Tuesday, July 12, 2005

like coming home


Like a lot of Korean American kids out there, when I was young my parents told me that they found me on the side of the road. I don't know why parents think this is funny. And even though I am the spitting image of my mother, the possibility that I really was an abandoned child always lingered in the back of my mind. Well, now I believe without a doubt that my brother and I really are blood related. This heartwarming realization took place at one a.m. at the unlikely location of Pink's hotdog stand, a Hollywood institution that serves the finest dogs I dare say on the planet. It was there that I ordered a spicy polish dog with chilli, mustard and onions, a dog that in its simplicity belies the near religious ecstasy contained within. So it's the four of us, my brother, his wife, and my BFF, eating our dogs when my brother who has managed to swallow his dog in three clean bites, gets a glint in his eye and disappears only to return holding the same spicy polish dog that I was still eating. The guys running the stand waved him ahead of the long line like a VIP when they saw him coming for seconds. And it was there under those fluorescent backyard lights on a still Los Angeles night, as we were both chomping down on this dog, spicy enough to give me the runs today, licking our fingers with gusto in complete syncronicity, that I knew with sudden clarity that we were born of the same womb. Some things just can't be faked when you're eating at Pink's.

8 comments:

Christopher Trottier said...

You tell a very beautiful story here. And the photos on your blog are just enough to get my creative juices flowing.

Anonymous said...

Funny, as the BFF witness at the spot 20 minutes after the downing of pink's dogs, I thought it was the rather bubbly flatulation that sounded EXACTLY the same, lasting JUST as long as a certain other spicy-polish-chili-dog-eating Ms. Dissertator that made a believer out of me - that their blood relations are true to form.

babibi said...

Thanks Christopher Trottier. And thanks Juice. You managed to reduce an otherwise magical moment into nothing more than a bowel movement by-product. As ever the unrelenting realist.

Anonymous said...

ok let's start putting some flesh in those photos .dan choi

Anonymous said...

Knock Knock----

Anonymous said...

According to this logic, it's possibly that PNammy is your long-lost brother...

babibi said...

that explains nammy's devastatingly good looks and sparkling intelligence...

t~ said...

hi... i stumbled onto your blog and must say i'm intrigued... what field are you going into?

oh... about your parents? mine used to say that they got the wrong child at the hospital. and every time i did something that mildly upset them they would threaten to "sell me to the gypsies"