School again, fifth grade. Lecturers. And lecturesses (v. school levels). Biology by some sweet girl (Cvetana), who called us little butterflies (leptirići).
Had a brief run-in with the PE teacher, who didn't like my posture nor stature, and told me to keep my chest pumped 120% at all times. Yeah, right. Next week my papers arrived and I was relieved of PE indefinitely. I did have to produce new papers for each year, but it was merely a formality. The school doctor (actually the one at dispanzer, in charge of school kids) would just look at my file, and the thickness of it was reason enough to just reissue the exemption.
Funny, though, I felt alright almost all of the time. It's only that when I'd have to climb, or run, or lift anything heavier than half of me, I'd just have to stop for a few minutes and breathe heavily... and then I'd be back. Not a nice affliction to have when someone's chasing you, which I realized would be a rather bad situation to be in. So I guess I started devising various strategies to avoid it. And it seems to have worked - that was the last year when I tried to play football, or when I got into any kind of fight.
I could do anything else, and given enough two-minute breaks, could go at it all day. Of course, over time it came to less and less, because I didn't exercise, which I didn't because I was under permanent suspicion by some guys in the class that I'm faking this and that the whole setup was arranged through some connections. They would test me at times, and I won each time by losing any kind of bet. And so it went on for years.
This may also be the time when my folks subscribed to "Roditelj" (parent) magazine, as per Ivka's speech at some PTO. Amazingly, I was allowed to read it, even though it described exactly the pedagogy, i.e. the tricks for parents and teachers on how to deal with kids. And then, again, against my expectations that I'd use the knowledge to subvert those tricks, I actually started applying them to myself, i.e. I worked on my own behavior so to make those tricks redundant. Not that it worked perfectly, but it did a few things, I gained some sense of what they had to deal with and got it into my head to help them in some things and thus gain some leeway (if not outright permission but then at least leniency or forgiveness) for the things I really wanted. In the long run, it worked - I managed to be the excellent enfant terrible, did most of the stuff as expected or above it, and then pushed my way somewhere else.
One of the things I was working on was my choice of foods. I got it into my head that it's normal for kids to not love this or that dish, but I'll get used to them as I grow. The list of things I wouldn't eat was rather long at the time - squash (because granma prepared them somehow too sour, excess vinegar), green beans, carrot (boiled, though, I loved them raw), pihtije (actually the layer of fat on top), greasy parts of the meat, green peas, raw cucumbers, soft boiled eggs, spinach, etc etc. Then I started eating stuff I didn't like. Not too fast: by college age, the list dwindled to three things: boiled carrots, raw cucumbers, too much vinegar in the salad.
Much, much later I added the oversweetened coffee to the list, just about the time I learned to eat boiled carrots (still up to small size bites, a spoonful would be too much). Another much later I learned the horrible truth: mom and granny weren't much of cooks. Mom had flights of ingenuity and inspiration, and for a while we'd eat some excellent dishes (for one, the cauliflower mussaka with onion rings on top), but those would be soon forgotten and the food would revert to the same old. And, the ingredients were what they could find. The squash - granny would put too much vinegar. Green beans - too old and wrong kind, so they'd have a nasty piece of fiber along the seams, which would never boil away, so you had to remove them while you ate (here granny makes a nasty face as if removing a long thread from her mouth). Greasy meat was cheaper, these were the years when they were pushing folks to switch to edible oil. Green peas become great once we started growing our own and picking them before they get old and stiff. Raw cucumbers made me burp and had a taste overpowering anything else I ate; with the advent of burpless and non-bitter cucumbers this became okay (but that was about forty years in the future). Soft boiled eggs were the first to go, though, it was then the hard boiled that I started to dislike, the yolk was stuffy and hard to manipulate in the mouth. That passed when my mouth grew, I guess. Spinach - I started liking it at home, because there was milk or cream in the recipe, and just a touch of garlic; in obdanište they made it with just water and it was awful. At least I learned the jazz principle - it's not what you play, it's how you play it.
About vinegar. Dad had some accident with ammonia as a young man - whether it was in high school or in first years of work I never knew - but he lost most of his sense of smell. Which was fine, it's not the most important sense, and he had enough left to feel most of the food and drink, with two exceptions. One was that he couldn't rely on his nose to test good rakija, he had to take a drink, and if hairs on his forearms stood up, it was good. The other was that he liked sour food - sour čorba, salad, whichever, and couldn't feel it at regular levels. And the only way granma knew how to make it was to add vinegar - the alcohol vinegar, as made by some little workshop in kombinat - the more, the better. Our salads were just nasty. He'd add a spoonful to his plate of čorba. By the time apple vinegar was there to be bought, I wasn't eating with them anyway.
I now have a nasty feeling that someone is reading this on the web and disagrees about "was not there to be bought". Yeah, right, perhaps it was somewhere out there, but not where we did our groceries. There were perhaps fifty such items which would require knowing folks who would know when and where to buy them, or would be bosses in retail and would keep some amount for a friend. We could, perhaps, do a couple of those a month, but even that was mostly from kombinat's own production. There was simply no time for more: you'd have to meet the guy to get the promise, then meet him again on time when he has the news ("it arrived"), then go to the shop on his shift (which may be when you're working too)... not feasible. Most of the time we didn't even know such things.
Some time this year I started learning english. Another set of private lessons, by a neighbor. Sofija was the young student in the neighborhood, probably in her sophomore year (which would be the final year, she may have completed the other two years much later), so she wanted to try her luck with actual teaching. I guess we were each other's guinea pigs. I did have some encounters with the language already, as mom's schoolbooks were still arround, and the pre-war manual for reporters, by some guy Vukadinović, who used to be a correspondent from London for Politika. The textbook used the IPA, while he developed his own typographics (putting th for theta and dh for its sound pair, so "the" [dhe]). Then the first order of business was to learn all the dozen vowels, the w, both of the ths, and the generall mess of spelling.
This lasted until late spring 1967, with her brother (an interpreter for a shipping, and I mean literal ships, enterprise in Rijeka) jumping in when she was cramming for exams. It seems to me that they both liked me, and I liked them. By next summer, I was at decent conversational level.
25-VII-2020 - 10-VII-2026