Fridays make me remember stuff

Until I visited him last December, I had always had the impression that my grandfather was a tiger that accidentally got changed into a human. When we were very young, maybe once or twice, he displayed signs of affection. On visits to his house in the Korean countryside he would take us for long walks along the red dusty road (which has since been paved over) and scare us by catching grasshoppers or dragonflies - being girls, my sister and I didn't take to insects kindly - and offering the trapped animal into our faces.

As we got older, I suspect he became more irritable because we were no longer small people who did his bidding but instead tried to argue our way out of doing things his way. Although he wasn't a military man, my grandfather ran his house like a barracks: breakfast was served before seven o'clock for him, while we had to rub our eyes to get up at around eight. No snacks were allowed - he would say, "If you eat three bowls of rice every day on time there's no need for snacks," which was probably true but not really taking into account the fact that we were children with an appetite that demanded frequent calorie intakes. He turned off the television at nine o'clock and that was that - we had to go to sleep. He considered my little sister and me to be lacking in discipline every time he examined us during our summer holidays. "How can the children be still sleeping at nine o'clock?" he'd thunder across the house, and we'd realise we had to get out of bed. He examined our socks and decided we needed to learn to wash them ourselves, even though there was a washing machine, because he did so himself.

He tried to educate us when we got to the age of ten or so. Even though I was examined on the matter every summer - as a child with the memory of a goldfish and the attention span of a bee - I was petrified every time he asked me to recite in Chinese characters his name, my grandmother's name, my other set of grandparents' names, my parents' names and my sisters' names. I had to recite where our family was from, and what our tribal name was. I got it wrong every time - I had a heap of notes stashed in random notebooks with his spidery calligraphy showing me how to write out some name or other. Sadly, I won't claim to know how to write them now. He reminded me to do the proper kowtow every time I greeted him for the first time, which has to this day made me pretty unsure about how I do my kowtows. He tried to tell me about the ancestral rites, but my sieve-like mind drooled it all away.

I think the one time I impressed him was when I took him to watch a football game during the '88 Olympics. He was surprised I could navigate around Seoul by myself.
Later on, when I was a teenager, we would clash even more openly - he disapproved of my wearing shorts, for example. But he stopped going on about socks. Then I didn't get to see him as often, for long stretches of summer were no longer available for holidays - I had grown up.

I don't remember the last time I saw him before last year. He showed his considerable age with his baldness, which took my breath away, for the last time I had seen him he had a full head of hair. Frailty was not something I associated with him, yet he was white and wrinkled in the manner that denotes that one's energy is finally spent. The rest of the household was looking fairly relaxed as they had their breakfast at eleven o'clock. I sat in front of my grandfather on my knees. He tried to recall my birth year, but failed. He decided to consult his Chinese horoscope almanac at length to find out my zodiac sign.
"We'll see you at your [wedding] ceremony," he said, as he bade me goodbye.