Vegetables, Yogurt, and Pizza hr632

My childhood diet was very healthy. That may be the reason why I was such a skinny kid, contrary to how I am today.
I was born in a farmer’s family in Kyoto, an old city in Japan. My family used to be almost self-sufficient. We mainly ate the leftover vegetables of eggplant and spinach that weren’t fit to be sold at the market because of flaws. We also planted rice and other vegetables such as onions, potatoes, carrots, radishes, burdocks and green peppers, not for sale but exclusively for our daily meals. We kept barnyard fowls that provided fresh eggs every morning. Our breakfasts and lunches were almost always row egg mixed with rice and soy sauce, pickled vegetables and too-weak miso soup.
A natural life may sound beautiful and relaxing, but it’s not in reality. Our fowls would holler screaming crows at dawn every day which would induce the clamorous barking of dogs in the neighborhood. Sometimes, one of our fowls that I named and fed every day like my pets was missing, and we had chicken on the table at dinner that evening. It took time for me to realize I was eating my pet fowl while I was worried about its whereabouts. Sometimes, I did witness my grandfather choked and plucked our fowl.
Since we didn’t have to buy vegetables, we had large servings at meals. Unfortunately, all vegetable meals of ours tasted horrible because we had to pay for seasonings or cooking oil and we were stingy enough to refrain them. Everything on our table was flavorless and bland. It never stimulated my appetite and I stayed skinny. As time passed, shops had been appearing in the rural area around our house. Also, my grandfather began to loosen his tight reign of the household and my mother had been able to have some discretion to go shopping and spend money. Our self-sufficiency was rapidly falling. Foods from outside tasted awesome. My appetite finally came out of its long hibernation. I was hooked by ham and mayonnaise in particular, and became chubby in no time.
Of all the terribly-tasted foods that my grandfather had long eaten, he picked yogurt as the worst. When he saw my sister eat it everyday, he asked for one out of curiosity. He said he had never had such an awful food in his life. After I left home for my music career and started living by myself in Tokyo, he often asked my father to take him to my apartment that was far from Kyoto. He wanted to see what was like to live alone there. My father didn’t feel like taking on such a bother for him and used a clever repelling. He told my grandfather that I was eating pizza everyday in Tokyo.
Of course he knew both that I wasn’t and that my grandfather didn’t know what pizza was. He explained to my grandfather that a food called pizza was oily round bread covered with sour sticky substance called cheese that was stringy and trailed threads to a mouth at every bite. And he added a threat, “You would eat that thing in her small apartment. Can you do that?” My grandfather replied in horror, “Why should I eat such a thing rotten enough to pull threads? I can’t ever go to Tokyo.” That pizza description cleanly stopped my grandfather’s repetitive request.
When I returned home for a visit once, my grandfather asked me a question at dinner time. Pointing the four corners of the dining room and drawing invisible lines in the air with his chopsticks, he said, “Your entire apartment is merely about this size, isn’t it?” As I replied it was about right, he asked, “How come you chose to do all what is necessary to live in such a small space and eat stringy rotten foods with threads although you have a spacious house and nice foods here? Is music worth that much? I don’t understand at all.” He looked unconvinced. As for me, while I had a certain amount of hardship, I had a far better life with tasty foods and freedom compared to the one that I had had in this house. Nevertheless, I didn’t utter those words. I said nothing and pour sake for him into his small empty cup, instead.

The First Cold in 10 Years hr566

I started coughing the next day when I got back from a four-day trip of my winter getaway. The day after that, I had a high fever. Now it was official that I had a cold. I had been very careful not to catch a cold for years by wiping my hands with wet tissue every time I touch public materials, gurgling right after I come home and drinking vegetable juice every morning. As I had boasted about building up my immune system, I believed I had strong resistance to a cold. That confidence was shattered. My diligent anti-bacteria daily life was to no avail and I caught a cold for the first time in more than ten years. Because my fever was as high as 101 degrees, I suspected it was influenza. I also feared that I might have contracted MARS or something since I was strolling around the airport during the trip. I usually consult the Internet instead of a doctor, and websites said that I should see how my fever would go over a week. If it got higher and lasted more than a week, it would be influenza. If less than that, it would be a simple cold. Until the verdict, I just took cold medicine and stayed in bed. To make things worse, my partner caught a cold at the same time and had the exactly the same symptoms as mine. Two of us under the same roof had a cold simultaneously meant there was no one who took care of us. With nobody to cook or clean, we ate instant foods in our gradually dirtying apartment, which surely didn’t seem to work for recovery. I lost appetite and every simple movement lead to exhaustion easily. Because I hadn’t had a cold for such a long time, I forgot about how painful it could be. I lay in bed all day long coughing and wheezing, with my head dim by a fever and medicine, thinking about how much I wanted to be in good health. I realized that health was the most important thing to have and I could do anything if only I got rid of a cold. Then I began to feel helpless and all sorts of negative thoughts invaded me. I was afraid of being in this excruciating condition over a week. What if I didn’t get better after several weeks? Could it be much more serious disease beyond my deductions? Would I eventually be brought into an emergency room and hospitalized for a long time? When I get very old, would I be feeble like this every day? If so, I strongly defy aging. I slept on and off with those cloudy thoughts. One morning, I woke up after I slept for twelve hours straight probably because of medicine. I found no sign of my partner who sleeps in a different room and usually gets up earlier than I do. There was no sound of him walking down the hallway or fixing breakfast as I hear in my room every morning. I wondered if he had died as his condition got worse during the night. Should I call an ambulance? Can I live all alone from now on? Do I have enough money for his funeral? I felt terrified at the thought of what I should do, and then, I heard him getting out of his room. He was alive, thankfully. After three days in physical and mental agony, my fever began to drop. It returned to normal temperature within a week. It was a cold, not anything serious after all. I got back to work ten days later. To sum up, I wasted two weeks in total on the trip and the cold. Only one good thing was that I lost six pounds in a week although I hadn’t been able to lose an ounce whatever I tried. Now I must keep my weight this way. Otherwise, I suffered for nothing and just threw two weeks down the drain…