IN KOO KIM

ASKED: BUT WHAT DO YOU LOVE?

I love Vermeer's paintings; that there aren't many of his works; that when thieves stole his painting from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, curators put a drape over where it was and didn't replace it with something else. I love the dinosaur and beetle mosaics imbedded in the tiled subway of the New York Natural History Museum; the snip of hair cut by fine scissors; the paper-thin shavings that fall when a woodworker shapes a block of cedar into a bowl. I love the shape of an anvil. I love the engineer who first dreamed up the cable suspension bridge and the craftsman who invented the f-shaped resonance holes in violins. I love the way Glen Gould plays Mozart's Piano Sonata in G and that you can hear him humming in his recordings. I love the hammerwork inside the piano - finger to key, key to lever, lever to hammer, hammer to string. I love the negative weight of a piano key. I love that someone took the care to brand designs on manhole covers. I love Italian words of tempo - Lento e Placido, Andante Graziozo, Molto Vivace; but most of all, I love the word Adagio. I love words that begin with the letter k - keck, kibble, kerf, krill. I love the quiet during a heavy snow. I love, how sad, the color of a violin. I love remembering how it was to be a boy - that we played games like Heads Up Seven Up, how cool the air conditioned rooms felt when we ran in from hot recess, that my palms smelled like iron from swinging on the monkey bars.