(standing in brown shadows)
（続き）
The music used for the slides was
mp3 Music
LUV type beat background after (FREE DOWNLOAD)
SoundCloud
There are currently two cats in my house.
This is because I am looking after my daughter's cat who is in hospital and undergoing surgery.
They are both difficult cats, and on top of that, they don't get on well with each other. My daughter's cat is about three years older than my cat, but that doesn't seem to matter. The fact that they are both female may be another reason why they don't get on.
The anxiety of not having my daughter around has made the difficult cat an even more difficult cat. This morning, the cat came to wake me up a little after 2am and asked me to feed her. I opened the downstairs cabinet and put a small dish of food on the floor, she ate some and went back upstairs.
My cat may have been awake, but she didn't even come to peek at it.
I don't sleep well and wake up many times during the night, so being woken up after 2am is no different to my daily routine.
However, I couldn't sleep for a while as thoughts of this and that kept haunting me.
In the darkness, I was remembering a wedding that took place about 45 years ago.
I was able to hold the ceremony almost for free in a chapel on campus, where there was a lot of greenery. It was the first day of spring, less than a year after I started working. In my mind's eye, I remember the ceremony as being in the green, as if it was the season of fresh greenery.
My wife and I thought that the ceremony alone was enough, but our relatives were not convinced and a reception was held at a nearby banquet hall. The costs were not in our custody.
I remember the reception more than the ceremony because there is an 8 mm film that records the whole thing. Filming was done by the father-in-law. The equipment seems to have been borrowed from one of his relatives, with no small part of the filming done by the owner. My father-in-law became addicted to filming moving images after this, and he himself had his own 8 mm camera, projector and editing equipment. There were a number of 8 mm film screenings of the wedding and reception, and my father-in-law showed my daughter when she was in primary school.
Many relatives and friends from university appear on the films. Only a couple of people from the generation older than mine are still alive. Some of my generation are already dead.
Above all, my wife, who was by my side, is gone, and my only daughter has undergone an early detection cancer removal operation.
There used to be a DPE shop near the station building that claimed to offer a service to have 8mm films made into DVDs, but it has long since disappeared. Is this because the demands for such a service have been met once and for all? During my father-in-law's lifetime, there was talk of using that service many times, but in the end, time passed without anything being done.
The sight of my wife in a white wedding dress in the ‘fresh green’ campus remains only as a pseudo-memory for me.
我が家には現在猫が二匹いる。
入院・手術の娘の猫を預かっているからだ。
二匹ともムツカシイ猫で、その上、お互い仲が悪い。娘の猫の方が３歳くらい上だが、そんなことは関係ないようだ。二匹とも雌だということも仲が悪い理由かもしれない。
娘のいない不安から、ムツカシイ猫は、さらにムツカシイ猫になっている。今朝は、２時過ぎに起こしに来て、餌をねだった。階下の棚を開けて、餌の入った小皿を床に置くと、いくらか食べて２階へ戻った。
我が家の猫は目を覚ましていたのかもしれないが、それを覗きにも来なかった。
私は、睡眠が浅く、夜中に何度も目が覚めるから、２時過ぎに起こされても、日常と然して変わらない。
しかし、あれやこれやが頭に去来して、暫く眠れなかった。
暗がりの中で、思い出していたのは、４５年ほど前になる結婚式。
緑の多い学内チャペルを利用して、殆どタダ同然で式を挙げることができた。就職して１年に満たない春分の日。頭の中では、新緑の季節、緑の中での式だったように記憶している。
私も妻も、式だけで充分だと考えていたが、お互いの親族がそれでは納得せず、近くの宴会場を借りて、披露宴も行われた。費用は私たちの預かり知らない形で。
式よりも披露宴の記憶が甦るのは、その一部始終を記録した8ミリフィルムがあるから。撮影は義父。機材は、親族の誰かに借りたようで、その人による撮影部分も多い。義父は、これをきっかけにして動画撮影にはまり、自分でも8ミリカメラ、映写機、編集用の機材を揃えた。結婚式と披露宴の８ミリフィルムの上映会は、何度もあったし、娘が小学生になったころに義父は娘にも披露していた。
多くの親族、大学時代の友人がフイルムに登場する。私よりも上の世代で生きているのは、もう二～三人程度。同世代でも、もう死んでしまった者も。
何よりも私の横にいた妻がいないし、一人娘も早期発見の癌摘出手術を受けた。
8ミリフィルをデジタル化してDVDへというサービスを謳うDPEショップが駅ビル近くにあったが、無くなって久しい。そんなサービスを希望する要求は一通り満たしたからだろうか。義父が生きている間に、何度も、そのサービスを利用する話が持ち上がったが、結局、何もしないまま時は過ぎてしまった。
「新緑」の学内の白いウェディングドレス姿は、私の擬似記憶として残るだけだ。
