"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

                        Every morning, I walk down the stairs from my apartment. Fourteen steps. And every morning, my knees announce each one. Click. Pop. Crack. Click. Pop. Crack. My wife says she can hear me coming from the bedroom. She doesn't need an alarm clock. She has my knees. I'm 59 years old, but my knees are at least 60. Probably 65. They've lived a harder life than the rest of me. While my brain was sitting in boardrooms and my hands were signing contracts, my knees were still paying the bill for what I did to them in my twenties. Let me do the math. In my professional baseball career, I estimate I slid into bases roughly 2,000 times. Each slide slammed my knees into packed dirt at full sprint speed. I squatted behind home plate for catching drills thousands of times — deep squats, full body weight, for hours. I sprinted from first to third, stopped hard, pivoted, pushed off. Over and over. Season after season. Tha...

                             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 ...