Ah 2020, you were suprisingly good to me part II: Hello shit, meet the fan
Well 2020, you started out well! Beating goals, spending time with friends, throwing axes and climbing mountains. What? You want to completely emotionally, mentally and physically destroy me? What was that? Oh everything that can go wrong will go wrong from March to July? Well $#%.
March, First evidence this year is not like any other
March started normal. I was climbing. Going out for drinks and socializing. After that tho everything changed. It changed for all of us.
The first thing I notice when looking back is that my photos become more mundane. No vistas, no peaks, no rocks, no people. Just me, my dog, and the same streets of Denver on repeat. People are going crazy buying up all the toilet paper in the city. I literally made a roll last 2 weeks. I started showering after every morning shit just to save on it. The only really pretty photo I have in March is one hiking trip I did with Goose over a snowy weekend.
Quarantine at first wasn’t serious. We all thought we would just go back to living our normal lives in a month or two. At my office we had someone whose partner came back from China with a fever. We closed down for a day. Everyone joked around about it. I think I even went to the gym like nothing happened. I just didn’t understand the nuke that was about to go off in my life. On my birthday after a month of hanging around the clutch in my car literally detonated. The car was kaput. Local mechanic wanted to charge me 2200 bucks to fix it. The car was totaled. So here I was without a way to get to the mountains a huge bill in my hands. Luckily my cousin is a mechanic and was able to hook me up but it took 3 months before I would drive anywhere again. Let alone see other people. Anyone who has known me for very long knows I love adventure and being outside. With quarantine beginning to look more serious and severe I was also stuck in Denver.
Don’t get me wrong I LOVE my city. Love it. The people, the bars, the food, the parks, all of it! The thing is when you don’t have a car and trains aren’t running because pandemic it means you are stuck. My roommates were all laid off from service industry jobs and I quickly made the decision to not drink during quarantine. I figured three months of not drinking would be easy. Where the hell would I go. This was the first big WIN of 2020 for me that I just never saw coming. I have always drank socially. I love it. Nothing like hitting a bar with your best buds and getting drunk. Love the social aspect of it and it was always a release for me. Have a bad day, go to the bar. Have a good day, go to the bar. But as I got into quarantine I realized I didn’t actually like being drunk. I liked the people. I like doing karaoke with my co-workers but not the drinking. The drinking was there to celebrate them. I have nothing against it now but quarantine made me put into perspective the why. I vowed to not drink alone and to do my best to not drink at home. Without community I just didn’t want to do it.
Work sucks, life sucks, I need my People!
Community community community. This is what I needed during quarantine and the biggest hole in my heart. I moved to Denver for two things: the mountains and Guild Education. Guild is a lot of my life here. I love my team, I love our mission, and I am happy to be a part of an amazing organization. During quarantine this was never more apparent. We kept hearing rumors of going back to work in June, that turned to August, and then September, and finally 2021. That really took the wind out of my sails. I felt so defeated. I was away from my community. Away from my team, my friends, and really the family I made here in Denver. Working remotely is really really fucking challenging. You sit in the same room looking at everyone on a zoom call or whatever. I hit rock bottom. I felt so disconnected and alone and I just never told anyone about it. I missed people. I missed parties. I missed climbing. All of it because of the community it brings. The special interactions where you sit in an elevator and laugh about a stupid joke. The days melded together. My roommates continued to party and I continued to not drink and not sleep very much. I was angry. I was trying to walk around Denver everyday. I would put on a podcast or symphony and just walk. Sometimes for 30 minutes and sometimes for three hours. I met a few people in my neighborhood with dogs and we started randomly seeing each other at the park. This turned into multiple days a week going for walks together. This was the first taste of community and compassion I had felt in months.
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April, A Dream of Spring
It felt good just talking about how much everything wasn’t great. We were all going through it together. Shared experience goes a long way to create bonds and while I don’t still see these people walking I am glad we had a two or three month period where we were able to connect through random means. What I felt on those random interactions and meetings was hope. Hope that I could someday be with someone new in a romantic sense but also hope that everything would be fine. The human condition runs on hope. We always find ways to look to the brighter in each other and bounce back. This is what I was missing and it was like being thrown into a cold pool. You just wake up and realize, shit that was not fun…wait I am alive now! Spring was coming to Denver…the best place to be for it. Even though we didn’t have patios and our normal party from our Winter hibernation it was still here. Small glimpses of life and just feeling like everything was getting better. Colorado’s numbers were down and restrictions were beginning to lift. The biggest thing was I got the chance to CLIMB.
Coming out of quarantine I wasn’t climbing well. Hell it had been two months of no activity. I was literally wheezing my way up the rock and getting my ass handed to me. It was horrible. All this progress lost. I ticked two of my goals in January and my goal of climbing 5.11 let alone climbing anything difficult felt completely and utterly impossible. I got shut down on everything. Drove up to Estes Park to celebrate my birthday late and couldn’t get the climb I drove up there for. So frustrating. But, I was spending time with my people. My community was slowly growing and the flower of Spring was beginning to blossom into a delicate flower that would drive my growth for the rest of the year. I needed these people. My climbing friends Marcus, Reuben, George, Scott, Max, etc. But also my work family. All these communities were starting to blossom as spring touched the Rockies and it was magical.
My people were back and my focus was crystal clear. It wasn’t about goals it was about experiences. I focused on teaching my roommates how to climb. I began to be more vocal with my needs for sleeping and my boundaries. I interviewed for jobs that helped me grow. During this time the blurry photo destroyed by the pandemic was starting to be crystal clear. I was still me. Focused on growth. Focused on just being in the moment. These months flew by. That was until the death of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor.
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May and June Protests, Riots, and Denver showing it’s magic
The first protests I ran into in Denver were anti-mask anti-lockdown protests. I didn’t even understand what I was getting into until someone spit at me and told me to take off my mask. They were in a car and I had Goose with me. They were to chicken-shit to get out of there car. It was weird. Little did I know this would set the stage for the most challenging summer I have lived through. A pandemic and the largest civil rights movement since the 60s was a terrible combination. Really it was a perfect storm.
The death of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery shook the nation to it’s core. To be honest, I was at first a silent observer. Just like all the other times it happened in my life. So many other times. I sat on the sidelines and claimed to be an ally and friend to the black community but I really never spoke up or spoke out. I grew up around a lot of different cultures and I grew up respecting them. They were my community. My friends. My best friends. But as I grew older my crowd got less diverse. Classical music wasn’t diverse. Most of my classmates were white and I never knew why I never felt like a part of the group. When I lived in Georgia that changed. I was a part of the black community there because we both shared a love of music. I played concerts with them, went to church with them, and was welcomed into the community because we were just people who loved music and people. Looking back, my childhood heroes were black. Jackie Robinson, Kobe Bryant, and Miles Davis. This was a community I claimed to love and appreciate but I never really supported when they needed me. The protests in Denver were the first time I risked it to be there for them.
I am not under any illusion that going to one protest makes me a better person than anyone else. But for me it felt like I was standing next to a friend I knew my entire life. This wasn’t about posting on social media with a blank black photo it was about showing up when a community needed you. Did I support the graffiti or destruction or rioting? Maybe some would say that. In Denver the protests were peaceful. It was a small community asking to be recognized and lawmakers here did. Reforms were passed. These protests made a difference in my community. I felt like being there out in the thick of it I helped that in some infinitesimally small way.
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Saying goodbye to your elders
Unfortunately, the night of the first big protest two things happened that were traumatic. My roommate was shot in the face with a rubber bullet while trying to pick someone up who fell and was in the middle of tear gas. Tore a hole straight through his chin. I was staying in that night and my roommate Max walked in and asked if I could drive him to the hospital. I thought he was joking. I walked out of my room and there he was covered in blood. I helped him change clothes and we had to drive to a hospital down south. Police had blocked off the hospital close to my house and were arresting protested. We drove to a further south hospital and dropped him off. As I walked back to my car to wait for his chin to be sutured up with 21 stitches my mom called me. My grandma had passed away. In that moment the biggest pain I felt was for my father. He was unable to go to her. To see her. To be with her. The pandemic blocked him from being there for someone who cared for him and loved him. My dad doesn’t cry. Only time I have ever seen him completely moved to tears was when he dropped me off in Denver. But that night over the phone all I wanted was for him to be able to do that. But he is a rock. He is the model of which I base my idea of being a great person after. He was strong.
I learned a lot through that. My dad was always a silent watcher over me. Watching me grow into a man and slightly but significantly tempering me to be who I am today. His sense of humor and willingness to always be goofy as can be. His ability to charm any human being into having one more drink. His uncanny ability to flirt with my girlfriends way better than I ever could. The man who was strict with me but let every kitten and puppy onto the couch. He gave me my stoicism and hardiness. My unfaltering determination when angry. He made me a Chun. My grandfather was the same way. Stoic and kind but stern and strict. They both mirror each other so well. I always loved my grandpa for his ability to to tell a story. To keep me effortlessly enthralled on his lap for hours. My Dad is the same way. But the time on his lap was enthralling me discovering new caves in Zelda and making pinewood derby cars that didn’t win but looked damn cool trying. My dad was always tough on me but I glad for it. I don’t feel like we ever saw eye to eye until we did. Some time ago we just clicked. Like father like son. I never wanted to hug him more in this moment but an invisible force of nature kept us apart.
My grandma and I never had that click. I always loved her and always will but there were definitely some issues there. Ultimately, she gave me the greatest gift anyone ever did. My artistry. Where Dad and Grandpa were the steel my Grandma and Mom were the heart. Losing a parent is unfathomable. As children we are a weird combination of them. What grandma contributed more than anything else was love of beauty. She painted like a fiend. Even when her eyesight was lost to cataracts she still painted. I never was brave enough to ask for a painting of my trumpets or the mountains and my biggest regret when she died was that I never did. What we do have are beautiful watercolors of tropical paradise. Fitting. She was a flower. A tremendously tough flower. Beautiful, brilliant, an artist. She gave me art supplies for every birthday I could remember. She translated comics into English so I knew the characters. She loved me. She saw the creativity and lit the spark. I saw her cry twice. Both of those times was when I played the trumpet. One in a cycle of songs about the country and the other when I played taps for grandpa at Punch Bowl. Art is what will bond us through the eternities. Where our souls met and will always intertwine.
Looking over old photos and looking into our history I realized she came from a cold part of Japan. The northern part of Japan. There are photos of her in the snow, on rocks and outside. The women I knew wasn’t an adventurer. But perhaps I judged her too soon. Maybe her childhood in the cold and the mountains and her adult life in a paradise in Hawaii changed her. She hated her feet being cold. Even when she was coming out of a stroke five years ago the first thing my dad did was make sure her feet were warm. Why didn’t I ever ask how she grew up? Maybe she was a climber, an adventurer. The photos seem to support that evidence. What I knew was a totally different person. I regret not asking more about it. My aunt Daisy wrote countless paragraphs about the Chun family settling in Hawaii. About my Korean Heritage. But I never felt Korean. My grandpa hid it away like a secret. He only wanted me to be American. I always wanted to be Japanese. I do not know much about Keiko Sasaki, the wild child in the foothills of Japan. What I do know is that her death made me want to see my homeland with my father before I die. The call of Japan has always failed to find my ears. I never went with her. I was never invited. But I am Japanese in spirit and in soul. That came from her. I long to find where these photos were taken and to go on adventures in a land that is unmistakably home. To follow in the footsteps of greatness, and to tread heavily on a land that will feel foreign and a part of me when I set foot on it. What Grandma gave me was identity that will live in me until the day I die.
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Losing Grandma was hard. It made me think a lot about how she gave me art and artistry and how she shaped me. This summer I also lost Keith Johnson. Mr. Johnson was my teacher’s teacher. When it was time for me to go to grad school and study with someone I chose to study with Keith. It made sense. He was brilliant and had followed and intersected with my music journey since the day I studied under Rob. Unfortunately, shortly after I arrived at the University of North Texas Keith was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. This diagnosis would change his life forever and impact me in ways I really didn’t understand yet.
I dreamed of studying under Mr. Johnson from the day I met him at eighteen years old. He was so wise. So put together. Every time I played with him I played better. I grew. Our lessons when was starting to show symptoms were still great. I chalked it up to him being the absent minded professor lost in his wisdom. When I found out it was something more sinister it broke me. This brilliant force of nature robbed of his brilliance right in front of my eyes. It was like losing a grandparent for me. This man had been a part of my growth for so long. I would go on to find other mentors but the hole left from losing my chance to study with him still stings. I still have a signed copy of his book “The Art of Trumpet Playing” on my shelf. That book changed my life. It made me think of trumpet playing not as a skill but an art. He made me not want to be some trumpet jock but to be a musician. When people asked what I did for a living I would say a musician not a trumpet player. He redefined what it meant for me to create something. I still hear him saying “Ah tu” in his charming East Texas accent in my head when I take a breath. I still long to hear him say “That’s it!” when I playing a beautiful flowing lyrical line. But really I miss him as a person. Lessons with Mr. Johnson were like parables that taught you the important things about life. A lot of it was about music but he also made me love Indian food and good scotch.
I felt like Keith was my last connection to my wife and to my time in Texas. His wife, Cecile, is a brilliant teacher of the Kodaly method. When Lizz moved to Texas she was having a lot of trouble finding work. Cecile took time out of her day to get coffee and lunch with her and shortly after she found work. I feel like after that I heard just as much about Cecile as I did about Keith at home. We both needed them to grow into stronger people. When Keith stopped teaching me and left UNT it was never the same. I never clicked with the other teachers there and I felt like my move across the country was for nothing. Now that he is gone I can say goodbye to that chapter. Fondly.
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Lose a Mentor Gain a Friend
Life works in mysterious ways. Funny enough, my learning of Keith having to retire led me to climb more. I spent more time at the gym and I poured myself into climbing as a new passion. I met Marcus shortly after I heard about Keith’s diagnosis. I lost a mentor in Texas but I gained a life long friend who eventually pulled me to Colorado. 2020 made me appreciate these little serendipitous moments so much more. We never know when a random night at the gym will turn into one of the strongest partnerships and friendships of our lives. Looking back when Keith passed gave me perspective that every loss leads to an opportunity. Every falter or fall eventually leads to a summit. While these three months of this year were taxing and challenging in new ways I had not experienced or accounted for they also made me appreciate who and what I have in my life. No one has made me realize that more than Marcus.
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Stay Tuned for what’s next in my 2020
Summits, community, and I start to teach again.
