What’s Past Is Past

35. 지나간 것은 지나간대로

35. What’s Past Is Past

It was Rev. Kim’s wedding day. Members of the Chicago temple where he worked had flown in, along with his relatives from Korea. The ministers who knew him had willingly taken time out of their busy schedules to travel in from all over the US.

At the time, I was a pre-minister at the Washington temple where the wedding was to take place. I was hard at work greeting guests and preparing for the banquet dinner. The officiant was the former director of the Eastern US diocese.

After a long-term, long-distance romance that had stretched between such places as New York, Chicago, Korea, and Maryland, the couple were finally uniting in marriage. The time they had spent together was by no means easy.

Now over 40 years old, the groom had a grin on his face so wide that he spent the whole day looking like a frog. He was normally a serious fellow, but he could do nothing about the comical expression on his face.

As darkness began to fall, the front doors opened and stacks of white Styrofoam boxes arrived in the banquet hall. They were filled with steamed blue crab. A Maryland specialty, the crabs had been caught off the East Coast.

Billowing steam and deep red, the crabs were brought out to the tables, to the delight of the wedding guests. There was just one exception: me, because of my allergies.

It isn’t just blue crab that I am allergic to. My body cannot tolerate any form of crustacean, including lobster and shrimp, or any fish with tough skin on its back, such as salmon or tuna. If I yield to temptation and take a bite, I develop a runny nose, sneezing, rashes, itchiness, and bloodshot eyes. The symptoms all go away over time, but they’re quite unpleasant to experience.

I wasn’t like this when I was a child. I often enjoyed snow crab while visiting my mother’s family in Yeongdeok, where it is a local specialty, and I relished the crab stew that my mother would often cook up at home. As an adult, I often enjoyed tuna sashimi while drinking with friends. But at some point after turning 30, I could no longer stomach it.

The allergy developed around the same time that I became a practitioner. At the time, I didn’t have the luxury of concerning myself too much with what I did and did not eat. But every time I visited the temple by the beach, I would linger in front of the lavish selection of seafood dishes that they had so thoughtfully prepared, and I felt sorry about having to refuse them every time. The other Won-Buddhists felt even sorrier about it than I did.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t eat it at all. From time to time, I would sample a bit of deep red sashimi, playfully testing myself to see where my threshold lay. Before long, my throat would start to swell up and become sore, at which point I would set my chopsticks down and wait for the symptoms to subside.

It’s fascinating to see how strongly the body can react to a little bit of food. I thought it might improve if I took some herbal medicine to improve my constitution, but I gave up before too long. As inconvenient as it may be at times, I decided to accept that my body had changed.

My youngest uncle surprising me and my parents with a box of steamed Yeongdeok snow crab when we traveled to the countryside, my family sitting at the dinner table around a pot of my mother’s signature crab stew, sharing drinks over all-you-can-eat tuna sashimi with colleagues after a long day of work—all of these are memories that can never be revisited. This is what it is like to let go of a type of food that I’ve enjoyed for over 30 years.

If I look back, I can see similarly emotional goodbyes that I experienced with things other than food—things I trusted as familiar presences in life. People are one particular example. Some people are quite warm when we reunite after a long time;

others become quite awkward. The way someone is today is usually different from how they exist in my memory, which in turn separates the me of today from the me etched upon their mind.

It feels strange to look at these people. We exchange words, but they all seem to fall flat. We cannot fathom how the other has changed. Each of us carries less weight in the other’s life. It is not the fault of either of us; these gaps are merely something created by time. In the past, I would have been upset about the way a renewed relationship did not conform to my hopes.

I would have racked my brain trying to fill that gap. But now, I simply allow disappointment to be disappointment. “The affinities of time have run their course,” I say, and serenely let them go. I leave what is past in the past.

I gave up the taste of crab because of my allergies, not because I did not like crab, and in the same way, I do not begrudge the lack of feeling between old friends even when we end up crossing paths. All I can do is pray for affection to form if we meet again somewhere along the course of life.