911 Kimbap Delivery & Letters to the Dead: Two Stories of Gifts

A Christmas special from Scribbleland

Christmas is a time of giving and receiving gifts. I remember as a child, I pondered over the saying, “It is better to give than to receive.” I was confused. Why would sacrificing my candy and dolls for others be better than getting lots for myself?

Now, I think I understand. The act of giving assumes that you have something to give. Therefore, any giver has already received. I think the person who lives with open hands and an open heart must be the happiest of us all because he lives everyday conscious of what he’s been given. He is free of penny-pinching worry and the all-consuming calculations of the zero-sum game. Instead, he shares freely from his abundance. And when he shares it, he finds that instead of diminishing, it grows bigger and more beautiful with every person he includes.

But let’s be done with philosophizing. Here are two stories of my two best gifts, the first one given, the second received.

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911 Kimbap Delivery

The Gift of Love

We were thirteen. Gavin was the class clown, with a wide grin and reddish hair that curled around his ears. I was the quiet girl, with wire-rimmed glasses and armfuls of books that I chose based on difficulty. We weren’t friends. But I’ve always had a soft spot for the clowns because they were the only ones who dared tease me, get to know me as a weak, fallible person instead of a straight-A’s Mary Sue. He made fun of all the girls and got in trouble constantly for being a loud-mouth. So, one morning, when he spent a whole morning in morose silence, everybody knew something was wrong.

Eventually it came out. Gavin’s parents had divorced. I had never thought much about divorce, but the change it had wrought in Gavin’s face convinced me it was horrible. I excused myself and scurried down the hall to the school office where I asked to use the phone. It was an emergency, I said, because it was.

As a Korean and a teenager, my go-to palliative for tragedy was food. Not in an unhealthy way, binging Oreos in secret to numb the pain, but in the mother’s-arms warmth of a homemade meal eaten with family around the kitchen table. Because of this, when Gavin announced the news of the divorce, the logic came to me clear and immediate as a lightning strike. He’s lost his family, so he’s lost dinnertime. Let me give the dinner back.

When my mom picked up the phone, I begged her to drop everything and make a tub of kimbap in time for the lunch hour. I bit my nails through the next hour of class. Everything relied on those shiny, dark rolls sliced neatly into half-inch pieces with a razor-sharp sesame-oiled chef’s knife. If the kimbap came together in time, the break in Gavin’s life could be repaired before it settled into permanence, and after lunch, he would once again be cracking jokes.

I didn’t know then that this big announcement of divorce was only the tiny black dot of silence at the end of a tedious, painful, and redundant run-on sentence that had grown and grown until it was so long it could not be unsaid. I didn’t know that all Gavin’s disobedience and loud-mouthed bravado was probably not innate but his attempt to quash the sadness bubbling up in his chest. That today, he had just been too tired to keep up the facade.

We were sitting on the benches of the lunch tables when my mom appeared in the door of the gymnasium with her largest Tupperware in her hands. I ran up. She had made an enormous amount, enough to feed a family. I think she understood how Gavin must be feeling, and the size of the container was meant to match the size of his emotions. I took the container, hugged her, and plopped it down right in front of Gavin, nearly crushing his Lunchables tray.

“Here.”

“What?”

“It’s for you.”

“ALL of this is for ME?”

“What? You think you can’t eat it all?”

He stopped talking and started eating. He chewed in silence, cheeks bulging, for the rest of the lunch hour. I think he was holding back tears.

He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. I knew it meant a lot to him. At the end of the day, he handed me back an empty container.

That's the best gift I’ve ever given.

Letters to the Dead

The Gift of a Life Boat

When I was ten, my sister died. The entire town gave gifts—fluffy teddy bears, candy, books, get-well cards, gift cards, baskets of apples, casseroles. Although they filled our entire entry room, I almost didn’t see them. I was so numb.

But then my mom’s friend Amy gave me a journal with a brown spine and a hard, cardboard cover with cyanotypes of vines and flowers. Beneath the journal was a stack of books. Enclosed in the front was a note.

“In these books, Emily, the main character, writes letters to her father after he’s died. I hope that you can use this journal to write down things that are important to you, maybe even write them to your sister.”

I said nothing. I didn’t even say thank you. I read the books. And then I opened the journal and began to write letters to my sister. I told her about my day at school, the boys I liked, how my P.E. teacher thought I was good at running and wanted me to sign up for cross-country.

“Dear Lizzie,” I would begin. “You were only nine when you died, so thankfully you never had to experience all the pain and hardship of life.”

Sure, I was only eleven, but I felt older than time and utterly alone.

Over the years, I stopped addressing my entries to my sister and began to write for myself. It took a decade, but eventually, I even began to share my joys and doubts out loud to others. I felt young again and surrounded by friends.

Now, writing is no longer my life boat. Instead of doing it from a compulsive need to survive, I do it freely because I like it.

Thank you, Amy.

That’s the best gift I’ve ever received.

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You can give me a gift by commenting below or sharing with a friend.

xo,

Amelia