by Togatun Saram Kim

Created on: June 05, 2009

Chicken and dumplins' sloshed into white, ceramic bowls, while a basket of warm biscuits swaddled in a red towel were passed round the table. Whisps of steam rose from the collard greens, and cups full of ice hissed and sizzled as RC cola and Barque's Rootbeer flowed in with liberality. The sights and sounds of home could perhaps be emulated in other parts of God's green earth, but the taste, ah the taste! That was simply irreproducible.

When the guests had finished gorging themselves they sprawled out on couches and armchairs with their hands folded in front of them or behind their heads. Between the contented sighs they would ask Robert what his trip had been like, what those people had said and done, and how he had managed to fair so well so far from all of them. He would reply as honestly or as simply as he could depending on his particular audience throwing in a quip or a joke for good measure. He knew that in their lifetimes they would never see or experience half of the things he had already done, some of them had never even left the county. Montgomery and Atlanta lay at the edges of the known world for them.

Robert had slowly, and somewhat intentionally, begun to lose his accent while he was abroad. There had been no point then in cleaving to something that that would only encourage downward mobility, but now that he was surrounded by the language of his birth and childhood the phrases, the pronunciation, the intonation rising and falling appropriately to the subject matter, all fell back into place. He was able to speak his mother tongue without retribution or trepidation. He felt that he now had a stake in the best of both worlds, the old and the new, the progress and the tradition, and he loved it. He didn't feel hungry for something he couldn't have. He had all he could want and more.

There was only one problem. They hadn't asked him that one nagging question. He still didn't know what he was going to say when it came up, perhaps it never would. But the thought that there would be something between himself and his family of this magnitude was simply more than he could bear sometimes, especially when he was alone, lying in bed at night, or while he was driving the long road to come back home. He was a fool and he knew it.

During a lull in the conversation he recounted the steps in his mind that had led him to his current situation.

He had gone to Cookeville, Tennessee to attend the Tennessee Tech school of Agriculture. He had been there for

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