Nostalgic Blog Filler...

Nostalgia

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My family and I moved to a new apartment over the weekend.

You could say that we've come down a bit in the world, leaving the spacious 23rd-floor flat for a smaller, 2nd-storey flat a few blocks away.

Physically, we have come down, of course, but materially, we've gone up in the world, for we're no longer renting. This apartment is our own -- or will be when we've paid off the loans.

But up or down, rented or owned, a new apartment requires one to rearrange one's life. I spent two days going through boxes of books, notes, photos, letters, and trivia, deciding -- at times arbitrarily -- what to save, what to discard.

In one old folder, I discovered the announcement of my birth. Yellowed with age -- an ironic reminder of old mortality for a clipping reporting a birth -- it reads:

Born to Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Hodges of Salem a son, Horace Jeffery, on May 14. The young lad weighed 8 lb. and 2 oz. Mother and son are doing fine. He has in the family one other brother. Mrs. Hodges is the former Gay Perryman of Salem.

The "lb." and "oz." look oddly familiar to me now, memories from a distant childhood when they already looked mysterious, like fragments of a broken, half-forgotten tongue that had been carried along as detritus in the stream of our English language. I recall them most distinctly on labels and recipes, but here they are, applied to me in the newspaper clipping as though I were a product being advertised. Maybe I was, but watch out for the bait-and-switch since no price is given.

That might explain the eventually absented father, leaving out of disappointment with the product, which he found overpriced and not what he'd ordered anyway.

In another folder, I found a letter from Senator Fulbright. I had forgotten about that. In 1989, when I received a Fulbright Grant for a year's study in Tuebingen, I had written to the senator a grateful letter, which I recorded in my journal:

Dear Senator Fulbright,

This may sound odd, but I'm writing to thank you for setting up the study abroad program, for I have just been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the history of early Christianity at the University of Tuebingen, in West Germany, and I feel I ought to tell you how much it means to me to have this opportunity. Not only does it provide the first real scholarship I have ever had, it also allows me the time -- in the very place I need to be -- further to research and ultimately to complete my PhD dissertation. So I write to express my gratitude.

But I'm writing as much for another reason. I grew up in the small town of Salem, Arkansas, raised there by my grandparents, and in the late fifties, early sixties (as you know), the Ozarks were still pretty isolated. Our town lacked running water, we had only an outhouse, we took baths in washtubs, and we sometimes even washed our clothes in the town branch. About the only things we didn't do were wash our faces in frying pans or comb our hair with wagon wheels -- toothaches didn't defy natural laws either.

All of this changed fairly rapidly throughout the sixties, and we ended up having all the amenities besides a car, which we didn't need anyway, being satisfied with where we were. Still, my grandparents always expected me and my brothers to get an education, as our Uncle Harlin had. Now, Grandpa Perryman died a few years back, near Easter of '82, but Grandma's still alive, soon to be eighty-four years old, so I called her last Saturday to inform her of the good news.

And this is really why I write to you, for upon telling Grandma Perryman of my award, I was astonished to discover that she knows you. "Oh yes," she said, "the last time Senator Fulbright was campaigning in Fulton County, he came by to see me in the Assessor's Office." "He knows you?" I asked. "Oh yes, and he knew Henry, back from the days Henry was in the state legislature." "I never knew that you two knew Senator Fulbright," I said. She assured me that they did, that she still does: "Our ages are the same," she told me, "and we share the same month, April." Then she told me that what she has always liked best, "about Mr. Fulbright and his wife, is that they were always real' down-to-earth people. They had a farm near Fayetteville, and when Mrs. Fulbright would come out to greet people there, she'd be wearing the rubber boots she'd had on out where she was working in the barn. They were both real' down-to-earth. I'm real' proud you got his award."

Well, after all that, how could I resist writing you?

Sincerely Yours,

H. Jeff Hodges

I wrote that on March 28th, 1989 and received a reply written April 10, 1989:

Dear Mr. Hodges:

I deeply appreciate your cordial letter about your experiences with the Exchange Program. I was particularly interested in your reference to the University of Tuebingen from which I received an honorary degree some years ago. My wife, who is now deceased, and I had a wonderful visit there.

I was very pleased by your reference to your grandmother's comments about Betty and me as a result of our visit to Fulton County, Arkansas many years ago. I am so pleased that you enjoyed your scholarship.

Sincerely,

J. W. Fulbright

Getting the reply was nice even if Senator Fulbright did misunderstand, not realizing that I had yet to go to Tuebingen. He was 84 and feeble, having had a minor stroke, as I learned later, but that made me value the letter all the more, and I'm glad that I found it stored away in my belongings.

I also found, in yet another folder, the transit visas from my trip to Berlin. Although I took my trip in the spring of 1990, after the Berlin Wall had come down, the German 'Democratic' Republic still officially existed. The border guards, however, no longer cared to control visitors and merely waved us through the wall, through which, we entered a no man's land whose buildings still bore bullet marks from the end of the Second World War. That was history, and by the end of the year, so was East Germany, as the divided country became whole again.

My mind turned to these things not just from documents culled out of old folders but also from a copy of the Korea Observer, which I found waiting for me at Kyung Hee University yesterday. I had received a complimentary copy of the Spring 2007 edition as thanks for having translated -- from French into English -- Jean Klein's article, "Relevance of the European Model for Regulating Security Problems in Northeast Asia," a paper that deals not only with security issues but that also discusses the institutions and strategies that helped overcome the division in Europe and that might help overcome the divisions here on the Korean peninsula.

The article opens as follows:

Since the historic meeting of presidents Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang, June 15, 2000, the relations between South Korea (Republic of Korea or ROK) and North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea or DPRK) have entered a new phase, and many observers are inclined to see in this event the beginning of a pragmatic policy tending to create conditions for a peaceful unification of the Korean nation. Such a unification would be consistent with a long tradition of independence, but at the end of the 19th century, Korea suffered the side-effects of the weakening Manchu Dynasty, of which it was tributary, and was thrown into the swirl of struggles engaged in by the great powers for the division and the consolidation of their spheres of influence in Asia.

Klein looks more optimistically upon such events as this meeting between the two Kims than some observers do, but he speaks as an expert on European security and takes the long view, believing -- not without evidence -- that such meetings and the institutions built upon them contribute substantively to peace, prosperity, trust, and change.

And on that happy note, I close today's post...