Chapter 2

Important

Hada-ba-gi

Before I was five, my mother already had plans for me.

She wanted me to be important.

I know that.

Why she wanted it so badly, I don’t.

For a long time, I probably would have said she wanted me to be successful.

Now I’m not sure that’s quite the same thing.

Maybe she wanted me to be famous.

Maybe not.

What I know is that she wanted me to be important.

For a while, that meant ice skating.

I started “training” when I was three or four years old.

And I put training in quotes because I don’t want to make this into something it wasn’t. I

wasn’t training at the level a child seriously preparing for the Olympics would have been.

But we went to the rink every night so I could practice.

Before I tell you more about the skating, I need to tell you about Hada-ba-gi.

Mom’s father died before she ever met Dad.

I never knew him.

So on Mom’s side of the family, I didn’t have a grandfather I remembered.

Except I did, in a way.

Hada-ba-gi.

Hada-ba-gi means Grandpa.

He wasn’t my biological grandfather. He was Mom’s friend, an Olympic medalist from

Korea.

But I was three or four years old.

Biology wasn’t what made somebody Grandpa to me.

He was Hada-ba-gi.

He was the only Grandpa on Mom’s side I ever knew to call that.

And I loved him.

I didn’t call his wife Halmoni.

I already had my Halmoni.

But I loved his wife, too.

They lived in Houston, and we visited them often.

I loved those trips.

I wasn’t excited about going to Houston because an Olympic medalist was going to teach

me to skate.

I was excited because we were going to see Hada-ba-gi and his wife.

They were people I loved.

And sitting here writing about them now, I find myself wondering what happened to them.

I wish I knew.

I really do.

I don’t remember when they disappeared from my life.

I don’t know why.

I don’t know where life took either of them.

It’s strange.

You start digging around in your childhood looking for one thing and find people standing

there that you haven’t thought about in years.

And suddenly you miss them.

I miss them.

I miss those trips to Houston.

And I remember the ice.

Hada-ba-gi taught me to skate.

Not just how to stay upright and move around a rink.

He taught me how to skate backward properly.

And he taught me to jump.

Tiny jumps.

Very tiny jumps.

Because those scared the hell out of me enough.

I remember the butterflies in my stomach when it was time to leave the ice.

Even for a tiny jump, there was that moment when my skates weren’t going to be touching

anything.

I knew there were bigger jumps.

I knew I was supposed to learn them.

But I was afraid.

I was afraid of falling.

I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it.

And I was afraid of bringing shame to Mom.

She told me I brought shame to her.

Often enough that I knew what that meant long before a three- or four-year-old little girl

had any business worrying about whether her ice-skating ability reflected badly on her

mother.

So I did the little jumps.

Butterflies and all.

Up.

And back down onto the ice.

Safe.

The big ones were another matter.

I was too scared.

I don’t remember Hada-ba-gi making me feel ashamed of being afraid of the bigger jumps.

What I remember is him teaching me.

Mom wanted me to become an Olympic skater.

Hada-ba-gi was Grandpa, teaching a little girl how to skate.

That’s a distinction that matters to me now.

Why did Mom need the Olympics?

Why was just being good at something not enough?

Why did I need to become important?

That’s one of those things I’m realizing while writing this book that I never thought to ask.

I have a thought about it now.

It isn’t an answer.

I wonder whether Mom wanted a reason to be glad she had taken me from that basket and

brought me home.

Maybe if I became somebody important, bringing me home would have been worth it.

I don’t know.

I’ve never asked her.

So I’m not going to pretend I know what was in her head.

I only know what was put into mine.

Be good.

Be talented.

Be impressive.

Be important.

Don’t bring shame.

Maybe then there would be a reason to be glad you were here.

Dad skated with me, too.

Mom watched from the side.

She didn’t skate with us.

Dad did.

And I loved to spin.

Or be spun.

I loved that whirling feeling.

Round and round until the whole world seemed to be moving with me.

I loved that part of skating.

And then, suddenly, we stopped.

I don’t remember why.

I don’t remember anyone telling me we were done.

I just remember that at some point, we stopped going.

I wonder about that now.

Eventually, I might have been able to be good.

I don’t know.

I never got the chance to find out.

And that’s one of the problems with trying to tell a childhood in neat little chapters.

Mom wasn’t only one thing.

Dad wasn’t only one thing.

Neither was I.

There were beatings.

There was a basket.

There was fear.

But there was also music.

There were swimming pools.

There was Dad.

And there was his garage.

Little Helper

I remember Dad’s garage by its smells.

Oil.

Gasoline.

Grease.

Dad’s hands were usually dirty when he worked on cars.

Really dirty.

The kind of grease that worked its way underneath his fingernails and didn’t particularly

care that dinner was coming.

Mom cared.

Mom hated grease under his nails at dinner.

Which always struck me as a little unfair considering she expected him to fix everybody’s

cars.

Dad had LAVA soap.

That was the serious stuff.

Especially for the fingernails.

I remember the first time Dad showed me how to use it.

I’d been helping him.

Which meant my hands were starting to look a little like his.

Grease worked its way into the lines of my hands and underneath my fingernails.

Dad showed me how to scrub it out.

LAVA soap was gritty.

Really gritty.

It hurt.

I winced.

Dad kind of laughed.

Not at me exactly.

More at my discovery that getting filthy with Dad came with a price.

Clean-up.

He showed me how to work the gritty soap over my hands.

Around my fingers.

Under my nails.

Get all that grease out.

Because Mom didn’t like Dad coming to dinner with grease under his fingernails.

And I certainly didn’t want to get in trouble for having it under mine.

So Dad showed me how to get my hands clean.

Get dirty with Dad.

Get the evidence off before going inside.

I spent a lot of time in that garage with him.

I was his little helper.

The one he couldn’t get rid of.

He’d ask me for a tool.

At first, I didn’t know what half of them were.

So he taught me.

Not just their names.

What they looked like.

Where they were.

What made one different from another.

I watched him work, too.

Dad could listen to an engine and know something wasn’t right.

He could look at something broken and start figuring out how it worked, why it didn’t, and

what he needed to do to make it work again.

I wanted to understand.

Mostly, I wanted to be part of whatever Dad was doing.

He could have reached over and gotten most of those tools faster than waiting for me to

figure out what he wanted.

I know that now.

I probably slowed him down.

He taught me anyway.

Years later, when I took the ASVAB, every branch of the military wanted me.

My mechanical-knowledge scores were unusually high.

They saw test scores.

I could trace all of those answers back to a garage.

Dad.

Greasy hands.

LAVA soap.

And a little girl trying to remember which tool was which.

I may have slowed him down.

But I was learning.

And apparently, I was listening.

I’ve spent a lot of years asking why Dad didn’t protect me.

That’s still a fair question.

I’m beginning to understand that there may have been more than one answer.

Maybe keeping me beside him in that garage was one of the ways he knew how.

Maybe I was his helper because he needed me where he could see me.

I don’t know.

And I won’t turn a possibility into a memory just because it would make the story easier.

But I wonder about it now.

Because I remember being there.

Beside him.

Useful.

And safe enough to get my hands dirty.

Dad taught me a lot of things.

Other things, apparently, I decided to teach myself.

No More Floaties

I hated floaties.

Those inflatable things that went around your arms.

I hated them.

We had a kidney-shaped swimming pool in the backyard, and when my parents had

parties, I was often the only kid in a pool full of adults.

And there I was.

Bobbing around in floaties like some kind of human fishing lure.

Humiliating.

Eventually, I decided I was done with them.

One morning, while everybody else was asleep, I went outside.

It was early.

Really early.

The pool was still.

Nobody splashing.

Nobody talking.

Nobody telling me what I could or couldn’t do.

I walked past the waterslide.

Past the shallow end.

To the diving board.

The deep end was twelve feet.

I could not swim.

Apparently, I considered that a minor technicality.

I climbed onto the diving board.

I had decided I could swim.

So I jumped in.

I plunged through the stillness.

The water that had been perfectly calm a second before broke open around me.

Down I went.

Under the surface.

For that moment, there was nothing else.

Just water.

And me.

Then I fought my way back toward the other side of it.

Up.

Until I broke through the surface.

Air.

And apparently, I could swim.

So I swam.

No floaties holding my arms up.

No bobbing around like a human fishing lure.

I was doing it myself.

Freedom.

From floaties.

And then I remembered Jaws.

I’d seen that movie at an age when I had absolutely no business seeing Jaws.

And somewhere in my little-kid brain, I had managed to convince myself that Jaws could

come up through the drain at the bottom of our swimming pool.

Never mind that the drain was tiny.

Especially compared with Jaws.

Apparently, that was a problem for Jaws to solve.

All I knew was that I was in the deep end.

There was a drain underneath me.

And she was coming.

My beautiful first taste of floatie-free freedom turned into absolute panic.

I swam toward the shallow end as fast as my newly discovered swimming ability could

carry me.

I had gone from:

I CAN SWIM!

to:

I AM ABOUT TO BE EATEN BY A SHARK!

in record time.

Eventually, I got far enough into the shallow end that I decided I was safe.

Not because sharks couldn’t live in swimming pools.

I hadn’t gotten that far in my reasoning yet.

Because Jaws would get stuck before she could reach me.

That made perfect sense.

I stayed there and treaded water.

Here’s something strange.

I know what I used to be capable of in the water.

There was a time later in my life when I should have been swept away.

I wasn’t.

Somehow, I managed to get myself to safety anyway.

We’ll get to that.

My body can’t do those things anymore.

It’s broken down badly enough that the last time I tried swimming laps in a lane, I couldn’t

even make it through three of them.

But that’s my body.

I became a strong swimmer.

Really strong.

But that irrational fear of Jaws never went away.

It followed me into every body of water.

Somewhere in there, at least once, I’d feel that panic.

Like something was coming for me.

And sitting here writing this now, I’m wondering something I’ve never thought about

before.

Did I become such a strong swimmer because I was always trying to get away from Jaws?

Not literally, obviously.

I knew there wasn’t a shark in every swimming pool, lake or ocean I got into.

But my body apparently didn’t give a shit what I knew.

Maybe all those years of feeling like I needed to be able to get myself out of the water made

me better at getting myself out of the water.

I don’t know.

But now I wonder.

Back then, I had more immediate concerns.

Jaws was in the drain.

I needed to stay where she couldn’t fit.

And then my parents came outside.

Mom was yelling.

Screaming.

She had gone to sleep with a little girl who couldn’t swim and had awakened to find that

same little girl in the swimming pool.

Dad was there, too.

Quiet.

Dad was usually quiet.

Mom had enough volume for everybody.

I knew I was in trouble.

A lot of trouble.

But somewhere in the middle of Mom yelling and Dad being his usual quiet self, I caught

something in his eyes.

A twinkle.

He wasn’t smiling.

He didn’t have to.

I knew that look.

He was mad.

He had every right to be mad.

But that twinkle made me think he might have been a little proud, too.

I’d done it myself.

That mattered to me.

Doing things myself usually did.

Daddy’s Girl

Thursday was my night with Daddy.

I don’t remember exactly when our regular Thursday nights started.

I might have been four.

Maybe five.

I was little.

But I remember waiting for them.

Mom worked late on Thursdays.

That meant Dad and I could go.

Just us.

And in my mind, Dad was all I needed.

There was a whole little ritual to Dad getting ready.

I remember the sounds of him moving around the house.

And I remember Old Spice.

To this day, Old Spice smells like my dad.

Not some expensive cologne.

Not anything fancy.

Just Daddy.

And on Thursdays, it meant we were going somewhere.

I had homework to do first.

That part was non-negotiable.

But once it was done, Thursday night belonged to us.

We went to Starlight Skate.

I had white roller skates.

The good ones.

I loved those skates.

But Dad’s were cooler.

Dad had taken a pair of dark-brown cowboy boots and turned them into roller skates when

he was younger.

He made them himself.

When he skated, what you saw was a pair of cowboy boots a couple of inches off the

ground.

You didn’t expect wheels underneath cowboy boots.

So people would look.

Then look again.

Sometimes a third time.

How the hell was that man skating?

Then they’d realize there were wheels underneath the boots.

I loved watching people figure it out.

And I thought those skates were cool as hell.

I still do.

I’ve told Dad repeatedly that when he dies, if he doesn’t leave me anything else, I want

those skates.

I mean it.

They’re not valuable because they’re some rare pair of antique roller skates.

They’re valuable because they’re his.

They’re the cowboy skates my Daddy wore on Thursday nights.

The ones beside my white skates.

The ones I watched going around Starlight.

I want the skates.

I thought my dad was the coolest person alive.

I still think he’s pretty damn cool.

And those skates were Dad.

He made things.

He could take something that already existed, decide he wanted it to do something else,

and figure out how to make that happen.

I’d already seen that part of him in the garage.

I was his little helper there.

At Starlight, everybody else got to see a little bit of it, too.

But skating wasn’t really about the skates.

It was about him.

I loved couple skating.

When they called for couples, I didn’t want some boy.

I wanted Daddy.

I’d hold his hand and skate around that rink with my Daddy.

Those Thursday nights were different.

They were just Daddy and me.

And when I was with him, I felt like maybe I was wanted.

I didn’t know for sure.

But sometimes, when it was just Daddy and me, I could believe I might be.

For those few hours, that was enough.

I loved racing, too.

I wanted to go fast.

Really fast.

And yes, I wanted to win.

But I wanted something else even more.

I wanted Dad watching.

I wanted him to see how fast I could go.

I wanted him to be proud of me.

I wanted that twinkle.

As long as I can remember, I’ve fought for that twinkle.

Done damn near anything I could to get it.

That, and one of Dad’s barely-half-a-chuckle chuckles.

Dad has never been a man who gives you a whole lot to work with.

But I learned to read him.

A twinkle.

Half a chuckle.

That was enough.

So I raced.

Thursday after Thursday, we went back.

I got older.

My feet got bigger.

I’m sure plenty of things changed that I don’t remember changing.

But I remember those nights.

Starlight.

My white skates.

Daddy’s cowboy skates.

Old Spice.

His hand in mine during couple skate.

And being his little girl.

I can look backward now and ask all kinds of questions about my father.

There were things about him I didn’t understand.

Questions I carried with me for years.

How could he love me that much and not stop what was happening to me?

I know more about that now than I did then.

We’ll get there.

But little Judy didn’t know any of it.

She only knew her Daddy.

And she adored him.

Because I loved my Daddy.

I adored him.

And in my mind, he was all I needed.

Whatever else was happening in my life, on Thursday nights I didn’t have to wonder

whether I belonged.

I knew.

I was Daddy’s Girl.

That was my night with my Daddy.