Hidemi’s Rambling No.221

The next bed to me in the hospital was a girl with asthma, who was two years younger than I was. Her mother visited her only on Sundays and she was practically all alone. That drove her to snuggle up to me all the time. And, she became the biggest disturbance in my hospital life. She was babbling rubbish all day long beside my bed and during the night, she would wake me up to tell me that she was going to the bathroom on her each trip there. Soon my patience ran out and we had a fight. She got on my nerves so badly that I started to hit her with a notebook in madness, as if I had been battering annoying flies. Other girls’ mothers stopped me and treated me like the cruelest girl they had known. Thankfully, she got out of the hospital much sooner than I did. Nobody was happier than I was for her release…

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Hidemi’s Rambling No.220

When I was in the hospital with nephritis, I shared the room with five other girl patients. Except for a very small or very sick child, parents weren’t permitted to stay overnight with the patients. They came during the visiting hours. I was nine years old and had never stayed outside home such a long time before. I suffered from homesickness rather than from nephritis. My parents were too busy working seven days a week as farmers and only my mother visited me everyday. But she only made it less than one hour before the visiting hour ended although I was waiting for her all day long. No matter how desperately I begged her to come earlier, she prioritized her work and I got to see her merely forty minutes or so a day. Sometimes my father also came to see me, taking my younger sister with him. In that case, when the visiting hour was over, I would see my parents and my sister off. They went into the elevator together and the door shut before me, excluding me alone. That was the thickest door I’d ever felt it was. I went back to my bed and lay down hiding tears from other girls and nurses. Maybe it hinted my future relationship with my family. The three of them still live together in our old house that I left after I struggled and couldn’t quite fit in…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.219

This time in my fourth grade, I was in the hospital. It started as cold-like symptoms with a high fever. But I was left unattended because summer was the peak season for farming and my parents were extremely busy as farmers. To make things worse, my family had been rebuilding our house at the time and extra attention of my parents was paid to that. A week or so later, I vomited blood and fainted. That at last captured my parents’ attention and they realized the seriousness. When I became conscious, they had called a nurse who lived in the neighborhood and she was attending me. She suggested taking me to a hospital. After examination, I was diagnosed with nephritis. As the summer break for school was just around the corner, I was admitted to the hospital on the day the break began. Although I had been longing for the summer break as the precious time of my freedom, I was locked up in the hospital instead…

Hidemi’s Rambling No.218

Fernando Alonso won GP of Germany last Sunday. He is my most favorite driver in the current Formula One competition. He transferred to Ferrari at the beginning of this season, which caused me to cheer for my least favorite team. Ferrari was infamous for foul play and preferential treatment when Michael Schumacher was in the team. Because a couple of years have passed since Schumacher left Ferrari and the team crew changed, I had hoped that the team had gotten out of wickedness. But it hasn’t, judging from the way they won the last race. They made Alonso’s teammate slow down so that Alonso overtook him by team orders that were banned. I wonder if Alonso can stay fair and right as he has been, in a dirty team like Ferrari. The question is awfully similar to the one I always ask myself. Can I stay fair and right in the dirty world like this…?

Hidemi’s Rambling No.217

My sister won the first prize of a local poem contest for elementary school students. Her poem appeared in the local paper and many people read it. The title was ‘My Mean Big Sister’. Back then, every time she saw my face, her habit was to say ‘Play with me!’ As I liked to spend time alone, it had been an endless torment. Her continuous play-with-me chant would often drive me crazy and I tried to escape from her as much as I could. Her poem described how coldly I snubbed her whenever she felt happy to see me at home, and that was highly praised. To congratulate her, I told her that she owed me for this prize because if I had been nice to her, her poem wouldn’t have existed, and added that my meanness proved right and so I would try harder. Needless to say, she got on the verge of crying and ran straight to my mother as usual to tell on me…