Friday, December 27, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.500

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This incident happened one New Year’s at the end of the card game called ‘kabu’, in which my uncle acted as dealer for the yearly family casino at my grandparents’ house. He had lost quite a lot to my cousin, who was his son, as usual that night and my cousin had left the table as the morning dawned. My uncle, my mother and I were left at the table and the game was about to close. My mother asked for a few more deals because she had also lost a large sum and wanted to get it back. To recover her loss quickly, she bet by the $100. The game was played for high stakes every year, but I had never seen the stakes this high. She lost in succession and her loss swelled to $500 in a flash. “This is the last bet,” she claimed in desperation and put $500 on the table. She tried to offset her total loss on the last deal of the game. All at once the tension skyrocketed and strange silence filled the room. I held my breath and withdrew my usual small bet. The cards were dealt tensely and my mother and my uncle showed their hands of fate. Both hands were ridiculously bad but my mother’s was even worse. She lost $1000. Burying her head in her hands, she repeatedly uttered, “It can’t be! Can’t be true!” I saw tears in her widely opened bloodshot eyes. Then she repeated “Oh, my… Oh, my…” in a faint voice for ten times and staggered away. I clearly remember her state of stupor. A couple of days later back in our home, I enticed her into playing ‘kabu’ with me since I learned how poorly she played it and I knew I would win. I used to receive cash as a New Year’s gift from my relatives during New Year’s and it would amount to $1000. I dangled it in front of her and said that it would be her chance to get back her loss. She took it and we played for $1000. As I had thought, she lost another $1000 to me. She said she couldn’t pay, and I offered her the installment plan. I got $100 more to my monthly allowance of $30 for the next ten months. That was the richest year in my early teens. Many years later, she failed in real estate investment and lost most of our family fortune that had been inherited for generations. The amount she lost that time was well over $1 million. And that was the money I was supposed to inherit…

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Friday, December 20, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.499

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The living room in my grandparents’ home was used for a card game when the house turned into a family casino during New Year’s. The game was a blackjack-like one called ‘kabu’ and organized by my uncle. It used to be the best treat of New Year’s for me in my childhood and early in my teens. Unlike ‘mortar roller’ I had introduced before, this game was played seriously and intensely because it was for high stakes. The players usually bet a dollar or more, sometimes as high as a hundred dollars. The farther into the night it got, the higher the bet went. The family members would leave the table one by one, as the higher bet would make them tense and deprive them of pleasure. As for me, I liked to see the game get heated so much and would play throughout the night until the game came to an end in the next morning. The usual players who stayed at the table near dawn would be my uncle who was a dealer, my eldest cousin, my mother and I. My uncle was a successor of the family by marriage and so my grandparents were his in-laws. He was on terrible terms with my grandmother who raised my eldest cousin in place of him and his wife because they were too busy working at the family farm. Consequently, he didn’t get along well with his own son either. New Year’s ‘kabu’ would become an intense battle between my uncle and my cousin by dawn. My uncle couldn’t lose especially to his son and that made the game extraordinarily thrilling. My cousin would bet more than $10 on each deal and my heart would be pounding by seeing bills on the table. My uncle would concentrate on the cards dealt to him and his son too deeply to care about my small bets. Because he would forget to count me in and settle my deal thoughtlessly each time, I would end up winning quite a big amount of money in total every year. He would summon all his strength when he saw the last card dealt to him. In spite of his prayer-like chants “Come on! Come on!”, most of the time the card would be the least one he had wanted. Hand after hand, he drew the worst card possible while my cousin was rolling on the tatami floor to stifle his giggling. As far as I remember, he had never won against my cousin. He was manly and frank, but I can still picture him going back to his room after the game in the morning light with unsteady steps, worn out, drooping, and on the verge of tears. Three months after the house was burned down, he died of cancer without becoming the head of the family…

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Friday, December 13, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.498

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I ask you to keep what you are about to read in here to yourself since it’s regarding an illegal activity I was once engaged in. Until I was about sixteen years old, my parents, my younger sister and I had visited my grandparents’ home every year during the New Year’s. Limited for that time of the year, a quiet countryside house of my grandparents’ would turn into a family casino. It consisted of three different areas. In the card game area, which was the living room, a card game called ‘kabu’ that is similar to blackjack would be played. In the coin game area, which was my grandparents’ room, would be for a game called ‘mortar roller’. And the break area, which was the dining room, would be for those who didn’t like gambling or who needed food and drink. It would be open for 24 hours but only the family members could play. The coin game was organized by my grandmother. She set up a huge china mortar for sesame on the tatami floor and the players would sit around it on the floor. They would take turns and roll a 10-yen coin, which is worth about ten cents, inside the mortar. The coin rolled along the side of the round mortar, descending gradually toward the bottom. If it landed on other coins at the bottom, the player could get them. Although the game was simple, we would be absorbed in playing and our heads and eyes were rolling with a coin above the mortar. My cousin was good at it with her own devised technique to throw in a coin. I would also win snugly with my fixation on money. Beside the excited circle, my grandfather and my father, who were not interested in gambling, would talk over Japanese tea that my grandfather would make. My grandmother would start fretting after midnight and tell us to be quiet because she had believed that the military policemen could bust in with bayonets. We laughed at her anachronism while seeing her try to mute the mortar and still live the WWII era. She upgraded the mortar one year by putting a round piece of cardboard near the bottom. The mortar’s floor was raised and became wider and flatter so that it was harder to make the coin lie on top of the other. More coins to take would be left at the bottom and the game got more exciting. Those were such fond memories and I can still hear the sound of a rolling coin inside a mortar during New Year’s. Later on, the joyful grandparents’ house was burned down by my grandmother’s carelessness with a candle. It’s gone forever…

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Saturday, December 7, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.497

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My eyesight has grown considerably worse. The glasses I’ve used for a long time no longer fit to my deteriorated eyesight. I went to get new glasses the other day for the first time in years. During the course of years when I had paid no attention to the glasses market, the stores have become modern and sophisticated, looking like boutiques. Several different chains have their stores inside the shopping mall. They carry cool frames at the low price that people could never dream of years ago. An eyesight test was done inside the store and didn’t use an eye chart but some sort of a high-tech machine. The glasses were prepared only in twenty minutes. I had dreaded how much the new pair would cost, but they charged me far less than I had braced for. I had never imagined getting glasses would be this easy. My new pair is nifty and incredibly light. My face looks so different. With my new sharp vision, I feel like I have transformed myself into a new me. I had my first close encounter with glasses when I was in the second grade. I failed an annual eyesight test at school and the school required a further examination at the doctor’s office. That sent my mother into a near panic. Back in those days, one of the unbelievably stupid things people said in a rural area was that a girl with glasses couldn’t marry and so had no life in the future. My mother said to me, “If you need glasses, it’ll be the end of your life!” I was headed for the doctor’s office trembling with fear with my friend who had also failed the test. After the examination, the receptionist simply let my friend go, and then said to me, “Your glasses will be ready soon. Come get them at the store next to this office.” As casually as that, she handed me a death sentence. I couldn’t face the fact and told a lie to my mother that my eyes were fine. Since then, I hadn’t been able to sleep thinking that the doctor’s office would call for my glasses. Every single phone ring made me jump. My coward lie served me a couple of uneasy months but the call didn’t come after all. My glasses were smothered up. When I was eighteen, I needed glasses to get a driver’s license. I came back to the store next to the doctor’s office and, finally a decade later, got my first pair there. While I took a load off my mind at last, I failed a driving test this time. Only the glasses were left and I had cherished them up until my new pair…

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Saturday, November 30, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.496

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The Catholic school I attended had an annual event of a movie viewing. One year, the school selected a movie about Jesus Christ’s life. In the final scene, Jesus looked straight at me, which I mean was straight at the camera, and said, “I am with you always.” That line startled me. For the first time, I realized he was always with me and I was touched by the thought. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. I had a hard time to see the stairs on my way out of the movie theater because of my tears and to hide them from my friends at the same time. I had been exposed to the Christian teachings routinely through a Bible class and a daily morning prayer at school. Yet, I had never thought about it deeply like this before. As a teenager, I had believed that nothing good would ever happen to me in the future and I would have to endure a life in the prison-like world. I had constantly felt lonely and hopeless. But what if Jesus was always beside me? I wondered how helpful it would be! Although I had had numerous bad incidents with nuns at school and been unable to get along well with them, I felt like I understood a fraction of the reason why they became nuns. Imagining being a nun can be much closer to Jesus, I suddenly wanted to be one. I talked about it casually to my best friend and she burst into laughter as she thought it was my new joke. I had told her seriously for days but that was even funnier to her. My decision to be a nun hadn’t changed after one week, and at last I dared to tell my mother about it. She just flatly said, “You’re too curious and tempting about sexual matters to be a nun.” Her remark was right enough for me to come to my senses and think better of it…

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Friday, November 22, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.495

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Back in my Catholic school days, a teacher for home economics was Sister Carmela. I was in her cooking class. I had no interest in cooking at all and all I did during the class was giggling with my friends and washing the dishes. I simply couldn’t take anything in the class seriously. Home making seemed ridiculous to me, and to begin with, I could laugh endlessly when I thought about a sister called Carmela teaching how to make caramel. As I was lazy all the time chatting and giggling, Sister Carmela often had to call my name in front of the class and shush me. She also noticed I hadn’t participated in any cooking but just been doing the dishes. No matter how hard and often she scolded me for my bad attitude, I didn’t obey and kept making other students laugh. Her patience snapped at last and she called me before the principal. In my school, bad students were close to zero and a student was hardly ever called to the principal’s office. The principal was Sister Mary Catherine who reasonably believed I had done something extraordinarily wrong. But she was taken aback when Sister Carmela told her that I had fooled around during the class. She looked at her face with an impression of ‘That’s it?’ After mildly telling me to behave myself, she let me go. Sister Carmela’s punishment didn’t work and my bad behavior continued. I was in her sewing class next year. Again, I slacked and asked my friend to make a skirt for me. Sister Carmela found that out when I turned in the skirt pretending I had sewn it. That snapped her completely. She decided to appeal directly to my parents and called up my mother that evening. Over the phone, she told her at length how bad I had been in her class. She blamed my bad attitude on my mother’s lack of discipline. My mother kept apologizing for a long time, but her tone gradually changed. As Sister Carmela strongly criticized my mother’s way of raising a child, my mother suddenly yelled, “I have no reason to listen to someone who has never married nor had a child!” and hung up violently. I was stunned because it sounded to me the most insulting remark about a sister. She said to me, “Who does she think she is? She has never raised a child herself, and yet looks down on me who did raise a child. You don’t have to obey such a stuck-up person!” And Sister Carmela stopped complaining about my behavior ever since…

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Friday, November 15, 2013

Hidemi’s Rambling No.494

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Since I became the class clown at school, I was quite popular back then, not only among the students but also among the teachers. When I needed to see a teacher at the hallway in front of the teachers’ office, other teachers would come out of the office to talk with me. They would stand in a circle around me and laugh at my jokes and stories. Inevitably, it was always noisy wherever I showed up. The vice-principal was a stern, rigid teacher called Sister Maris Stella. She was the oldest sister at school and dressed in a traditional, old-fashioned Catholic gown. She was strict to students and teachers alike. Everybody tried to keep away from her because she always reproved someone for something. She would appear wherever people were buzzing, to shut them up. She had recognized that I was often a seismic center of the buzz and given me a look of ‘You again’. Every time the teachers were cracking up with me in front of the teachers’ office, she poked her long-veiled head out of the office. That was a signal for the end of the show. Teachers would disperse quickly while I stopped talking. Sometimes we failed to notice her and she stood behind the circle listening to me. The moment someone spotted her, they would walk away. In those cases, she would ask me what I was talking about. I would apologize and leave. And one thought occurred to me. She didn’t come out to reprove us. She might want to join us. Even after I realized that, I had no way to keep talking once other teachers ran away. As a result, we just kept leaving when she came up. And one day, when we were scattering at the sight of her as usual, she grabbed my arm. She said to me, “That’s it! You hate me, don’t you? I know you hate me! I know, because I hate you too!” Over her shoulder was a statue of the Virgin Mary with a plaque saying ‘Love and Humanity’. It was the most inconsistent scene I had ever experienced. Months later, there came a general-school-cleaning day. I was unlucky enough to be assigned to the school cafeteria of which Sister Maris Stella took charge. As if she got a golden opportunity, she made a slave of me. She chose the dirtiest floor just for me and made me crawl to clean up thoroughly, yelling “Not enough! Do it over!” repeatedly. I felt her revenge so strongly. Given the hatred and now the revenge, I deepened the mystery of Catholic sisters…

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