in a similar direction, regardless of whether I found them more or less sympathetic: I am more cognizant of their flaws, and better understand the mistakes they make. Though there are a few in there that I still don't quite understand, my record with these characters is better than my record with real life people!

I liked Aiken Drum less this time around, and found him to be pitiful in a way which I didn't before. I sympathized more with Elizabeth this time, but found myself tuning into her occasional arrogance in a way I hadn't before. I liked Amerie even more than the first time around, took her spiritual growth more seriously, and actually noticed that she was Hispanic this time.6 The first time around I thought that Bryan was romantic, but this time he felt delusional, even mentally ill. At first it felt like lazy characterization, but then I found that it deepened the story as a whole, even as it made him seem more pitiful. Why would a sane person take a one-way trip six million years into the past just to pursue a relationship with "the perfect woman?" Other than the demands of the plot, I found the reason to be disturbing and haunting.

I am really enjoying reading this series again, and I am pretty sure it is not just nostalgia. From the first time I read TMCL I dreamed of seeing it on the screen. For many years I thought that it would make an amazing movie, but as I grew older and more cynical, I saw how much you have to cut down even simple books like the Harry Potter series to make good movies. The Many Colored Land is the first book of four, and there would be no way to do justice to it even split into two movies. But the past decade has made it clear that TMCL really needs to be a series on HBO or Netflix. The first book could be told over 12 hours of screen time, maybe more.

If you have watched or read A Game of Thrones, the Saga of Pliocene Exile is comparable in scope, with the potential to be more visually stunning. It would require no exaggeration at all in the transition from book to screen to bring audiences to their knees. No dinosaurs or dragons, but there are some exotic (sorry, make that ancient) animals, aliens that vary from tall and ethereal to monstrous in a variety of flavors. The settings would be quite wide ranging, especially since the core eight characters come from different worlds, with stories that range from highly technical to high theater, deep space to deep seas, and future hospitals, sports stadiums and... offices, I suppose.

The characters are a bit white, as I've mentioned, with only one person of color in that initial group of eight. But there are some minor characters of color who could be brought to the foreground. Her Galactic Millieu is supposed to be a Utopian, post-racial society, but the galaxy-wide colonization is set up so that individual countries are allotted planets of their own. May doesn't directly address how such a system could foster racism, but mankind is working towards a mental unity that promises to be the end of the violence inherent in the system.7 And there is some handwaving at the beginning about how most people who choose this exile are white and of Western European descent.

----

I started writing this post in 2019. I suppose I ran out of steam. But I find it now to be a good piece of writing, worth sharing. Reading the above makes me want to revisit the Saga of the Pliocene Exile. Maybe they are worthy of some further reflection. And I'm curious if the past seven years worth of Covid, cancer, and life in general has changed the way I view these characters. Because it's clear that revisiting an old favorite like this is as much about looking back at myself as it is about the book.



2 They may have picked it out based on the cover, but it wouldn't have been any of these covers. It was a trade paperback, mostly black, with what looks like a multiple exposure photo of a neon-blue spaceship receding into the background. My Google skills are not world class, and I'm afraid I was unable to find it.
3 But let's be honest here, in the books can you really tell the elves apart?
4 I was going to go with "solo" here, but decided I didn't want to risk the pun-ishment.
5 An odd choice, which did not strike me as odd until I wrote this sentence, just now.
6 Publishing was, and still is, very white-washed, but my pitiful, white-encased brain often read even more white into stories than was actually there. I'm getting better, though.
7 Help, help, I'm being repressed.

The Picture Comes Together

This semester I am teaching 20 hours of classes per week, with a total of about 180 students. That's more than usual for me recently. The past couple of years it's been closer to 130. If you don't count repeat students, I meet around 200 new students every semester. If I can remember a single name from a previous semester it is a minor miracle, but I can usually recognize former students when I see them on campus.

And of course every semester there are students who look kind of like students I have taught previously. There are only so many combinations of features possible, especially in a relatively homogeneous population like that of Korea. In a way, when you recognize someone it's because they present enough of the right pieces in the right places for your brain to to put the pieces together and make a picture that connects with your mental model of that person.

But this semester is hitting differently. I have a handful of students who look a lot like students I've taught before. Four weeks into the semester that feeling has shifted into something like, "Oh yeah, I've known this student for years!" when rationally I know that is absolutely false.

If I could remember the names of the previous students, I would ask, "Are you so-and-so's sibling? Or (gasp) child?" Except that asking "Do you have an older relative?" is kind of a weird question if you can't actually name the older relative, or even guess what year they might have studied with you.

I wondered if this was a recognized phenomenon, like déjà vu, so I tried asking ChatGPT. It's pretty good at figuring out what word you are looking for to match a complicated idea. In this case, it wrote:

----

The short answer to the actual question is: there may be several named phenomena adjacent to what you're describing—déjà vu, déjà vécu, cryptomnesia, source-monitoring errors, and facial familiarity without identification—but I don't know of a specific named phenomenon meaning “people in a new generation start looking familiar because they resemble people from an earlier generation you've encountered professionally.”

----

Fun stuff, right? But more rabbit hole than solution.

After some discussion with my low-budget, unreliable, artificial therapist, I came to the conclusion that my facial recognition database is full and I'm experiencing stack-overflow errors. (And people say that AI can't relate to us!) In other words, I have too many familiar face pieces stored in my head, and they are desperate to connect up to make a familiar face. I'm getting false recognition signals. Useless information.

Sometimes having too many pieces causes problems. But sometimes having excess pieces keeps the problem interesting.

You see, I've also noticed a similar phenomenon in the area of recognizing the personalities of my students: that there are really only a handful of student personality types. I think I recognize them all, usually within the first couple of weeks. I want to be good at teaching all of them, in any combination. When I get an odd combination of types, what you might consider a difficult class, I consider it a challenge. And I don't get bored with classes, because not only are they all slightly different in composition, they all have a variety of possible outcomes.

For me every class is like a puzzle, and I kind of like solving puzzles. Especially jigsaw puzzles. I have a stack in my office, and will set one up on my table if I really need to chill out. Every class is a different puzzle, every student is a piece, and the pieces fit together differently depending on how you finesse them. But unlike the facial recognition problem, recognizing these pieces works in my favor.

Some classes are easy puzzles. I have a few classes with students who took my class last semester (the veterans). They like my style, and they sought me out to experience it again. The veterans help the new students to figure out how things work, and those classes are up and running smoothly by the end of the 2nd week. That means that I can make them into some really interesting pictures: more focus on larger conversation strategies, and how to be an excellent conversation partner, rather than just competent at English conversation.

One class has no veterans, but a majority of students seem to like the idea of becoming better at English conversation, so they do what I ask them to do. They make mistakes in following my directions, but don't mind being corrected and learn from each other. They will make a lovely picture of confidence and curiosity.

I've also got a couple of low-level classes. Most of the students are "normal" for Korea: they've studied English, but haven't practiced speaking much, if at all. They're taking this class because it's a required course, but wouldn't be here if they could avoid it. They are at least somewhat interested in getting a good grade, so they do the minimum of what I ask them to do. They will make a pleasing landscape: they won't be able to go deep, but by the end of the semester many of them will be nice to talk to, and not scared of talking to someone in English.

The difficult classes are the real puzzles: these classes have a handful of "wing-nuts," as my friend Rick put it. Often--but not exclusively--sports majors, they are way more interested in entertaining each other than improving their communication. They can be friendly, especially if you meet them with some Korean, but they are easily overwhelmed and quickly resort to class clown mode or shutting down.

A common response to the wingnuts is to treat them with contempt, ignoring them while focusing on the students who are prepared to learn. I've done that, as well as trying to strongarm them into doing what I want. 

But in the past few years I have found more satisfaction in convincing the wing-nuts to try, and celebrating their little victories. Everyone likes to be celebrated, whether they admit it or not. Some are like cats, tolerating it then lashing out when they realize that they have been fooled into camaraderie. But most of them see their own progress and are pleasantly surprised.  And when I fail at my job (because it feels like failure when I don't convince the wing-nuts to join me), they just do as little as they can get away with. They pass or they fail, but they don't really learn much.

I know that I am not a failure in those situations. The two hours a week we share is not going to turn a student around if they don't want to be turned. Some of the wing-nuts have rusted in place. I don't have enough WD-40 for all of them. Archimedes said, "Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." Sure. But what are you going to bring to the next class? Or the one after that? Or the fifth in a row?

It's rare for me to find a student that doesn't match a previous type. In my toolkit I now have drivers for most every kind of personality: the eager, high-achieving students, the wing-nuts, the apathetic phone-glued zombies (thankfully few), the kids that are surprised to find that they can learn to have English conversation and get better at it, the shy ones, the outgoing ones, and the rebels who don't seem to fit in with the rest of the class. They are all unique in their own way, and they all fit together into puzzles with varying levels of complexity and beauty. 

When I do jigsaw puzzles I deliberate hide the box, so I have to find the picture as it emerges. An English class doesn't come with a box, but I get a similar enjoyment out of discovering the picture they form. Some classes are the Mona Lisa, some are Dogs Playing Poker, and some are just a heavy-handed crayon drawing of our house and a fire truck. 

Even the house and fire truck get their day on the fridge.

Getting it Write

My father wrote me an email when I told him that I was asked to be the regular preacher at Holy Joy church. In it, he wrote the following:

Dear Rob. 

I think your becoming a preacher is a calling you have had most of your life and I wish you well.  I am still working on my writing, some new stuff and minor corrections on old stuff.  I just got through reading Chapter 25, Who I Am,  A Spiritual Journey.  I go back and read it every once in a while.  Each time I read it makes me think about who I am or at least who I want to be.  

I wonder if something like that might be something you need to write for yourself, to help you remember who you are when you get stuck at times.  Doing two jobs at a time is often hard to keep track of who you really are.

That is something to consider. Who you are is so tied up in what you spend time on, and most of us spend most of our waking time at work. What happens when you add another job that is significantly different from your main job? How does that change who you are, what you do, and what you want to be?

One thing I did during this last trip to Kansas (January/February 2026) was browse through some of my old journals. I read through quite a few entries from the first one, which covered most of my college years. There were things that made me cringe, and things that made me nod in recognition. My reasons for journaling were mostly to preserve my thoughts. I even made a short list, including my grandfather who had recently passed away, a girl who I had been infatuated with (just her name, nothing for me to actually connect with, and true to the prediction I do not remember anything about her at all!), a couple of classes that I have memories of, and Monty Python for crying out loud! The British comedy troupe managed to occupy far more of my mental state than I am willing to admit at this point.

What I didn't realize when I started was that the very act of writing down my thoughts was helping me to think. I am hardly unique in this, and probably started to understand it after reading it from someone else. Maybe one of the sources quoted in this article from Quote Investigator. 

I like to think of myself as a thoughtful, intelligent person. Who doesn't? But I am not fast on my feet conversationally. Taking in a new idea as I hear it is slow for me, and my response is either fast or thoughtful. Not both.

Part of what you see in the Roblog is me thinking slowly. Sometimes really slowly, sometimes not slowly enough. I started writing this post in February of 2026, just for the record. I will leave it to you to decide whether I wrote it slowly enough.

Part of my job is counseling students at my university. Sometimes this means listening to them talk about something that they think will impress me, or asking me questions that they think will impress me. But sometimes they ask for advice, which scares me just a little. I try to avoid saying, "You should..." with one exception, and even that adds a maybe:

Maybe you should try writing about this in a journal. Write down the question you just asked me, then write out an answer, and what that answer means, and what it would lead to. Then explore another answer to the question. You will find that some of your ideas seem to become more solid as you write them down, and some get fuzzier and fuzzier, until all that you have left is a blurry smudge of ink where you thought you had an idea. If it's a really tough one, you might have to write out some ideas them leave them alone for a few days, because even the good ideas look fuzzy when you stare at them too long. 

I both love and fear this process. I love it because sometimes an idea comes out so clear and beautiful that I can't quite believe that it is really mine. I fear it because sometimes my ideas rise up like the Urak-hai out of Saruman's mud pits in Lord of the Rings. Ugly grains of truth twisted by selfishness or pride. And totally mine. And what if I mistake the wrong for the right just because it is mine, and pleasing to me? What if I take one of these deceptive ideas into the nest of my mind, feed it and care for it until it grows into a belief, spawning habits and attitudes like a cuckoo that came out of my own self? What then?

The good writers know that you must kill your darlings. No matter how well something is written, if it does not serve the purpose of your piece, it has to be cut. This has always been hard for me, because these darling ideas are sometimes very difficult to bring into being. It has gotten easier in some ways, harder in others.

I have been preaching semi-full-time at Holy Joy for a year now. Thirteen and a half months on the calendar, but six weeks in America during the winter makes it roughly a year. Three sermons a month, so right around 40 sermons. An auspicious number, even if that is not the exact count. At any rate, it is more than the 30-something sermons I wrote between 2017 and June of 2025.

I have also been writing content for the courses I've been teaching. A lecture and a sermon are qualitatively different, but one similarity is that there is a deliberate audience. In short, I've been sharpening my thinking for other people to hear my ideas. It's meant that the Roblog has been sadly neglected. I started writing this post on February 20th, 2026. If I hit publish today, it will be August 15th. 

So here is part of the answer to the question: Who am I? I'm someone who writes to get it right.

The Office and the Echo

 I’ve been practicing my euphonium mostly in my office at work. Practicing music in the law building is complicated. I do not want to disturb students or colleagues, so I use a mute, check that no one is in the nearby offices, and play at lower volumes.

However, I have found that after 7:00 p.m. the building is mostly empty, especially on the weekends. I still keep my door closed, but take out the mute. Muted practice is better than no practice, but it changes everything. The tone is not an honest reflection of my ability. Even though my colleague down the hall can faintly hear me, he said it was kind of nice, like a far away trumpet. 

I was willing to overlook the trumpet comment, especially in light of his otherwise positive words.

I was practicing in my office on the last Friday night of winter vacation when I went out in the hall to get some water. The building felt especially dark, empty and quiet, so I decided to try something a little outside of my comfort zone. I took my euphonium out into the hallway and played a few notes. It was fun to hear the echoes, but felt like breaking a rule. I blew a few more notes, then waited quietly for a door to open, or footsteps to approach. 

Nothing but silence. 

I headed for the central stairwell.

My office building has two wings with a large central stairwell that is open to both wings on all five floors and the basement below. My office is on the fifth floor, so the stairwell goes up just one more floor. In other words, a large sound in the stairwell could be heard throughout the building. During work hours I like to hum or sing in this stairwell, but try to restrain myself. It feels like easily excused behavior if it is not loud enough to disturb nearby classes.

I have long wondered what it would be like to go into that stairwell and make a sound that could not be easily excused. This would be the day to find out. How would it sound to play my euphonium in there? Would I get in trouble? Surely not, especially during vacation with no one around.

So I played. Instinct told me to start with a single note. I decided to play the F below middle C, the most relaxed note in the scale for me: all valves open, lips so relaxed it feels more like play than work. No need to hunt for this one. Starts as clear as a bell every time. Except when I’m nervous.

My first note in the stairwell did not start as clear as a bell. But after a second or two my lips and lungs remembered what they were doing, and we settled into the kind of note that I can hold without wavering for a surprisingly long time. Which I did.

I had to. I had to hold that note because I was joined by a host of angels, all playing the same horn around a thousand corners from a thousand different dimensions. They all followed my slightest wavering, but not at precisely the same time. They all played the same note, but not exactly the same pitch. When I let my volume swell, they followed me the same way that a flock of birds follows itself. When I let my volume drop, they too got quieter. 

I am pretty good at playing quietly. The euphonium does not look like a subtle instrument, being shaped like a small tuba, but it can whisper with the best. 

I could not play under the sound of those echoing angels. When I stopped, the slowest of them took two or three seconds to fade out. 

It was sublime. I listened as the echoes faded, my ears grasping for the last few waves finding their way back to me. Somehow the silence felt richer than before, now that this chorus had performed.

I took a few breaths, then played the F again, dropped to the C below, went back to the F, then up to the A, then repeated them over and over. The echoes held the whole chord as I moved between notes, but they also reflected every missed tone, every rough start. It is both the most rewarding and least forgiving performance hall ever.

I wanted to offer a song, and found the old hymn “How Great Thou Art” right there in that F chord, so I played it. The song lifted me even as I lifted it. I slowed down on the descending lines, giving each note a chance to inhabit the hallways.

I wanted to soar through the chorus, and I mostly did. Even the notes I flubbed couldn’t bring me down. It was hard to believe that these amazing sounds were coming from me and my euphonium! 

I will not give up practicing in my office to only play in the stairwell. For starters, the windows of opportunity for stairwell practice are limited, especially during the semester. I don’t want to get a reputation as the Low Budget Low Brass Phantom of the Law Building Professor. 

More importantly, there is room for mistakes. The loaded bookshelves lining my office not only hold ideas, but grab the sound--including mistakes--out of the air. I still hear them, just not echoed back by a thousand angels in a thousand ways. The angels offer no judgement, just honesty, but that much honesty can be overwhelming. 

The office is a forgiving place to practice. I think that it suits my needs most of the time. But when I really need to hear the truth, and the building is empty, I will return to the stairwell. 

A Taste of a Previous Home

Thakali Khana, up top so it shows up on the preview thumbnail.

Early last fall a former coffee shop near my workplace closed and put up a new sign:

Lumbini Restaurant & Bar / Nepal * Indian Food

When I saw that the sign specifically listed Nepal before Indian food, and had the Nepali flag first on their sign, my heart began to beat faster. 

Close up of their sign

Would this be the first Nepali focused restaurant in our fair city? We have Indian restaurants, including some with Nepali chefs. They have cloth napkins, fancy glass goblets for your water, and lots of art on display and deliberate decor. They offer a nice experience for going on a date, but are too expensive to visit very often. I could not return to any of them with Lumbini taunting me.

I had no choice but to play the waiting game. I put that top photo in my class slides and begged my students to tell me when they opened. Around the second week of November one of my students told me that they were open, so that weekend I went in for a meal.

Lumbini is as close to the Nepali eating experience as I have ever had outside of Nepal. At the end of this post I will add a lengthy description, but there's a photo at the top of this post to make your mouth water.

The first time I ate at Lumbini it didn't just bring back memories, it reminded me of who I used to be. Uncounted meals eaten in smokey, poorly lit rooms, sitting cross-legged on a woven bamboo mat on a dirt floor, eating off of an aluminum plate on the same dirt floor in front of me. Rice and dhal cooked over a wood fired hand-made brick and mud-mortared stove. Meals eaten at bus stops with benches and tables, maybe even electric lights, but still that smoke in the air, the dishes washed at a pump outside.

Food was always served by women, whether in a home or restaurant. They were both pleasantly surprised that I ate correctly (right hand scooping food from plate to mouth, left hand picking up a cup of water; digging in without even asking for one of the two spoons they have for measuring sugar and tea) and mildly offended that I was unable to eat half of my body weight in one sitting. 

In some circles there is no higher compliment than visibly enjoying the food that someone has cooked. This can be amplified by licking the fingers clean before washing and letting loose a proper belch, to show that you speak truly when you say that you are physically incapable of taking another bite. 

Just one more bite!

The second time I needed to confirm that I had not dreamed the entire experience. It was just as good as the first time, and I decided that the next time I had to bring my family with me. They are fairly adventurous, but I was still a bit nervous. For years I had been cooking curry for them, and they called it "Nepal Curry," when it was nothing of the sort. It was MY curry, influenced by my time in Nepal, but also by my cooking experiences in Korea and Kansas. What if the flavors were too weird for them? What if my love for Nepali food was mostly sentimental? 

What if my family rejects this food? Or dismisses it as not worth eating more than once? It would be a rejection of a fundamental formative chunk of my past. 

Like saying, "I love you, but lose the left hand." 

The third time we ordered five different dishes as well as dumplings as an appetizer. I was pretty sure that something in the lineup would work, hoping that the khana would be front and center. It is our default Korean mode to share food from the center of the table, which was a bit awkward with the khana. I mixed some dhal bhat (bean curry with rice) to serve out, but the side dishes were a bit awkward for everyone to reach. Some cultural differences are just difficult to get past.

That's one happy family! Nice photo, Maxine!

Maxine's favorite dish was t'hukpa, a Tibetan style noodle soup. Very comforting food, and evidence that if a culture has chickens they eventually develop chicken noodle soup. Quinten liked the sukatee: dried pork strips fried with spices and onions. The Pulao (rice cooked with veggies and nuts) and Chicken Chili (sweet and spicy chicken with a thick tomato and onion sauce) were popular, and mixed well together. 

T'hukpa on the left, Chicken Chili top center, Khana on the right

We forgot to order samosas, but by the end of the meal not even Quinten wanted more to eat. We had polished off all but the last few stubborn grains of rice. I assured my family that leaving a little food was the Nepali way of showing that you definitely had enough to eat.

I didn't use the spoon to put food in my mouth! I promise!

Now that I have dragged you through my nostalgia, I might as well make you hungry as well. And perhaps convince you to visit Lumbini.

Thakali is the ethnic group from which this food originates, but most Nepali people call it khana (food). Everything was there, starting with the rice in the middle. If you have ever eaten in Nepal, you will instantly realize that there is not nearly enough rice on that plate to qualify for dhal-bhat, but whenever I started to run out of rice, or dhal, or veggies, they offered me more! Just like in Nepal! No extra charge! Every food on this plate has a very different flavor profile. You can mix and match so that every bite tastes slightly different. 

For the tour of the khana, I am going to start on the plate at the 9:00 position with the slices of raw cucumber and carrot. They are the easiest food to identify other than the rice in the middle, and give us a good starting point. They are also the simplest flavor to describe, because like the rice they are prepared with no seasoning at all.

Moving clockwise, at 10:00 is a tomato preserve (gohlbayda achar). I know that it is made by scorching the tomatoes under a flame, but I'm not sure what happens after that. I suspect that the tomato repents of its sins and becomes an angel. An angel with an acidic profile.

Next is a metal bowl of dhal--lentil curry. A thick, hearty soup, mildly seasoned, that will power you up for a long day, and later help you to make entertaining noises. The thing at noon that looks like a giant corn chip is a fried spicy bean-flour papadum. Crispy, with a little bit of its own, it offers a nice textural counterpart to the rest.

Thakali Khana

Just to the right of the papadum is the meat curry. They offer chicken, lamb, pork or goat. I went with goat (this time) because goat is The GOAT: greasy, because they don't trim off the fat or skin, stewed slowly to make it tender, long enough that the cartilage becomes soft. Exquisite spices. The bowl looks tiny, but it is actually the right amount of meat. In Nepali cuisine the meat is usually not the center of the meal, but a side dish that enhances the rice. And boy does it.

The next little shallow dish at 2:00 has curried potatoes, which could have passed for an exotic potato salad if it had been chilled.

Next to it at 3:00 are a couple of pickled green chili peppers, and a 4:30 a pickle called "sinky" (rhymes with the toy slinky). It is made by slicing long white radishes into strips, then drying them in the sun for a few days. This gives them a unique texture, a bit tough and chewy for a vegetable, but not fibrous at all. They are then marinated in spices, mustard oil, and mystery. It was one of my favorite side dishes back in the day. There is a Korean kimchi that is similar, but not as good.

At 6:00 we have spinach, cooked quickly and simply in a pan with almost no spices. A solid dose of green to the plate, and another unique flavor to add to the palate, and at 7:00 we have our last entry, curried broccoli. 

Not pictured is the clarified butter, much to my shame. They charge extra for it, but oh my goodness is it worth it! They bring it in extremely hot, and add it to the dhal and the rice. It sizzles when it hits, and makes the food scalding hot for a minute, which means you shouldn't try to eat it. Damn the torpedoes and burn my fingers I ate anyway. Totally worth it.

In the past, McDonald's was my weekly taste of home, and I still like to have a Sausage Egg McMuffin and hashbrown from time to time. But now Lumbini is my taste of home, even though Nepal was only my home for two years. I'm glad my family likes the flavor of my past. I hope to bring them back many times.

A Day with Maxine

Today I spent the day with Maxine. 

We checked on getting her driver's license, which we are ready to get tomorrow. We had lunch at a Jamaican restaurant, which we both enjoyed. We walked across town for it, 30 minutes round trip. On the way back we stopped at a game shop. I bought a card game called "a Gentle Rain" (which claims to be "A cozy game for one or more minds in need of a soothing reset." Sounds perfect for me.) 

Maxine drove us around town. It was only her fourth time driving since we came to Kansas. (Where's a gentle rain when you need it?) Later I drove us for 45 minutes to meet my aunt and uncle for dinner, then back to town for another 45 minutes. Lots of time for conversation. We will get more time together before I leave, but not a lot. 

It was a good capstone day, as Quinten and I will be leaving in four days. We talked about many things: about the cool aunts and uncles, and what it takes to be them. About being ready--or not--to leave home. About driving, which still makes her nervous, even in this small town. And about food, of course--the ones we miss and the ones we are enjoying. We talked about her brother, and how he will miss her when he needs her, but probably not day to day. 

And we talked about the little things that fill up the spaces between the big topics, like how we are out of shape in this town that discourages walking, and how getting a bargain on good clothes feels great. It was a good day. A kind of soothing rain. It didn't erase the things hanging over me, but it gave me a chance to reassure Maxine (and myself) that she will be okay.

Family Reunion

My kids and I are in Kansas for six weeks, about halfway through as I start writing this. We have made this trip every two or three years since 2011 when we moved back to Korea. We always lose things when we take a trip like this. Some losses are easier to carry than others.

Part of each of these trips has been a family gathering. My mother sets it all up weeks in advance so that everyone can get it on their calendar. It started as a late Christmas celebration when my children were little kids, but gradually became a family and close friends potluck. 

This time I overheard someone say, "I haven't seen Doug's family since the last time we did this three years ago!" The response was, "It's become a kind of regular family reunion."

I love the idea of Family Reunions. When I was growing up the Sack family got together for Christmas for a good 20 or more years in a row. Watching the kids this time reminded me of when I was little and all these almost-strangers told me how tall I had gotten and asked how I was doing in school. I tried to make not-awkward conversation with my cousin's 12-year-old daughter, but it was clearly awkward, even though she was reading a book and I love reading and could always be found reading at uncomfortable events when I was her age. My role has moved too far beyond hers to join her group, at least in one shot.

These Family Reunions are always fun, with good food and lively conversation, even though I was getting a little tired by hour five, and kind of wanted to get out my Kindle and just sit and read with the other bookworm.

My mother planned this one well, deliberately taking herself out of the center of action. In the past she has been more involved in preparing food and such, but this time she did most of the work by phone: reserving the room, emailing everyone, ordering a huge amount of fried chicken from a local restaurant, etc. It was a deliberate choice, because it has gotten more difficult for her to stand and move around the past year or two. Her planning paid off in a way that she could not have expected:

She was unable to attend. At five o'clock in the morning on the day we arrived in the United States, she tripped on a slipper, fell and broke her hip. I visited her in the hospital that afternoon (or evening? damn jetlag) without the kids. She had surgery the next day, which went very well, then was moved to a rehabilitation clinic in Leavenworth about a week later. The problem is that she has also had appetite problems: she has no appetite. And it hurts to swallow. A lot. For a long time.

This went unchecked by the hospital and the rehab for almost two weeks, possibly because they were focused on the broken hip. By that time her condition was deteriorating because she wasn't eating. It felt like she was just getting worse and worse, and was going to die. There have been ups and downs, but as I write this the doctors still don't understand why she has trouble eating.

So around four o'clock at the family reunion which was missing its coordinator, my Dad told me he was going to see Mom, then stood at the front of the room and got everyone's attention. "Thank you for coming everyone. We're so happy to have Rob and all the grandkids here, but.. I... I... I thought I could do this." He started to break down in front of everyone, so I went up to him, put my arm around his shoulder, and continued for him:

"We are so happy that you all are here. Stay, eat, talk, but Dad is going to be with Mom at the hospital now. She knows that you want to see her, but please don't come to the damn hospital. We love you."

I got a laugh with "damn hospital," and replies of "We love you, too." Then I walked outside with Dad. I asked how I did, and he told me that it was a bit scary how well I had read his mind! I told him that I have spent my life hearing his and Mom's voice in my head, and as I have gotten older and listened more closely, I hear them both more clearly than ever. It is not scary at all. It's beautiful. As much as I will miss them when they are gone, they will never be completely gone as long as I still hear their voices.

The ironic part of me hearing my father's voice in my head is that he is losing his words. He has ideas clearly in his head, but the words will not form in his mouth. Simple words, like hospital, or key, or blanket. He will be reading words from a page, but his mouth refuses to form them. He has stopped being worship leader or doing any other public speaking at church, though he still sings. Sometimes I can give him the right words, but mostly I just listen, or encourage him to go on to the next idea. 

I have started mourning the passing of my parents, as I lose little pieces of them. I don't suppose anyone ever feels ready to take the place of their parents as the oldest in their immediate family. I thought it hurt when I lost my grandparents, but it is clear that that was a shadow of the loss that is coming. 

You don't have to tell me that this is the price of love. I know. I know that the price of love is losing it, and that someone will always pay that price. It is not too steep a price for the love I carry for them in my heart, and their voices that I carry in my mind. Love and voices which I will continue to pass to my children, until I too lose my words.