Up With Goodness

Times have been strange.

Geoff's job may be in jeopardy and my favorite Korean teacher, Elli, who is really the only friend I've made over here, got fired on Friday.

Just now Geoff and I were coming back from procuring me a sandwich from my favorite toast shop, Isaac's. He spotted it first.

It was a wooden coat and hat hanger, the kind I've been hankering after for months and months. The kind I've almost bought at least five or six times.

And there it sat, wooden and relatively perfect looking, in a pile of trash.

But here's the thing. The pile of trash was in the yard of our neighbor. So while on the one hand, we would be theoretically liberating some discarded furnishing from a pile of trash, on the other hand (as I put it rapidly to Geoff), we might very well be robbing someone and their special pile of trash. It was a pickle.

Geoff, who lacks my heightened sense of moral scruples, was all for pinching the thing. His hands were full of toast and so he couldn't do the deed, but he told me too, insisting that it was just an ordinary pile of trash, that no one would miss it.

I pointed to carefully stacked pieces of broken wood on either side of the trash heap, which you could almost pretend was a fence if you squinted, and told Geoff that this was clearly someone's trash, trash they'd laid aside for themselves and built a fortress around. He begged to differ.

Just then, a nice car pull into our street. We just stood around nervously, smiling uneasily at the car and pretending we hadn't just been contemplating stealing someone's refuse. The car pulled along side us and a Korean woman, well dressed, middle aged rolled her window down and said, "Excuse me. I was wondering if you could help me."

I was completely shocked. The first surprise was that her English was great and the second was that she was approaching and eliciting aid and conversation from two strangers, and worse still, two foreigners. This doesn't happen. Koreans do not speak to people they don't know and they especially do not speak to foreigners. Korean children laugh at us and shout hello at us. The adults sometimes try to practice awkward English on us or want our phone numbers, but they do not engage us in normal conversation.

I nodded assent or just shut my mouth with my hand and she went on, "I was just watching television and it said, 'up with goodness.' I don't understand what that means."

Faltering, uneasy and certain that she was trying to induct us into a cult or religion, Geoff and I explained it. She said "Thank you," told us we were neighbors and drove away.

It was so strange.

And here's the thing. Geoff still wanted to rob the special trash pile!

Now, I ask you. If you are contemplating thievery in a foreign country and then are approached by someone who asks you the meaning of, "up with goodness," would you still contemplate that thief? I don't think so. That is the world at large communicating something to you. That is not an accident. I got the hell out of there.

Geoff, once I'd gone, lifted the coat rack, saw that things were growing on it, and returned it to the trash pile.