"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

                            My father turns ninety this year. He still walks every morning. Not ten thousand steps. Maybe two thousand on a good day, three thousand if he's lucky. But he walks. In the worn leather shoes my mother bought him fifteen years ago — the ones he refuses to replace — he shuffles down the apartment hallway, out the front door, and around the small park near his building. The loop that takes me twelve minutes takes him forty. He doesn't care. He just walks. Watching him walk, I see two things at once. I see the miracle of a body past ninety that still moves, still breathes, still insists on going outside every morning despite everything that age has taken from it. And I see the cruelty of a mind that is slowly forgetting why it goes outside at all. My father has dementia (치매, chimae). Not the dramatic kind you see in movies, where a parent suddenly doesn't recognize their child. The slow kind. ...