Down on the corner was an anime store.  In it, I searched for a new series to begin watching.  I stumbled acrossed a plastic pressed form like those to hold new cd players.  Upon the cover was the picture of a young girl, maybe 14 or 15, with long, almost-grayish brown hair in a dark green school uniform with body angled away but freckled face facing towards me.  I recalled overhearing mention of this title, both in word and I'm sure a post I saw, but I did not recall her name which in full was the title of the series.
The image conjured up a strong idea: this girl had something to do with fish, a deep sea-blue springing to mind.  I grabbed the box-set and headed straight to the counter.  At the desk were the husband and wife team who owned the store.  They were steep hagglers who at principle would never take returns on a good, and I was sure didn't sell parts of a series sold as a whole.  The husband was stacking goods on the wall behind the counter, as his wife worked the cash register.  I guessed them both to be of Japanese descent, and the wife would at times make remarks in an accent I didn't quite know.  The wife was quite thin but taller than me at the time.  The husband was meatier and appeared to have some causian mixed blood.
After ringing up the box-set, I went to work on writing my name.  My hand was wobblier than usual, as I had a hard time writing my name to the credit-card slip.  The wife also wanted me to fill out some form writing my name down and such.  I looked over the form and noticed there was no space for my name, to which she rather commanded I use one of the unused blanks.  As I continued to fill out the form, the wife spread open the top of the sealed plastic box-set and placed on her hand on one of the smaller inner paper boxes.  She suggested that I could if I wanted just buy one of the smaller boxes instead.  The husband turned and with wrinkled face and much deeper, elderly accent deeply concurred.
Finally the forms were filled, and I raced home to enjoy my prize.  A few doors over was the apartment where me and my mother lived.  As I raced in towards the ajar red door housing the boarding-house type room which was my home, I overshot slightly in stopping (was there a rug in the hallway?) and spotted our new neighbor in the ajacent room through the widely open door sitting upright about half-way forward on a made bed facing towards the door.  Upon the bed sat an elderly, thin light black woman who on spotting me spoke in french.  I strolled into the room, having been told by mother that it would be nice to meet with the new neighbor.
As I had taken several classes in french before, I felt that there would be an instant bond between us.  However, as I even now hardly knew any french, what she spoke spilled out as gibberish on the bottom of the screen.  I stepped forward and spoke to her in English, telling her of my classes in french as well as my lacking in understand as I sat down on a small white wooden chair with arched back and two parallel poles within the arch that sat snuggly towards the bed.  The camera stayed at the doorway.  We began to converse, and I was sure that my understanding of french would surely improve greatly with someone I could feel free to learn with.