Hidemi’s Rambling No.408

My grandfather’s sister lived in a small house right at the back of our family’s house a long time ago. Until I was five or six years old, I had visited her house alone frequently. The main reason I spent a lot of time there was that my strict grandparents took care of me instead of my busy parents and I couldn’t feel comfortable with them for tension in my house. But, there was another reason. Half of her small house was a print shop. It was a tiny typography place run by her husband, which mostly printed fliers for neighbors. I liked to watch the shop so much. The printing machine was running only occasionally, but looking at innumerable wooden types arranged neatly in the shelves was interesting enough for me. I used to spend hours sitting toward the shelves and just gazing the wooden types. If it was my lucky day, her daughter was home and cooked me fried rice. Back then, I had been troubled with autointoxication. I spent so much time in her house that my mother instantly imputed the cause to printing ink when I was diagnosed at the doctor’s office. In the following ten years, both my grandfather’s sister and her husband have passed away, her children have left home, and the house was demolished. The print shop was gone. A new house was built for sale and a young couple moved in. The husband was an office worker but soon he quit his job. He started his own business at his home and that was a print shop. The couple was newcomers to our neighborhood and had no way to know that there had been also a print shop on the site of their house. The site must be predestined to be a print shop…