may 1961.
The month is approximative. This is, roughly, the year when I learned to read, both cyrillic and latinic, in that order but dunno how far apart. Or maybe I started some the year before, reading off cigarette boxes and whatever I could pick up. I remember I read "APOTEKA" (pharmacy) as "AROTEKA" - it was in latinic, and I took it to be cyrillic (where P reads as r and all other characters of this word are identical).
They started making the road in our street. We had three rows of accacia and a gravel road, and now they razed all the trees and brought these big stones. Over the next few months they'll dig a lot, lay the stones.
They started buying me one, then two, then three kids' newspapers - Politikin Zabavnik first, then Kekec, then (when it was started, and for as long as it lasted) Mali Jež. There's an anecdote about one time when they sent me to the old kiosk near the gate of šećerana. It's just three blocks down the road, and the two side streets I had to cross were deadended by the railroad, so no traffic at all. Not that there were many cars there at the time; there were the three or four buses every hour and maybe six or seven cars. Don't remember if the sky blue londoner buses were still operating. I loved to climb upstairs and watch from there.
Our favorite driver was some guy who at home had a huge collection of canaries, cage after cage. He was a legend of sorts. Actually, the ten second birdsong that opened the "good morning, children" broadcast every morning on the radio was a recording of one of his birds. It went on every morning at 7:00, and I learned to hate that recording because of that. The mornings were simply cold, the house would cool down overnight and I'd hate those minutes when I'd have to wake up and touch the cold floor or cold footwear. And that birdsong would happen just then.
Anyway, I went and bought the Kekec, and when I returned I said I cheated the uncle there ("čika" - word rather meant "any older guy", and was the common term for the kids to refer to male adults, but also meant "uncle"). My parents were somewhat shocked first, but then asked me how did I do that. I said "well here it says 'for everyone from 7 to 77 years' and I'm not six yet".
Such was the power of the printed word. It had to be something official and serious, otherwise it wouldn't have been in print.
In the rear yard, behind the shed and the little shed (where we had pigs originally, though I don't remember seeing them, only their water trow remained), there was always wood. This time probably included the accacias from the street, freshly uprooted. We cooked on a smederevac stove, so wood was always needed.
I remember once, for some holiday lunch, decapitation of a hen didn't quite succeed, so it ran around the yard with its head dangling until it bled enough. I memorized the scene as interesting but not specially scary.
The border between the front and rear yard was a chicken wire fence; front yard was for the flowers, rear for the chicken. In a full yard there'd be a vegetable garden behind that, but the house is on a corner and there's the neighbor's house instead. He always head that kind of overturned stool on his window, as is proper. If you have a window looking into neighbor's yard, make it so that you aren't looking through it.
Mentions: šećerana, in serbian
18-IV-2013 - 6-II-2026