Odd jobs and idle thoughts

By Chang Soon-hee

In good American terminology I’m a homemaker and a grandmother. I have been doing domestic consumption work for over 50 years, which included preparing meals and washing dishes three times almost every day, seven days a week, plus child and grandchild care, scrubbing floors, washing clothes in a clear stream or using a washing board, mending socks wrapped over a light bulb, and so on. All of which men call odd jobs.

“You are always in the kitchen busy doing the same odd things. Don’t you get bored, grandma?” my elder grandson once inquired about my enduring daily routine, which his grandfather had never taken an interest in. The youngster’s curiosity didn’t stop there; “What do you think about in the kitchen?” “Not much, but do I have to think about something while I’m cooking and washing dishes?” I asked back. “Yeah, I think you’re wasting your time if you let idle thoughts swirl around in your mind.”

Wasting time, idle thoughts swirling around, where did he get those phrases? I wasn’t wasting my time. In order to prepare good food for the household, I even followed the maxim of the French Culinary Institute in New York that says “Great food begins beyond a kitchen. It begins in fields and pastures, the sea, vineyards and markets.”

Well, I wouldn’t go to pastures or the sea for fresh meat or live fish but I visit the wholesale groceries or fish markets for the best possible ingredients. I sometimes visit Icheon Ceramic Art Village on the outskirts of Seoul for a selection of artistic chinaware in an effort to improve the flavor of my cooking. Wasn’t it enough?

Perhaps it wasn’t. Because I was becoming tired of doing the same routine day after day and not receiving appreciative words, well, not often enough, from those whom I dearly serve. A discontented feeling came into being once in a while and a variety of idle thoughts sneaked into my mind, feeling unhappy. I cook, lay chopsticks, spoons, dishes and bowls on the table three times a day, like a robot, not thinking much. Children rush in, hastily swallow and hurriedly disappear. That’s it, something was missing.

Oh, the robot. The machine doesn’t have a heart so it works without having idle thoughts entering into its memory chips so it has no odd jobs. My muscles might work better than the robot’s but we have a mind and a heart, which will never stand still. I should improve my thoughts; the brooding ideas must be replaced by affectionate thoughts.

Unlike a robot we can offer a silent prayer of love for the happiness of those whom we housewives serve while working in the kitchen and preparing tables. Using time with love in my mind changed a so called odd job to worthwhile work and contentment filled my empty mind. I felt happy.

I’ve no way of knowing if my spiritual devotion produced happiness. But it’s all right. It is my way of not wasting time as a homemaker. It’s all right if my telepathy didn’t reach the loved ones as I see in the mirror that my sullen countenance has been replaced by a new bright face.

Domestic difficulties come around in a homemaker’s life more often than we’d like, for which men, in most cases, are helpless. Every year, about this time when the cold wind begins to blow and the yellowed gingko leaves fall to the ground, the senior high school students take the College Scholastic Ability Test.

Some 700,000 students took the test this year and about the same number of mothers plus many grandmothers, well, a few fathers too, lost sleep the night before the test. They didn’t want to sleep but prayed for their children not to make any silly mistake. For them, it didn’t matter which god they prayed to because there was the actual mothers’ and grandmothers’ love.

For those housewives, their 20, 30 or 50 years of enduring household chores weren’t odd jobs.

The writer is one of those reserved grandmothers and still active homemakers who once lived with her children in the United States but finds Seoul more beautiful and comfortable. Her email address is ham1940@gmail.com.