Today my younger brother Harold turned sixty years old!  In honor of that event, our nuclear family, their spouses, and one brave member of the younger generation (Stevie Koh) converged on Harold and Christy’s house in New Haven for a Korean dinner prepared (mostly) by my sister Jeannie.  We were asked to think up humorous stories about Ha.  I was the only one to take this task seriously.  Here are three that I presented yesterday, to a rousing response.

THE “RE-NAMER”

One of Ha’s most important contributions to our family was that he was the “re-namer.”  Thus, we went from the relatively normal names of Howard, Edward, and Harold to the ridiculous names of Howboob, Hebron, and Habeb.  Actually, I was the first to get my new name.  We were all watching an episode of the Twilight Zone where (unusually) they played a foreign adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”  Toward the end of the film, a delirious man stumbles down a dirt road calling “Hebby, Hebby!”, presumably a reference to his wife.  Well we all started saying “Hebby, Hebby!” to each other, and then the eight year-old Ha somehow made the connection to “Eddie” and I became “Hebby”.  The finishing touch came at Camp Winni, where Reverend Avery Manchester made a statement in one of his handouts that Jesus of Nazareth might just as well have been Herman from Hebronville.  Thus, “Hebron” was born. (It wasn’t too much of a jump to come up with “Howboob” and “Habeb.”)

If you think this was convoluted, let me tell you what he did with “Jeannie”.  At the time we lived next to a four year-old boy who was quite clingy.  Whenever he saw her, he would call “Jeannie, c’mere!” until it started to drive her nuts.  Ha came to the rescue by altering Jeannie’s name so that the kid could not pronounce it.  So he told him that Jeannie’s real name was “Jean-a-roonie”.  Unfortunately the kid learned to say Jeanaroonie quite easily.  So Ha lengthened it even farther to “Jeanaroonie-barrel a nika!” and told the kid that if he wanted Jeannie to come over he would have to say “Jeanarooniebarrelanika c’mere!”  That was too much for the kid, and he gave up and went inside.

Actually, we didn’t call Jeannie by any of these names.  We used another Habeb concoction and called her simply “Beanhead.”  In a similar way, Carolyn became “Canonun” and Richard “Dichab”.

WRONG LEG!

As an infant Harold was afflicted with polio which made his right leg shorter than his left and gave him a limp.  At the age of ten Harold underwent an operation to staple the growth plate in his good leg, to allow his right leg to “catch up”.  The morning of his surgery, his nurse gave him the “premedication”, a sedative cocktail of demerol and scopolamine given routinely as a shot about an hour before the operation.   As Ha was getting woozy, an orderly came in with a shaving kit, looked at Ha’s two legs, and began lathering up and shaving the smaller right leg.  In a growing haze, Ha said “Wrong leg!”  The orderly stopped and said “What?”  “Look at the chart!  You’re shaving the wrong leg!”  And then he drifted off into a narcotic sleep.  Even at the age of ten, Ha was able to protect himself from the vagaries of the adult world.

MUNIENTOS

Despite being high achievers, the three of us were procrastinators.  We managed to keep up with our numerous daily assignments, but always kept “English themes” and term papers till the very last minute.  In the meantime, we became addicted to Marvel Comics, which we cleverly hid in the top drawers of our desks so we could simply lean back in our chairs and read them, and come to an upright position when we heard Dad coming up the stairs.

When the deadlines inevitably came, we had a clever solution: munientos (another Habeb- inspired term).  Typically, the three of us would stay up well into the night.  After about an hour and a half, Mom, who was always up very late, would come up the stairs with a tray of tea and cookies, and we would take a twenty-minute break with her.  After she left, we would work for another half-hour or so, and then one of us (usually Ha) would get very sleepy, and say to the others “Hey, can you give me five munientos?” (a pseudo-Hispanization of “minutes”) We would let him sleep for about ten minutes, after which he would say groggily “Can you just give me five more munientos?”  We would oblige, after which we would be quite sleepy ourselves. “Ha, why don’t you give us fifteen munientos?”  We would go to sleep, and after about five minutes Ha would fall asleep too, and we would all sleep until we were awakened by the rays of the morning sun.  In a total panic, we would finish our papers in about ten minutes, dress, and race off to school. With few exceptions, we got A’s on these papers, mainly because of the “teacher psych” strategy, meaning that we would produce excellent papers at the beginning of the year, then slack off imperceptibly as the year went on.  Using these ingenious methods we grew the legend of the “Koh dynasty”.

THERE ARE MORE STORIES…

which at some point I will get around to writing here.  In the meantime, let us  join in saying “Happy Birthday, Habeb!!”