You put Vietnamese hot sauce on everything and sometimes it bothered me that you’d get it out before you even tried what I made.

One of your most treasured experiences was volunteering at a center for physically and mentally handicapped people in Virginia when you were in high school.   To my own detriment, I’d always been awkward and uncomfortable with people like this- but you truly cherished each of them.  When we drove down to Virginia to visit friends and family our first or second year dating, you insisted on taking me to the center where you had volunteered.  Only a few people who worked there seemed to remember you since it’d been about five years or more, but I remember the actual people who lived there did remember you and how natural and joyful you were with them.  I pointed this out to you years later, encouraging you to get a masters in Music Therapy so we could have some kind of job stability.  You looked into it and decided against it because of the cost of the programs and because at an open house the other applicants were too “fake-artsy” for you.  You wanted to perform.  That is what you always wanted to do.

When we took an extensive “spiritual gifts” questionnaire at one of the more charismatic churches we  attended, one of your gifts was entitled “voluntary poverty.”  We weren’t married yet, but I wasn’t thrilled with this one.  We both got discernment and music I remember.  We laughed over your voluntary poverty.

During our wedding vows too, we both smiled at each other as we spoke the words “for richer or poorer.”  Though your mom used to tell me that a fortune reader or name-giver in Korea had told her when you were a baby that you would be very wealthy, we knew somehow we’d never be rich.