Easing my guilt.

Been trying to UP the Okaasan duty since Sunday.
Pure guilt easing. I try to be a good person and give something to this old lady....I do...I try. Occassionally.

Monday afternoon I was there when Okaasan came home exhausted after hula dance - and with the inevitable little Japanese sweet bean paste cakes.
I poured her cold juice, I ate the cakes, I sat and chatted with her.
And yesterday a student who went on a tour to Kawagoe in Saitama gave me two very nice English/Japanese pamphlets made by students at Tokyo International University - and I brought them home for Okaasan.

Kawagoe of course is where Okaasan was born. She lived there through the war until she married. So many of her happy memories and stories center on this town.
I gave her the pamphlets after dinner and got her telling stories - she brightend up so much and told us endlessly the same stories. Although it took a bit of effort to get Okaasan to actually turn the first page because the photograph on the cover of a tower got her in a loop-story about her friend's house, and everytime she looked back down at the front cover she started the same story again - looked up to tell it, and then...looked down again, saw the picture of the tower and started the same story again.
I am not joking. She is really like that!

Yujiro fled upstairs after dinner, I managed to hang on for 20 minutes of "this is my friend's house, here on the corner, and this is a shop that makes screens, and this is my friend's house, here on the corner...and Americans liked to buy screens from the shop, and this is my friend's house...."

The pamphlets should be a very useful way of getting her down memory lane.
So I feel a little Oyomesan guilt eased.

*  News from England not so great. My step-mother has been taken into hospital with an infection and low blood pressure. She was due to have a malignant polyp operation next week. Now who knows.