My first race

The passage of more than three decades has resulted in some of the details fading away, but I am able to remember my first road race fairly well. I would have paid closer attention had I known I would run in so many more of these in the...

I Finally Made the Team

I Finally Made the Team

The back-story is as follows. I had played guard on the basketball team, and quarterback and defensive back on the football team at Hexter Elementary School in Dallas. My neighborhood was no hotbed of athletic competition...

Close calls

I had done relatively well in the Sunsa 10K race in Amsa-dong. I just needed to traverse an intersection, and I would soon be at the finish line. It was the duty of some retired Marine Corpsmen to tell the drivers to stop...

A Cadillac for $50

Shortly after the turn of the millennium—let’s say 2002—I got something in the mail. It was not a personal letter but a commercial come-on. I ordinarily threw such pieces of mail in the circular file (the trash), but...

Spring break, 1972

I was a freshman at the University of Texas, and the one-week spring break was coming up. Some students went home to be with their families in Dallas or Houston, rich ones took skiing trips in Colorado or places more exotic, and others...

Scenes from a Hagwon: VII

Scenes from a Hagwon: VII

Who is Avril Levigne? Heck if I knew until I read about the Canadian singer/songwriter in one of the LIKE textbooks. Kim Hee-Man, director of the Yongsan school, had written it himself and so it was part of the curriculum. He thought...

Scenes from a hagwon: VI

Scenes from a hagwon: VI

I am writing this nearly two years after the fact, so I have forgotten some of the details. I wish I could have forgotten all of them, for reasons that will soon be clear. First, permit me to set the scene. The Chilgok LIKE School where I...

Scenes from a hagwon: V

Scenes from a hagwon: V

During the 14 months I taught at a pair of hagwons in Daegu, I had what seemed like thousands of children troop through my classrooms. There were all kinds of personalities, from painfully shy and introverted to bold and brash. None, though...