The Yellow Sea coast was only about two and a half miles from our home. It was near enough that I could easily see it from any high place near our home. There was a series of water pools along the path to the sea, and a creek flowed between them. I would often dig around one of those pools smelling of stale water to catch eel and freshwater mud crab. I would poke around in all sorts of places to catch different kinds of water life, so I came to know where each kind lived. Eels, by nature, do not like to be visible, so they hide their long bodies in crab holes and other similar places. Often, though, they can’t quite fit all of their bodies n the holes, so the ends of their tails remain sticking out. I could easily catch them, simply by grabbing the tail and pulling the eel out of its hole. If we had company in our home and they wanted to eat steamed eel, then it was nothing for me to run the three and a half miles round trip to the water pools and bring back about five eels. During summer vacations, I would often catch more than forty eels in a day.

       There was one chore I didn’t like doing. This was to feed the cow. Often, when my father would tell me to feed the cow, I would take it to the meadow of the neighboring village, where I would tie it up and run away. But after a while, I would start to worry about the cow. When I looked back, I could see it was still there, right where I had tied it. It just stayed there, half the day or more, mooing and waiting for someone to come feed it. Hearing the cow mooing in the distance, I would feel sorry for it and think, “That cow! What am I going to do with it?” Maybe you can imagine how I felt to ignore the cow’s mooing. Still, when I would go back to it late in the evening, it wouldn’t be angry or try to gore me with its horns. Instead it seemed happy to see me. This made me realize that a person’s perspective on a major objective in life should be like that of a cow. Bide your time with patience, and something good will come to you.