1958

This I remember as one of the defining moments. I was somewhere with mom and dad, another city. Could be Belgrade, by the look of things - many people around, and I was tired, and probably already too heavy to be carried around, what with other luggage or whatever else they had in their hands. It was time to go somewhere (the bus, train ship - may have been Rijeka as well) but I wouldn't budge. Just wanted to stay where I was. Don't remember whether I was shouting, prob'ly not; whining, perhaps some. I'd hazard to say the requirement to be not too loud was not exactly drilled into me, but made clear and I don't remember them retelling such accounts to me later (and they did have the habit of retelling a lot, specially the nasty or stupid bits that I did once or twice, and they'd make it as if those were a habit of mine and I did them daily or more often, which really annoyed me). Either way, we needed to walk somewhere and I didn't want to.

So they pulled the old trick of "OK you stay and we'll go". Which sort of never worked, because I somehow knew they were bluffing, but then wasn't that tired or intent on staying, so the bluff was never called. This time it was. They took several steps away from me (gee I even see the scene from below, 50-some years later) and then I got shit scared of staying alone in an unknown place - what'd I do? So I shouted them to wait for me... and realized that I'm a dependent so I better shut up until I'm not. Which took many years.

Dad giving me a ride. This is right in front of the house. The surface is just flat tamped soil, which would be mud in the winter and would be dust now, had not all the old women scrupulously sprayed it with water from their buckets to soak the dust. The whiter stripe behind the bicycle is the, ahem, road, which is one lane of gravel.

The acacia tree to which one side of the bench was nailed was quite thick for an acacia - they usually grow too fast and mess with the wiring and have to be cut, at least the crowns, so the trunk never has the chance to grow. However, the wires to us went over the intersection to a concrete double post by Kale's house (and thence to the backstreet), so this tree was not in the way. The only wires at the time were the electrical ones.

The tree gave good shade.

There were three rows of acacias - two on our side, one on the shady side of the street.

My kiddie bed was right by the door in the bedroom, so when they had company in the evening, and they'd put me to sleep, I heard all the noise and didn't fall asleep right away. They played cards - tablić, I guess, but raub and ajnc were also popular (games I never learned, weren't popular anymore when I was learning the games), jokes were told. Of this joke I memorized just the punchline, and the thunderous laughter that followed. I heard the whole joke much later. The same joke was told many times, whenever someone new was at the table, or when someone heard the joke yesterday and had to share it. The sentence „interrupt me if you know this one“ wasn't invented yet, and folks laughed at the same joke six times, so why not.

A Bosnian and a Montenegrin decided to emigrate, so they hid into some crates in the port. The custom control comes to Bosnian's box, he crows like a rooster, and they write it down as poultry. They come to the Montenegrin's box, and he proclaims „vođe krompir!“ [here potato - except 'here' should be 'ovde', 'vođe' is the montenegrin variant]

From that period, while I slept in the kiddie bed, I remember they once asked me why don't I sleep in the middle. I'm making space. For? For the [little] girl.

That was remembered. Amazingly, not in plural. When I do something wrong once, it's always told as if I kept at it for weeks, at least once a day. When (unwittingly, of course) I do something funny, that happened once.

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Mentions: David Jamaček (Kale), tablić, in serbian