22-I-2013.
The evening before, at 21:30, I stood in front of her in the middle of the big room and kissed her. Ender looked at me with a „what was this?“. „We met exactly 40 years ago, give or take fifteen minutes“.
Friggin cold. Today we go to Novi to do some raw clothes shopping - there's an excellent little shop on the boulevard.
We packed into thesaxo (i.e. Lena, Nina, Ender, Raja and we two) and took off around noon. First we visited oma in the private (and off-the-books) nursing home in west end.
The house is the usual mix of new and neglected. The staircase is still raw concrete, no tiles. Its fence hasn't seen paint in years. The mailbox was new (because post office insisted on standardizing them to at least this size, and even I bought one and never mounted it) but the gas meter box is rusty. There's a satellite dish and a Ivandan wreath* (left there to wither on the house number, which is customary... and probably of some religious import...)
oma seems to be fine.
Found the shop. It's tiny and cramped and filled to the ceiling. The staff are literally an acrobatic group, how they jump over each other and the counter, it's incredible and I guess near impossible to make a decent video of, unless you have at least four wide angle cameras spread around the place. But they found what they were looking for, and then we got hungry, having skipped lunch. The harsh dry winter, specially combined with the košava, just as I remember it, will do that to your appetite. Went into a larger kiosk on the other side of the boulevard, had some pizza I guess. Raja was charming the girls there, as usual.
Drove to Gardinovci then, Ender drove almost to there but no, two villages before the end he got rather sleepy so I took over. I guess the combination of digestion and the heating (works quite well for such a small car) did him in. So I found the place and had a nice evening with Jaca, her husband and sons. We didn't go there ever since their wedding, and now they have two grownup boys (who did connect nicely with Lena, went on contacting online later for quite a while). They have inherited his family house, which is a huge village mansion, and amazingly well kept. Two aunts were in charge of the kitchen, and oh boy, do they have the old stuff kept alive. Tried a few things I haven't seen in decades.
Their brandy is rather strong, 63% but still having the taste (because, as he told me years later, they do redistill it, but they drop some sun-dried fruit into it and let it soak for a while). We drank a two or three but it didn't really kick, just felt nice. The cocklestove (kaljeva peć) is among the bigger ones I remember seeing. Kept us warm, and Raja spent most of the time without pants.
Don't know which road back did we take, I guess the shorter one over Titel, where the part after the bridge is outright dangerous, because it veers all over the dikes which are just clay, so it's undulating randomly. Well, Ender was driving and he likes roads like that.
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* Dad drove a screw into our wall between the bathroom window and the main door and hung one there while we were away. I yanked the wreath when we got home, no church will claim jurisdiction on our house. As Mile Kekin would sing in 2018, "I am not yours". The screw is now used as a tie point for the window shutter, because any wind would slap it around).
Ivandan can be translated as John's day, I think it's somewhere around summer solstice.
Mentions: 07-VI-2021., Ender Aquila (Ender), Jasmina Sentović (Jaca), Jelena Sredljević (Lena), košava, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Novi Sad, oma, Ryu (Raja), saxo, in serbian