february 1963.
My [parents] had various friends, mostly dad's from work or who knows where from, and many a visit was made. There's a shot from before 1960 with dad giving the guy a ride on his bicycle, sitting sideways on the top beam. The then bicycles maybe couldn't achieve the speed, but were strong and could carry a lot.
They lived nearby, somewhere in the area, and it somehow seemed to me that their house is somehow nicer than ours, and that the little Mira has nicer toys, she even had some caterpillar [tractor] with transparent engine in which the pistons moved and tiny lights blinked inside, raw miracle. And they had a television set, which was about the third one I saw before 1963. I remember it ran some SF-like cartoon. Look at that, a cartoon and you don't even have to go to a bioskop [movie theatre].
Many years later I somehow understood that that wasn't their house at all, they were tennants, which didn't ever cross my mind, I took it for granted that everyone lives in his own house. Then that house turned to be first or second next to Zmaj's gate, which wasn't so far away as it looked to me then, and it looked so because it was some winter month and it was dark when we went there.
Her I saw also in obdanište, of which I remember a funny scene when the upbringer* asked her what's her father's name, and she said „Čamac“ (rowboat) - because it was his nickname, everybody called him that.
These visits were ongoing perhaps since before 1960, judging by this photo, we were really kids. Played tač (touch), which is I guess the simplest game, with a minimal set of rules and required skills, one only needs to beware, failures were punished.
Then they got an apartment in the building across from Lesnina (which is, thus, older than I thought). There's a shot shot from a sidewalk, with the two of them standing on the terrace, I'd say on second [am. third] floor. I don't remember having visited there, which we probably did.
And then they somehow vanished from the horizon, don't know what happened later.
Around this time I remember watching a few movies, but the years and order in which I watched them is beyond me. The first soviet color movie, „Stone flower“ I know we watched downtown, in the movie theatre by the brewery. The plot didn't quite grab me, and the lush scenery - it was nice and fairy-like, but didn't impress me. What did was the idea of meticulously and slowly polishing the stone using a big potter's wheel with some kind of mill stone on it, and of course it had to be pedaled. Just the time required to do anything that way and grind it to perfection was unimaginable - how could they stay so stubbornly on the task, it must have taken months to do anything.
There were cartoons too, and some animated stuff, I remember we saw some version of Pinocchio, but also that Kale had a picture book about Buratino, which is a spitten Pinocchio but of russian author, which confused me completely, one of these must be wrong, it's the same story yet different names.
Equally strange was that with so much Disney stuff around there's no Donald Duck or Mickey - there was just one with Donald, without the nephews. So I saw that kinda symphony, and Cinderella and sleeping beauty and tres amigos and I guess Peter the Pan as well, while these two (with that one exception) I saw only in Zabavnik, as a comic. From Disney they also had various documentaries about nature, even that lemmings gimmick. I remember the flood rushing through an anthill and how I asked myself how did they shoot those scenes at all, these were obviously real ants... and came to various conclusions about the nature of film and that this probably doesn't look so dramatic in real life, it's this horrifying music and how they line up the shots, and even that anthill, they probably sawed it in half, put a glass against it and shot through that as they watched what will the ants do as they poured water over it.
This is when it began to dawn on me how much of it is just fake. Just as the lemmings thing later turned out to be... Later I learned that it's called editing.
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* „vaspitačica“, the official name of the teachers working in pre-school units and also in juvenile detention
Mentions: David Jamaček (Kale), Lesnina, obdanište, Zmaj, in serbian