"My Work is a Reflection of Myself."

Grandmaster Sang Kyu Shim had spent years moving through America — teaching, touring, carrying the complete philosophical lineage of Hwang Kee and the Moo Duk Kwan tradition from city to city. In 1963, he chose Detroit. He settled. That same year, on his birthday — March 3rd — a boy was born in that same city who would one day become one of his students.

The path to Shim began not in a bookstore but on a street in Northwest Detroit — that old melting-pot neighborhood where everyone knew each other and newcomers were noticed. A neighbor named Don: tough-looking, leather jacket, biker energy, but a man of real depth. Don was studying under Grandmaster Shim with his stepson, and he told Bobby — more than once, with the directness of someone who meant it — that Shim was rare. Essential. A true warrior and philosopher, the kind of mentor a young man must not miss. He pressed the books into Bobby's hands and told him to read them.

It took a year to begin reading. Another year before the books truly began working on him. And then — because there was no other honest next step — he made the call.

The books arrived through Don's hands — a neighbor, a man of the neighborhood, who had already found Shim and recognized something in Bobby that Shim's teaching could meet. Bobby carried them home and set them aside for a year. Then he picked them up. Then he couldn't put them down. Not as instruction in martial arts, but as a map of a life fully lived. The books entered his dreams. When he finally made the call to schedule an interview, he had already been a student for a long time.

A young car mechanic — hands that had rebuilt carburetors and diagnosed fuel injection systems, that knew how to read what a machine was telling you before it told you — read that sentence and stopped. Then read it again. Then wrote it down on a 3x5 card in his own hand. Then wrote it again on another.

It was deeper than martial arts. Deeper than philosophy. It was universal, timeless — a sentence that seemed to have been waiting for him specifically. Not because it told him something new, but because it named something he had already sensed in the marrow and never had the words for. That life was not a fixed thing to be possessed or protected, but a living current to be moved with, shaped by, answered.

The cards multiplied. The books stayed open. The dreams began. And eventually — because there was no other honest next step — he made the call.

During the interview to join the school, Bobby told Grandmaster Shim what the books had meant to him — the year of reading, the rereading, the dreams in which Shim had already been teaching him. Shim listened. Then, without ceremony, he said directly: "You will become one of my best black belts."

Almost nobody had read the books. Nobody had read them with that zeal. Grandmaster Shim recognized something — not just knowledge, but the hunger behind it.

Over the years that followed, Bobby would slip a birthday card through the office staff — quietly, without fanfare. And Grandmaster Shim, who maintained his dignified remove from all students, would always find a way to quietly, subtly acknowledge it. A word. A glance. The particular kind of thanks that does not draw attention to itself.

Some things are transmitted not in the dojo, and not in the teaching. They live in the small gestures that cross the space a master must keep.

Early on, Grandmaster Shim sent Bobby far south to Taylor — a long drive across Detroit at dawn on Saturday mornings, to assist the teacher at an almost-dead branch. Livonia was four miles from home. Taylor was another world away entirely. Bobby knew the difference. He went anyway, every Saturday, with full gusto — because when a Grandmaster sends you somewhere, you do not ask why. You find out by going.

After about ten months, Shim called him in. With the directness that was his nature, he said: "Robert, you will come to the main Saturday mornings from now on, take over the class — and I will teach you how to teach."

That was not an invitation. It was a mandate. And Bobby received it as the honor it was.

The main school — Grandmaster Shim's great home studio, the legendary home of Sunday Class, his personal office complex lining one entire wall — was the center of everything. Some of the office rooms had one-way glass. Parents and prospective students would be hosted there while class was underway, watching through the glass as Bobby taught.

He often ended up teaching two back-to-back classes — when the second morning instructor ran late, Bobby simply kept going. He never said anything but thank you. Shim was on the other side of that glass, hosting appointments, and Bobby understood exactly what that meant: how could he ever let him down? He was discipline. He was enthusiasm. And he had not been given more time because he was a favorite — he had earned it, and he knew the difference. He saw every double class as an honor, not a burden.

The Sunday Class was where the deeper teaching happened. Hwang Kee and the Moo Duk Kwan tradition carried a philosophical weight that most martial arts schools in America had set aside — Grandmaster Shim had not. His essays in Tae Kwon Do Times extended the teaching beyond the dojo, into the question of how a person lives, works, relates to others, and builds a life that is itself a discipline.

My Work is a Reflection of Myself — this was not a motto. It was a standard. It meant that every board broken, every form executed, every relationship tended and every project brought to completion was an expression of the practitioner's interior life. There was nowhere to hide. The work revealed you.

Bobby carried this not as a burden but as a liberation. It answered something he had already suspected — that excellence is not separate from character, that the quality of a life and the quality of one's craft are the same conversation.

Three years into the deepest period of study — with the philosophical transmission well underway, with the Sunday Class and the essays and the private birthday cards and the quiet acknowledgments that crossed the necessary distance — Grandmaster Sang Kyu Shim was taken suddenly.

There are losses that do not resolve. They become part of the structure of a life — not wounds that close, but rooms that stay open. Bobby has carried Shim's teaching forward for decades since, mentoring dozens of students who will never know the man directly, only through what passed through Bobby first.

This is how a lineage survives. Not in institutions, but in people who took something seriously enough to keep it alive.

The standard — My Work is a Reflection of Myself — governs everything Bobby builds and tends: the bamboo structures, the zen gardens, the soil he feeds, the homes he restores, the sons he is raising. None of it is separate from the question of who he is becoming.

Grandmaster Shim had traveled America for years before choosing Detroit as his home in 1963. On his birthday that year — March 3rd — Bobby Grimes was born in that same city. Neither knew the other existed. It would be years before their paths crossed, and only three years before that crossing was cut short. But the transmission had already happened — first through the books, then through the Sunday Class and the quiet birthday cards, then through Bobby's life itself, which has become the ongoing answer to the question Shim asked without ever asking it:

What does a man become when his work and himself are the same thing?