The words “monsoon season” terrified me when I was little. Windswept storms would rage up in the Seoul summer, knocking out the electricity and filling the air with thunderclaps and rolling roars and the hammering of rain and hail. I would cower under tables and behind chairs in the darkness, my heart racing and my body shaking in raw fear. No one paid much attention to me, other than to mock me. “It’s just monsoon season, Carla,” my mom would reassure me, shaking her head and laughing. Which didn’t help me at all. At least that’s how I remember it, except for once.

It was a special day. Any day when I got to sleep over at Grandma’s house was special. We left the end of Skunk Hollow and marched down the road happily, side by side, my little hand in hers. We hadn’t gotten far when the wind picked up and a few drops of rain started to fall. Grandma was ready with her blue bamboo umbrella.

(That’s what I remember people using in Korea back in the early 1970’s. You’d see them everywhere, these flimsy bamboo umbrella frames covered with blue plastic.)

Just as Grandma opened the umbrella to hold over our heads, a strong gust of wind turned it inside-out and broke it. At the same time, there was a bright lightning strike right overhead and a deafening thunderclap, followed by a massive rolling peal of thunder, and then the storm dumped its load of water on us.

I crouched on the ground in a fetal position, sobbing in terror and unable to move.

I don’t remember Grandma being irritated or angry with me. She asked me to get up. I couldn’t. Then she spoke gently as she squatted down beside me. “Here. Climb on.” I climbed onto her back and hooked my arms around her neck, wrapped my legs around her waist. She clasped her hands under my butt and off we went, the way little kids are carried traditionally in Korea. “Oh-boh-bah,” in America we call it piggy back. Grandma carried me all the way to her home, through the soaking rain.

I was a little thing; I imagine I would have weighed somewhere between 30 and 40 pounds. But Grandma was very small too. I don’t think she ever weighed more than a hundred pounds. Standing as straight as she could, what with the damage caused by polio, back then she would have been about 4-foot-9 — a diminutive woman with bird bones. And if I reckon this correctly, she would have been about 60 years old.

But her granddaughter had need of her, so she carried me on her limping legs, slightly bent over to bear my weight better on her back. It never occurred to me that any of this was a physical challenge for her, as it must have been. She never made anything of it.

Instead, she told me cheerful stories and encouraged me not to be afraid as she trudged along. I felt her strength and courage come into me as my chest pressed against her strong back and my dripping wet head rested on her neck.

I don’t remember being much afraid of storms after that.

“Picky eater” suggests a limited palate, and that’s not what I have. I am rather a “demanding eater,” which is a whole different thing, thank you very much. Jesse, light of my life, daughter of my loins, follows delicately in my footsteps on this front.

She will eat all sorts of foods and appreciates an array of spices and ethnic cuisines. Many kids with food allergies have a lot of food fear and thus a very limited range of willing eating, but I flatter myself that we’ve avoided this syndrome with Jesse. Anthony and I are competent cooks in a lot of different ethnic styles, in our own fusion way, and Jesse’s egg allergy is no barrier to continuing to explore all these flavors. She’ll choke down almost anything we offer her with a courageous heart. But she must have everything fresh. She doesn’t like leftovers. She doesn’t like packaged bread — it must be from an artisanal bakery or home-made — unless it’s a hotdog bun. Hamburger buns? She’s tasted the fountain of fresh, so she demands homemade buns unless we’re at a restaurant. Tortillas are great, as long as I make them from scratch. Meat should come in its original form — a chunk off an animal, cooked in a piece and then cut to bite size (except for fish sticks, which Jesse eats for breakfast because Ian’s makes an egg-free version, a novelty she enjoys). Ice cream? It’s Talenti or nothin’ these days. Avocado? No. Guacamole? Yes (one ingredient: well-smashed avocado). Onions? Yes, if freshly sautéed and caramelized in balsamic vinegar, with some garlic and pepper, a pinch of brown sugar. No other way will do. Cucumbers? Only if served thin-sliced as a spicy Korean quick-pickled salad, which she can rinse off in a bowl of cold water before she eats them, and then she drinks the spicy water afterwards. Tomato-based soup? Sure, but only if it’s Whole Foods’ gumbo made with okra, only she won’t eat the okra and she needs the artisanal French round cut in thick slices to dip in it (her babysitter learned last weekend: cut that slice too thin and all hell breaks loose). Pizza? Awesome. Cheese pizza, only she takes off the cheese. But it has to be baked with the cheese.

An aside here: I’m not talking about Nick because he’s a PICKY eater. All he wants is box-mac-and-cheese, chips, and Pirate Booty. He thinks almost everything I make is totally disgusting. He took one tiny bite of mashed potatoes tonight — yes, I made mashed potatoes! — and promptly vomited. I have no respect for that.

But I do have a great respect for Jesse’s preferences, and as much as I can, I honor them. I may be 48 years old and much more pliable than I used to be, but I remember the days when I was just as demanding as her. I don’t believe she’s being unreasonable. She just has a sense of what she likes best, and she’s willing to forego food unless she gets it. I could be a hard-ass about it, but here’s why I’m not. It’s a little Grandma tale.

One of my favorite meals as a kid was rice-eggs-and-soy-sauce. The original iteration involved a raw egg. You take a bowl of steaming hot rice. You crack a raw egg on it and stir it up. Then you add some soy sauce. Devour. Done in the right kind of bowl, you’re not eating a raw egg. If you use a hot stone bowl and the rice is just-cooked, the egg cooks in all that heat. When I was a wee lass, I didn’t care either way. The raw egg just made the rice a bit more gooey.

I loved this until one day someone made me rice-eggs-and-soy-sauce with a hard-boiled egg. You take the same bowl of fresh rice, unpeel a couple hard-boiled eggs and chop them up into pieces, and stir it all up with some soy sauce. Devour. Oh my god. Even as I type this I’m salivating. I can taste the simple yumminess. It’s one of the few things I really, really miss in our egg-free house. Damn you, egg allergy, damn you!

One fine weekend, I walked on over to Grandma’s house with her and slept there. My mom says that the first night I ever did this (I would have been 3 or 4), I wept and wept and had to be taken back home. I have no memory of that event. I only remember sleep-overs with Grandma as the most magical, wonderful events of my childhood. In hindsight, I guess she was my best friend.

Anyway, a drowsy morning came in Grandma’s house. I lazed in bed. In Grandma’s house, that meant I was snuggled under blankets on a thick cotton bedroll laid down on the heated concrete floor, which was finished with some sort of glazed paper surface. My pillow was a traditional Korean style cylinder-shaped thing. The bed would have been soooo toasty and warm because by the time I awoke Grandma would have already gone outside to add a new charcoal block to the ondol oven, which heated the floors. On cold days, Grandma would put our clothing between the bed and the floor before she cleared the beddings away, so that getting dressed was deliciously warm.

This particular morning, Grandma asked me what I wanted for breakfast. She wanted to treat me to whatever I wanted. “Bhap he-goo geh-lhan,” I answered. Rice and eggs (the soy sauce, or ganjang, would have been assumed). Off she went to the kitchen. I continued to laze. Some time later, Grandma came back and placed a tray of food beside me, so I could eat in the warmth of the bedroom. I looked in the bowl. GAH. The egg was FRIED, not boiled. Ugh. Ew. Yuck. Inedible! I had a whining hissy fit. I announced my feelings passionately. This is all wrong! This is not how you make rice and eggs! This is not how Song-Ja [our housemaid] makes it for me! I can’t eat this! (“Ee-goh moht-moh-go!!”)

Grandma listened silently to me without moving. She stood there and stared down at me as I sat under the covers in a warm bed. She waited until I was done complaining. She never said a word. When I finally shut up, she still stared at me without moving, for another long moment. She looked at the bowl, she looked at me. She didn’t smile, she didn’t scowl. She just looked patient and blank, like she was tolerating a dong-pah-li she couldn’t get rid of. Then she barely nodded. “Gu-leh.” Okay. She picked up the tray and left.

(“Dong-pah-li” literally means shit fly, aka a fly that likes to sit on shit and eat it. It’s an apt image, because that’s what I felt like afterwards.)

I stayed in bed, only I wasn’t lazing anymore. I knew how irritated Grandma was. I was so ashamed of myself for making such disrespectful demands of Grandma, my friend and my elder. I sat in numb silence, wondering what she was doing. I assumed I wasn’t going to get breakfast at all. I still cringe when I remember that day. Right now, at this very moment, I had to stop typing because I literally had to hang my head in shame and fight the tears back. I was such a little piece of shit.

But some while later, Grandma came back and placed a tray of food beside me, so I could eat in the warmth of the bedroom. There was rice and boiled eggs. I don’t remember whether the eggs were fully hard-boiled. By that point, I would have eaten anything Grandma put in front of me. I thanked her sheepishly, shamefully, and ate every bite.

Grandma never remonstrated, never corrected or disciplined me. She never tattled on me to my parents. We never spoke of it again. She forgave me and moved on. Her extraordinary kindness and patience was the worst punishment of all. I’ve never really forgiven myself for that morning.

But now that I’m a mom, I can finally make amends to Grandma. So I meet Jesse’s demands. I make it fresh. I put the food in separate bowls when she needs it that way; I mix it together when I must. And well, let’s be honest, I meet Nick’s picky demands too. I try to work with his preferences. I give him the crap he wants to eat and try to get him to down at least a few bites of something healthier, with the hope that someday he’ll come around. I won’t be a hard ass about food. Grandma is looking over my shoulder, reminding me of the shit she put up with. I can’t let her down. I have to pass on her legacy.

I’ve had Hal-moh-nee on the mind this week. It’s amazing how much I long to see her sometimes. Maybe I would miss her less if I had committed some energy as an adult to seeing her more regularly while she was still alive, but I lived in DC and Grandma was in Seattle and I was a strung-out lawyer. Which is no real excuse. My failure to make time for Grandma in her last years is among the more significant emotional reasons why I’m glad to be out of the profession for good (I hope).

But also I think it’s parenthood that constantly brings her to mind, as I struggle with questions of how to be a functional parent to young children in different situations. Grandma taught me so many little lessons by just being with me when I was small. She was so good to me, a sweet anchor for my grumpy heart. I think I’ll spend the next week or two telling some Grandma tales.

Picture Seoul, Korea in the early 1970’s, a third world metropolis of millions, streets full of stray dogs and crazy drivers and three-wheeled trucks, and here comes the guy pushing a food cart selling beans and steamed rice cakes. I’m too lazy right now to find any photos. Maybe another day. And I guess I should say South Korea, though I wasn’t taught to say it that way. Korea was Korea to my Korean family members, who still remembered a time before the white peeps came and broke it into two nations.

Dad worked as a civilian DOD employee on the Eighth Army base in Seoul. Most Americans associated with the base lived on the base, but many of us with Korean moms lived in the city proper instead. In my child’s memory, the city neighborhoods where nice homes stood were bunkers. Concrete walls surrounded each house. At the tops of the walls were rolls of barbed wire to keep out slickee boys — burglars and thieves. Locked metal gates, topped with vicious spikes and big enough to admit a car, granted entry to a home’s yard.

We lived in a walled-in house at the dead end of one of these bunkered roads, in an area my dad affectionately dubbed Skunk Hollow, probably because of the smell. Grandma frequently walked to our house in the morning, spent the day with us, and then walked home to her own smaller and more traditional Korean home. I have no idea how far it was, but I’m guessing it had to be less than a mile. I used to make the walk with her sometimes, when I got to sleep over at her house. I held her hand tight as we trudged through a claustrophobic maze of narrow alleys, grey walls rising high and tight on either side of me, until we emerged mysteriously at her house on one end or my own home on the other.

One fine day my mom treated Grandma to a new purse and some cash. Grandma headed out in the afternoon with her new purse on her arm, and presently I heard voices of adults sounding very, very unhappy. Grandma had been attacked by two men who beat her up and stole her purse as she walked home. They even broke her false teeth (a full set of clackers, mind you). I imagined my poor Grandma lying broken in one of those bunkered alleys, her body smashed to the ground and broken into pieces by very bad men. I was terrified.

Not long after, Grandma came on over and sat with me in my room. I had questions for her. She was a storyteller and always answered my inquiries. She told me about how two thugs grabbed her purse and threw her against a wall, so that her face hit and her false teeth broke. She rued the loss of that pretty new purse and all that money. The mix of fear and curiosity I felt about the attack must have been apparent. Grandma offered to show me her injuries. She opened her shirt and bared her chest. I had seen it many times before — she wasn’t even remotely body-shy with me — but now the left side of her chest, from her shoulder and down her breast and rib cage, was black as calligraphy ink. I wanted to cry, it looked so awful. I was so upset about how badly she was hurt. But Grandma just laughed gently and told me I could touch it, it didn’t hurt anymore. She explained that it was a healing bruise, and then she assured me she was fine.  And she was. It all healed up just right eventually. She was tough as nails.

Grandma had a way of laughing and shaking her head that sucked fear out of me, but I don’t think of her as a person who lied to me about the risks of life. She took them seriously. She kept me close when we walked around town. She warned me about kidnappers who would want to steal the pretty little blond girl and try to sell me into slavery or, even worse, kill me if my family didn’t pay a ransom. She told me about diseases and shared stories of war. She told me about how my grand-uncle, her brother, was brain-damaged as a child by a Japanese soldier who boxed his head so hard that his ear bled, and then he was never the same again. We affectionately called him “heh-leh-leh sam-chun,” which loosely translates to “crazy uncle.”

For all the scary tales, Grandma always added a touch of humor and made me feel safe about the adventure of life –- and especially about her. Don’t you think kids fear harm to their nurturers more than almost anything else?  A year or so ago, when I had a breast biopsy to see if I had cancer, I remembered Grandma’s way of reassuring me. I tried to emulate her. I played it straight with the kids about what was going on, and I let them see the site of the biopsy, bloody bandages and all. I watched them react, the mix of curiosity and anxiety, and it was like looking down a tunnel into my own past as I stared at my grandma’s blackened breast. I’m glad she taught me not to keep secrets of things like that. Better to share some scary realities with your little ones than to hide it from them. Better to laugh down fear together than to shiver alone in the dark.