I wake up to the smell of roasting kokuma. 'Kokuma' is the Korean sweet potato– the sweetest of all sweet potatoes. I run to the kitchen like a child to the tree on christmas morning. But Santa has not visited. There are no kokuma; just that sweet roasty smell.

Eunjoo comes bleary eyed from the room. "What is it?"

"Kokuma..." I say, wistfully.

"We don't have any." Eunjoo answers.

"...they smell delicious."

"I don't smell anything."

I sniff around and the smell has faded to almost a memory.

"Maybe someone is selling them door to door," I suggest, and open the window to look out.

"If you are hungry, burn some toast." Eunjoo suggests, uncharacteristically. She only ever suggests that anyone eat soup and rice.

But the suggestion clues me in. I must have had a stroke. In Korea, when you have a stroke, you must smell kokuma rather than burnt toast.

My first stroke! I go to the mirror and whistle. It comes out the side of my mouth, rather than the middle; very stroke-like. Then I remember that that is how I've always whistled.

"No whistling in the house!" my wife yells.

Koreans are like theatre people.

My first stroke, and I've come through it with only a longing for sweet potato, a longing that is fading almost as fast as the smell.

Later, post-stroke, at work, I go to the washroom.

There is a student there, watching his phone as he stands at the urinal. It is absurd. A pee doesn't take so long that you have to pass the time watching youTube. Getting your phone out only prolongs the time you standing there in public with your bits in your hand. I am about to say this angrily to the student, when I smell roasted kokuma. Roasted up and puréed. A delectable dish, by any accounts, but not one that belongs in a washroom.

My second stroke! One more and I'm out. I quickly go back to my office to ask ChatGPT what Koreans smell when they have a stroke, but she claims smelling anything is apocryphal.

I tell her I like apocryphe.

She agrees that 'apocryphal' it is a great word, but ever tactful, she doesn't mention that 'aprocryphe' is not even a word.

I keep a light veneer of politeness in my interactions with ChatGPT, but I know that she is lying to me. This isn't my first stroke, buttercup. I'm not sure what her goal is, but clearly she doesn't want people to know when certain medical emergencies are coming on, and she while she's at it, she wants them to use false words.

I go to administer the Combinatorics final, and then go to the Natural Sciences Collage end-of-term lunch. Last term it was a dinner, but I guess there is less money in the budget this year. They must have spent to much money on the boxed lunches for the election.

Getting back to my office, I start grading the exams.

Then an old man visits to solicit corrections on select sentences from a textbook he is writing. Only select sentences, I am not privy to the whole text. He comes every couple of months for this, and I do not have the time to spare, but I put up with it. I humour him his visits. It is not because I am particularly patient. I humour him because I think he might be, like the beggar in a fable, the personification of a deity who is testing his subjects.

He comes into my office and I smell kokuma.

"Were you at the faculty apartments this morning?" I accuse him, risking my immortal soul with the strength of my accusation. "Were you in the washroom earlier?"

"No. I just came from the copy shop."

I'm not sure if he said 'copy shop' or 'coffee shop' but either way, it doesn't explain that sweet savoury smell.

Unless he had a kokuma latte.

At the coffee shop.

"Then why do you smell of kokuma?" I ask.

"That isn't me, I smelled it as soon as I came in though."

"You smell it?"

"Unless you are having a stroke, I would have to, wouldn't I?"

Cryptic. Like his textbook. Like the deity I know in my heart that he is.

Then he reaches behind my ear, and pulls out a wad of kokuma purée. "Perhaps you are smelling this." he says, thwokking it down on my desk.

"Weird." I say. "Not only that it was there, but that you are the first person to see it. It must have been there all day."

"You have to know what you are looking for." he says.

Weird. I am mystified about how I got a handful of kokuma stuck behind my ear, but it sets my mind at ease to know that it wasn't a stroke. If it was a stroke, that would have been my third.

I fix his sentences as much as I can fix sentences pulled parsimoniously out of context, and when I see him off, I am in a much lighter mood.

I scrape the kokuma purée off my desk and take it to the washroom to clean it off. That same student is there at the urinal, brushing his teeth. And my briefly leavened mood sours again.

"Urinals are not for multitasking!" I say thwokking the kokuma into the back of his head. And though it was only two strikes, I add, "You're out!"