The Happiest Memory hr665

 

What I remember as the happiest memory in my childhood is the day that my parents took my younger sister and me to the confectionery factory for a guided tour when I was about seven or eight years old. Theme parks hadn’t arrived in Japan yet and even a factory tour was rare and unfamiliar back then while it has been popular and factories of many kinds have offered it nowadays. My father happened to find a major Japanese manufacturer offering a free tour at the factory that was a 40-minute drive from home. Since we didn’t go out much together because of my parents’ busy work, a factory tour sounded to me extra special and also to be something unimaginable. As we had made a reservation, the staff waited for and greeted us at the factory where we realized that we were the only group for the tour that day probably because it was a weekday.

A tour guide led just four of us around the huge factory and showed and explained each section in detail through the overwhelmingly big glass above the factory floor. Everywhere in the factory was thoroughly clean and all white. Walking along the long passage above the vast factory floor and looking down the machinery through the glass, I imagined that inside of a space station would be like this. I was amazed at automation. Everything was operated by automated equipment and few humans were around it, which was so futuristic. Cookies and snacks were flowing endlessly on the conveyors and hopping and wiggling as if they were dancing while they were seasoned. They looked to me some cute life-forms of another planet. My mother also looked so happy for this once. She said to me several times in excitement, “Look! That dough came out turning into these here! Look! Those pieces went in over there!” With an additional backdrop of my mother’s good mood, I was sticking to the glass, fascinated by the operation.

At the end of the tour, we were ushered to the large screening room. Many tables were set there and one of them had a big plate of confectionery on it. That was our table. The staff brought tea and told us to have as much confectionery as we liked. The short film that introduced the manufacturer’s history and business was shown on a big screen while I was munching freshly-baked, just-out -of-conveyor cookies and snacks. Since snacks were luxury for me who was raised by stingy grandparents, I had eaten neither so many of them nor the ones that were still warm at my fingertips before. We monopolized the whole thing as a single group and were treated like VIPs. I thought I was dreaming.

When we were leaving, they gave each of us a big bag filled with their confectionery as a souvenir. I was holding the bag to my chest in the back seat of our car as if it had been a treasure while the car was exiting the factory’s parking lot. I missed the place already and looked back to see it one last time from the rear window of the car. I saw the tour guide and a couple of other workers standing and bowing toward our car in front of the building. They waved to me, and I waved them back. We didn’t stop waving to each other until they became sizes of rice and finally disappeared from my sight when the car that my father drove slowly on purpose for me turned out the factory gate.

I had one more memory in which I felt the similar sense of that day. It happened at the theme park where the mouse works as a host. By then, I had already left home and begun to live on my own in Tokyo. It was a weekday in winter and the park was almost empty. When I was strolling about with my partner, the mascot of that mouse appeared with the space costume that matched the particular area’s theme. I greeted him with my partner and took a photograph together. I was chattering with him when my partner pointed at his shoe, saying, “Your shoe is tattered.” The mouse and I looked down with a surprise on it that was partly worn out indeed and he gestured embarrassment. I defended him by telling my partner that he had been traveling through space a lot, which relentless condition made his shoes worn off. Three of us laughed together. We said goodbye to the mouse and left him. I looked back a few steps away and saw him still waving to me. I waved him back. Other guests gathered around him, but he didn’t stop waving to me. I repeatedly looked back several times and saw him waving to me each time even while he was taking photographs with other guests. In the end, I reached the other foot of a bridge which arch hindered the sight of him. Yet, he kept waving to me while jumping so that I could see him. The scene of his big sweeping, waving hands toward me above his bobbing head over the asphalt arch had been burned into my brain.

Every time those two memories pop up in my mind, I feel heartwarming and yearning. I sometimes wonder why I have cherished those incidents in particular. I’m not a social character and not good at being with people. I hated people, especially when I was little. Somewhere in my deep subconsciousness, I assume that people don’t understand me and vice versa because they never treat me the way I think it should be. However, I proved wrong in those two memories. They treated me right with so much kindness, which was different from what I had believed as human behavior. I was betrayed by people in a good way and got connection instead. For a brief moment as it was, I sensed deeply connected to others and that gave me inexplicable happiness. It was totally unexpected, but extremely joyful enough to be the reason for my special, happiest memories.

The Insufficient Child

 I was a nine-year-old child living in Kyoto when I was hospitalized for nephritis. In my room for six patients of the children’s ward, a girl named Ayumi also suffered from nephritis and was next to my bed. She was so little, probably three or four years old, that her mother was allowed to stay in the ward on the makeshift couch beside her bed.
Ayumi’s mother studiously read thick medical books everyday to study kidney disease for Ayumi’s recovery while looking after Ayumi. She would ask millions of questions to an intern nurse and learned from her by taking detailed notes. For Ayumi’s medication, she went to get wafer papers and would divide a dose of powdered medicine into a couple of small wrapped doses three times a day so that Ayumi took it easily.
Next to her bed, I was struggling to swallow powdered medicine though I was nine, and often coughed up and blew powder all over my bed. My mother was hardly around. She visited me barely a few minutes before the visiting time was over and left immediately. She blamed her dash visit for her busy work as a farmer, but I doubted she cared. Looking at what Ayumi’s mother was doing for her, I was stunned by the difference between her mother and mine. Mine had never been attentive like hers even when I was a small child as far as I remembered.
The worst part of my hospitalized days was loneliness and hospital meals. As a nephritis patient, I was banned from taking in salt. My meals are salt-free and with minimum seasoning. I felt like eating sponge three times a day. The volume wasn’t enough either for me who was chubby. Because I persistently complained about the meals to my mother during the short visit, she brought me potato chips. Since potato chips were deemed as the biggest taboo for nephritis, she told me to hide under the bed and move the contents from its flashy package into a plastic bag. She continued to bring other salty snacks and I made a bag of my best mix under my bed. I was strolling about the hallway, carrying the plastic bag of snacks in one hand, munching in my mouth. In case I passed someone, I stopped munching and hid the bag behind my back. But one afternoon, Ayumi’s mother caught me. She asked me to show her the plastic bag. As I did, she said somewhat sadly, “It contains everything you can’t have.” I ignored her caution and kept snacking on what my mother brought. My mother enticed me to hide under my bed and let me eat a can of corned beef with a big topping of mayonnaise there. As a result, I stayed chubby in the hospital despite the controlled healthy meals.
One day, a younger girl who had been annoying all the time next to my bed on the opposite side of Ayumi enraged me. I was bashing her with a coloring book while yelling the biggest taboo word in the hospital this time, “Die! Die! Die!”, with full force. Impatient at my unprincipled behavior, Ayumi’s mother raised her voice toward me, “That’s enough, Hidemi! Clean up your act, already!” I thought she was a carping critic because I hadn’t realized evilness of my mother yet back then and had been such a nasty child who had totally accepted my mother’s bad influence.
Ayumi’s father came to visit her on his day off. I was taking powdered medicine on my bed that I had gotten used to swallowing without problems by then. He said to me smiling, “You have gotten the knack of it and no longer choked. Good for you!” I wondered how he had known that as I had rarely seen him here.
A family of caring. Not that I was familiar with.

Genetic Parsimony from Atavism hr571

I was brought up by my grandparents who led an extremely saving life. Although we were well off and lived in a big house back then, most lights were kept off to save the electric bill and the house was always dark. Turning on the TV was available by my grandfather’s daring permission. We would eat dinner in the poor light under a small kitchen fixture. My family had farmed in those days and what we ate were vegetables we grew in our fields. We grew some kinds for our family’s use, but most vegetables on our table were what were too damaged to be sold in the market. We ate eggplants almost every day in summer and spinach in winter. Meat seldom appeared and we lived like vegetarians. Protein was supplied mainly by beans from our fields. We kept hens that brought us eggs. Sometimes my grandmother got cheap fish at a nearby mom-and-pop store and grilled it that seemed to have more small bones than flesh. Every meal was bland and tasted terrible, as my grandmother saved seasoning. Snacks were hopeless too. Since my grandparents had tried not to waste money on them, we had only few snacks of Japanese style cookies that occasional visitors brought as gifts. They were damp and limp because we kept them as long as we could. I usually didn’t have any appetite and was thin probably owing to that eating habit. When I visited a relative’s house and ate there once in a while, everything on their table looked gorgeous. In that case, I devoured and called the house a restaurant. My relatives would wonder and ask me what I ate at home while they were watching perplexedly the way I was eating their regular meals. My grandmother spent most of her spare time sewing and mending something. She mended holes in socks and patched futons so that we could use them for a long time. I had never seen her get new clothes and she wore an old kimono every day. Her scarce cosmetics were the cheapest ones on the market. My grandfather went out by using a senior citizen’s pass for a free ride of public transportation, wearing an ancient drooping jacket and shoes with a hole. Whenever he ate out, he brought back the leftovers in a doggy bag. As a child, it was a mystery to me why they lived like that although they had plenty of money. I hated it and longed for a better life. Then I grew up and got to live in the way I liked. And now I find myself mending tirelessly my tattered socks. I’m not rich, but not that I can’t afford new ones. I replace elastic at the waist of pants, turn off the lights in my apartment as much as I can, buy and eat old food that is half price, ask for a doggy bag, and find free samples for my cosmetics. I think it’s not about saving money. I simply hate wasting. Not just money, but anything. If we waste time continuously, we will end up wasting our whole life. When I avoid wasting something successfully, I feel like I’m smart and that feeling brings me joy. I imagine my grandparents thought the same way. I gradually don’t loathe being stingy myself while I’m duly aware that someone notices and sneers at mended marks on my socks…