dinner with Dr. Hodges

Today, Friday, at 5PM, I found myself exiting a cab and lumbering over to the apartment building of my friend Dr. Horace Jeffery Hodges, who runs the Gypsy Scholar blog and teaches at Ehwa University, the top women's university in Korea. You might think that teaching at Ehwa—where a man is surrounded by beautiful young ladies all day long—would be a horndog's dream come true, but Jeff is a happily married man with a lovely wife and two great kids. He told me that some grad students occasionally ask him for relationship advice, and that he doesn't know whether to be flattered or insulted by such female attention.

When I reached the first floor of the apartment building, Jeff was already coming down the stairs. His timing was telepathically uncanny, cementing my impression that he is truly a master of the dark side of the Force. We stepped briefly into his apartment—a different domicile from the one I remembered visiting years ago—and I said hello to Jeff's wife Sun-ae, who was cooking. Jeff knew of a quiet coffee shop not far from his home, so we walked over there, ordered ourselves two tall glasses of kiwi fruit juice, then set to talking.

At first, we chatted mostly about our mutual friend Sperwer, who will be competing in the Mr. Seoul bodybuilding competition on Saturday. Sperwer has undergone a radical transformation since I last saw him in 2008. I can attest to his current near-total lack of body fat and his bulletproof, six-pack abs. Jeff and I covered quite a few other topics as well, ranging from language to culture to history to education to plagiarism to tenure to pop songs.

We eventually wandered back to Jeff's home, where I greeted the offspring: Sa-Rah, the elder sister who's in high school, and En-Uk, the younger brother who is, I think, in middle school. Both had grown quite a bit since the last time I had seen them. En-Uk struck me as much calmer and more focused than he had been during our previous meeting. Sa-Rah, meanwhile, was her usual poised, intellectual self. I think she's a budding scholar. During dinner, she said that a student shouldn't merely study only what the educational system says to study; at some point, she should go beyond those limits on her own initiative. That's scholar-talk to me. I can easily imagine her becoming a professor, just like her parents. Doctor Sa-Rah. En-Uk (pronounced "ee-nuke"), meanwhile, seems more like the hands-on type: less emphasis on thinking, more emphasis on doing. I don't imagine him ever sitting down to write a novel, but I can see him following a career path much like my brother David's: becoming successful in business and raking in the dough. He's got a charming personality and budding street smarts, both balanced by what his mother proudly deems his strong moral sense. "He's more ethical than a lot of the other students," Sun-ae told me.

Dinner was a multi-course affair: a lovely vegetable soup with crunchy garlic bread followed by a lasagna and salad. Comparisons with Charles's magnificent lasagna from the other night are, I suppose, inevitable. Ultimately, it's a bit like comparing apples and oranges because Sun-ae's approach to lasagna-making was so different from Charles's as to render comparison nearly impossible. In terms of thickness, Charles's lasagna won out, but Sun-ae offered me two pieces of her finished product; I'd eaten one gigantic piece of lasagna at Charles's.* Sun-ae's lasagna's top layer was also a thick and crispy cheese, and she placed a greater emphasis on meat, nearly to the exclusion of ricotta cheese in the lasagna's interior. As I said, these were two very different "lasagnic" experiences.


Above, you see the family in poses that reveal much about the members' respective personalities. Sa-Rah comes off as camera-shy and perhaps a bit introverted; Sun-ae radiates maternal warmth and welcome; En-Uk gives us a glimpse of his impish, tricksterish side; and Dr. Hodges beams a gaze at us that, while seemingly menacing at first, bespeaks a laserlike mental focus.

The family owns two cats, named Goya and Angi ("Angi" is not pronounced "an-jee" like "Angie"; instead, it's "ahng-ee"). Together, Jeff explained, the cats' names form Goyangi, the Korean word for cat. Jeff will correct me on this, but I think the following photo shows Angi Goya [thanks, Jeff, for the correction]:


Both cats were quite vocal, meowing loudly at me and the family for unfathomable feline reasons. One (Angi) hissed at me after sniffing my hand, perhaps sensing my evil nature, but warmed to me later on. The other (Goya, above) took to me immediately, and wandered back repeatedly for scratches between the ears.

Dinner conversation en famille ranged from the morbid to the literary, then back to the morbid again. A great deal of time was spent discussing cannibalism, but we also briefly touched on thought-systems and traditions like Taoism, Transcendentalism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Talk was mostly in English, but was peppered with bits of Korean. I did an Indian accent, much to the amusement of the kids, but never got the chance to demonstrate my faux-Glaswegian Scottish accent.

Jeff, because he is clinically insane, normally wakes up around 3AM, so I knew it was time to excuse myself when nine o'clock rolled around. Before I left the table, we had a lovely dessert of huge, sweet strawberries and Costco cheesecake, and after I had taken the family pic shown above, the Missus elected to take a picture of me:


Digicams are notoriously bad at taking photos in low-light conditions. They compensate for this flaw by being oversensitive with the flash, which pops off at the first indication of low light. I had to tone down the above photo's glare a bit, but all in all, it came out well. I succeeded in striking a pretentious pose, which is the only thing that matters.

Despite his need for sleep, Jeff walked me out of his apartment after I had said my goodbyes and thank-yous, especially to Sun-ae for the wonderful meal. I had originally planned to take a taxi to the nearby subway station, but I found myself standing at a bus stop served by several different buses; I noticed that Bus 1122 went right to the station I needed to hit, so instead of paying a few bucks for the taxi, I paid about a dollar for the bus, then another dollar or so for the subway back to the apartment.

En fin d'analyse, an evening well spent. Great company, great conversation, great food. What more can a body ask for?

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*Charles told me, by the way, that he was having guests over about a week after we had visited him, and that the guests wanted to bring a lasagna. Since Charles, too, wanted to make lasagna again, the whole thing blew up into a "lasagna throwdown." I wonder how that went.


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