Father-and-Son Time: Cycling

Dandy Horse

(Image from Wikipedia)

My son, En-Uk, is starting to grow up.

One week ago, I wanted him to go bike riding with me along one of the tributaries to the Han River, but he whinged about the hot day and refused to go riding. I told him that he needed to start growing up, especially if he wants to do anything during his upcoming Ozark trip, which will be hot.

He still refused, so I biked alone, but my wife tells me that after I'd left, En-Uk seemed to regret not having accompanied me.

I therefore gave him a second chance before he, Sa-Rah, and Sun-Ae take off for a month's vacation in the Arkansas Ozarks (leaving me alone with my books), and the two of us went off biking yesterday along a path beside that tributary river together as father and son.

We had a lovely time. En-Uk is ten years old and thus somewhere between childishness and puberty, a mixture of innocence and burgeoning awareness of 'other' things . . . though he claims to have no interest in girls yet and says that he will put off getting a girlfriend until high school. Or so he said over lunch at a place on an embankment overlooking the river near a spot where we had just spent thirty minutes trying to skip stones.

As I drank a refreshing beer . . . or two . . . En-Uk ate his ramyon noodles and told of a funny Chinese kung fu movie that his taekwando instructor had recently shown. In the story were a gang-shi and a gui-shin -- a Chinese vampire and a Korean ghost, respectively, though what a Korean ghost was doing in a Chinese film seems rather puzzling, now that I think about it. The movie was a comedy but had its scary moments, En-Uk acknowledged. I half-listened to a detailed and complicated explanation of how one defeats the Chinese vampire by pasting a scrap of paper with Chinese writing to the creature's forehead.

That sounded a bit like belling the cat, and I wondered how it could be safely done, but I didn't ask. I suppose that kung fu masters have superior skills and with their lightning-fast reflexes can quickly attach the protective paper.

After an hour of conversation about this . . . and that . . . we cycled our way back home, stopping a couple of times for popsicles and without even a single whinge from En-Uk. A dandy time . . . but I'm aching this morning and posting to this blog later than usual.

Not that I'm whingeing about that . . .