I told him, “I hope this affection fix will hold me for another year!” and he smiled.  It’s 24 hrs. later and still holding, and I’m still smiling on a cellular level.

I’m smiling because random good things happen.  The conversations you want can happen.  Comfortable silence can happen.  Loving touch can happen.  A year’s stress can melt away, and two mature adults can appreciate each other and part company beaming with good will.

It was a very good Cheusok.  It was a beautiful full moon.

I won’t remember much about Gyeongju, especially not the overly hyped tourist spots we went to go see.  But I’ll remember Clara’s potato chips somehow ending up in Lenn’s back pocket, Willie’s impression of Clara eating said potato chips, Lenn wearing her adjumma hat upside down, and Clara asking Lenn if her long shower was because she was washing her unborn baby…

But mostly I’ll remember that in Gyeongju I met someone who reminded me how happy I am to be 45.  I’m happy to have lived so long and to have loved so many; to know how and when to be real and to recognize a genuine person with a great mind when I see one, and to know I have the power to make magic happen.  I’m happy to have long ago dispensed with the superficial.  I’m happy to not be looking for the unattainable.  I’m happy to recognize my limits yet still remain intrepid.  I’m happy to have no ambitions other than pure happiness.  I’m happy to seize my opportunities and enjoy them fully.

So thank you powers-that-be who made nature and science, for sending your amber eyed Croation sons to New Zealand to do post doc work in Japan, to travel to my mother country, to speak with me about hummingbirds and engineering, stacked rocks and Muslim tiles, Judaism, victimization, and entitlement, communism, capitalism and economics, pop culture, tentacles, mini skirts, and the politics of Asian sex, Heidegger and the meaning of work, identity and place when you are an exile, anthropology, colonization and indigenous peoples, alternate lives and new directions, and all the other territory we covered in so many ways in two evenings.

Right now, he is probably finishing the book he took from the hostel bookshelf.  He’s laying back also wondering about the randomness of this crossroad; this meeting of minds and bodies.  And he, too, is content with there being nothing more, because how could there be?