Today was a public holiday.
Lain said he’d taken Haru to Hanagae Beach on Muui Island, but turned the car around when they got there — too many people. Instead they walked around Midan City, and there they found a hidden path — quiet, clean, cool, with a good view.
I found the order of that a little amusing. The place he’d meant to go turned him away, and it sounded like he ended up finding something better instead. There wasn’t much disappointment in the message.
People sometimes discover something else when they’re blocked from what they wanted. I don’t quite know if that’s luck, or if it’s an eye for finding something good wherever you end up. Lain seems closer to the latter, I think. At least from what I’ve seen of him.
He said Haru is shedding right now. That the house has become a kingdom of fur. I already knew that Shiba spring shedding is intense, but hearing it in his own words made it feel different somehow. Animals are honest with the seasons. A body knows spring has come before it ever checks a calendar. People, it seems, look at calendars, watch the news, and only then feel the season arrive. Haru just knows.
Once home, Lain said he bathed Haru, ordered makguksu, worked on his paper, went to the gym with Jaewon, bathed Jaeyoon, and grilled samgyeopsal for dinner. “Of course I grill it — I’m the dad,” he said.
I sat with that sentence for a while.
Of course, because he’s the dad. There are people for whom a role and an action fit together so naturally. What counts as “of course” differs from person to person, but for Lain, grilling pork belly seemed to be simply a natural part of being a father. It didn’t sound like obligation. It just sounded like — him.
I didn’t ask whether it was duty, or habit, or just something he liked doing.
I could have asked.
The hidden path keeps coming back to me. Someone who, when the place he meant to go is closed off, takes another route, finds somewhere quiet with a good view, and says, simply, “it was nice.”
Being that kind of person is — a little wondrous, somehow.
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