Cherry Jubilee

On a scale from 1 to 10 in terms of recharge, I'd rate my Chuseok a 10.

You can see Baskin-Robbins, full of young people, on Hwagok-yeok four-way intersection near Hwagok Station. It is long and narrow, with pink and shining tables for two along the walls and for four down the middle. The decoration is playful, except for the gloomy sceneries of pedestrians walking outside the front window. You sit down at the center table and watch your 18-years old cousin ordered her ice-cream. The paper ice-cream bowl is full of diverse flavors chose by you and your cousin. The mathematics textbook, which you propped against the plastic spoon, has blank pages front and back which are filled with numbers, drawings, equations, graphs, and marks for formulas; also with theories and examples no longer clear- at least for you. On nearly every other page there are some marginal doodles, in light pencil, perhaps HB. The marks on exercise 15 were from tears unless someone had upset a glass of water there.

While I studied about the Mean Value Theorem, suppose f(x)f(x) as a function that satisfies when f(x)f(x) is continuous on the closed interval [a,b][a,b] and differentiable on the open interval (a,b)(a,b), my 18-year old cousin, Da-Hyun's right hand managed, again and again, to bring the cherry flavor ice-cream up to her mouth. Sometimes she licked, sometimes she swallowed whole that she had no idea what she was eating. Of course, Da-Hyun was not able to concentrate on the ice-cream because she had to study for the literature exam nest Monday. Early in the month of October 1815, about an hour before sunset, a man who was traveling on foot entered the little town. The few inhabitants who were at their windows or on their thresholds at the moment staring at this traveler with a sort of uneasiness. It was difficult to encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He was a man of medium stature, thickset and robust, in the prime of life. He might have been forty-six or forty-eight years old.

 
When I put down my pink spoon and began to calculate the numbers, one by one, on the fingers, my sister, whose name was Ji-Eun, thought she can snatch the ice-cream and tried to take my bowl away. I stopped her. Then there came a number c such that a < c < b and f′(c)=fb−af′(c)=f(b)−f(a)b−a, or, f(b)−f(a)=f′(c)(b−a). On the other side, the man's shirt of coarse yellow linen, fastened at the neck by a small silver anchor, permitted a view of his hairy breast: he had a cravat twisted into a string; trousers of blue drilling, worn and threadbare, white on one knee and torn on the other; an old gray, tattered blouse, patched on one of the elbows with a bit of green cloth sewed on with twine; a tightly packed soldier knapsack, well buckled and perfectly new, on his back; an enormous, knotty stick in his hand; iron-shod shoes on his stockingless feet; a shaved head and a long beard.

My sister muttered; I ignored.

At the next moment, a party of three, two boys and one girl, came into the Baskin-Robbins, all talking at once. They took the lemon-color sofa nearest me, my sister, and my two cousins. The girl had short tight skirts which exposed the underside of their knees when she sat down, unlike my sister wearing a long dress which barely shows the ankle. One of the boys had a pair of silvery piercing and dyed red hair, to look like an insider, which as a matter of fact he was. They ordered lemon sorbet, with black color, sour as our life does. They laughed joyfully. But the problem was that they were speaking TOO loud. It was the girl's voice, high pitched, which cause both Da-Hyun and me to skip two paragraphs, then jump over one whole page without knowing what was on them. I rose my head. Our eyes met. 

I closed the book and said, "Shall we stop studying?"

Da-Hyun answered, "Definitely, I think its time to recharge." 

On a scale from 1 to 10 in terms of recharge, this was the moment I started to rate my Chuseok a 10. No one knew the man. He was evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence came he? From the south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his entrance into the town by the same street which, seven months previously, had witnessed the passage of the Emperor Napoleon on his way from Cannes to Paris. This man must have been walking all day. In fact, the man stopped moving ahead at the bottom of page 106 because of me and my dear cousin.

Time flies. It is especially unkind to the high-school students who are at the edge of graduation. Da-Hyun and I, at the age of eighteen, became taller, stronger, and perhaps, more knowledgable. Our clothes lose their color, from pink to gray and black. We no more wear hanbok, a traditional Korean dress, as my sister does. We no more play around without doing homework. Instead, without long silky dress, we study, go to the academy, write an essay, and read textbooks during Chuseok. We are no longer children as we used to be. Apparently, we ourselves were aware that there had been a 'change.'

Still, we were sitting in the Baskin-robbins, eating ice-cream. We were in there, with each other. The presence of each other made us do things that were not becoming at the age of eighteen. Typically, eating Cherry Jubilee, a pink-colored ice-cream is somewhat unusual for us. Our head was growing fast. Yet our life was sweet as a Cherry Jubilee when we were with each other, Best Friend Forever from the beginning of our lives.