june 1971.

It's tuesday and she hasn't replied since friday. I'm getting worried. It was so easy to get used to the fact that someone, somewhere, loves me. But other than that, it's mostly back to the bad old.

Another sports day at school, this time all the way out, at the sports airport, in the field. Mostly an excuse for everybody to have a day off. I remember Radoje playing football with the guys, already a bit fatter than we imagined him. Buzzed around for two or three hours and dispersed. J., S., Zova and I just laid on the grass, with knees bent to support each other's backs. I was with S. Pretty, very light blonde with curly hair, not frizzy. We changed position a few times, but still stayed clumped. Once, back to back, felt her hair on my neck, wooooh. And hearing her voice differently, my ear on her neck. At some point my hand was just below her tit... close but not. She kept smiling... and then it was time to go. It's a long walk. After a hundred meters, she remembered she forgot something, I escorted her back. On the way to town again, I even embraced her and, well, we did feel like a real couple. The parting, however, was just nothing, no hand squeeze, no kiss, nothing.

Later I heard she's got some kind of boyfriend, who probably has another one on the side. On the other hand, this was on the side, I won't be seeing her for much longer, just eight more days at school.

The single of the month is "One man band" by Three Dog Night. I keep playing it over and over. There's something in it. Still no letter from Melanija. The only one who tried to understand me. These days the most important event is the passage of the postman. It arrived, finally, on fourth, though it was written a couple of days before that. Hesitated or forgot?

I replied the next day, too fast. I omitted so much of what I wanted to say, that I almost wrote another. She gave me her phone number (five digits then), I'll call her once. And we may see each other at the sea, they have a house... well not that close to Zadar, a hour's drive, or two.

Veca and Sneca were in town on sunday, 5th. I visited their new apartment in the morning, they visited us in the afternoon. Promising. Good fun.

Preparing to build the garage. The old (sweet) cherry tree had to go down. This time we could pick it all the way - I'd climb up and cut a branch, they'd pick it below. While we were at it, Ivka (and perhaps Tejka's mom and... well whoever), dropped by. She asked what I was doing, and mom said "picking cherries". "Like that?" "Sure, that's the way it's done."

She was utterly confused. Which wasn't hard to achieve, though.

Season of KMT, this time I'm taking part as a DC-99 member, documenting how it went at municipal level.

Shot this one from the lobby of the komitet. Here's from suština.

I don't remember this. I see where, don't know when. But the rest of the shots from that negative makes it clear that the competitions of KMT (the nonexistent Klubovi mladih tehničara, young technicians' clubs, it was the school sekcija that competed) were opened in the building of komitet, and I shot this through the blinds (metal, the plastic wasn't good enough then). The rest are from Hala sportova.

What's on the shot. The little fountain on the bottom, so the monument wasn't moved here yet, it's still on the main square. The manhole on the left, not properly closed, bet a beer that it's made in the city. Some local bank advertises with the silhouette of vodotoranj - probably the Banatska then, later merged into Vojvođanska, which then became a greek bank, presently hungarian. The vodotoranj never held water, though, they recalculated the statics near the end and turns out that with so much headweight it would simply topple, who knows which way.

The car park: as much as two renault 8 (rear engine!), one škoda 1000 MB, one bug (called turtle then), one mečka (lady bear, i.e. mercedes, probably official, the wall behind belongs to city hall, to the left is DOZ aka ZOIL, ie. insurance; the building on the right is trade union and measures and weights control, also Narodna tehnika); one vespa, one moped, one bicycle, one pram, few pedestrians. Ah, yeah, and the IMV van, a technical miracle on a truck's chassis and springs for two tons, so it jumps and shakes your kidneys even on a seemingly flat pavement.

The booth, kiosk-like, is unexplained. Neither my maam nor I remember that anyone was ever there, and yet we passed that way so many times. Perhaps it sold tickets for kino garden (see entrance), or just tried to but it didn't work.

Note the chick on the right. Enlarge and see. The younger one. Minis as such were worn 1967 to 1973 (the invention of midi in 1970 didn't catch, the fashion dictators weren't lucky with those until 1974). The exemplar on the picture would go into the micromini category, which Dragoslav Andrić immortalized in his Slang Dictionary as „dopičnjak“.

Such were those years.

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Mentions: march 1960., DC-99, dopičnjak, Ivanka Tomašić /Čardić/ (Ivka), komitet, Melanija Tisarević, Radoje Maletin, sekcija, Slavica Tejin (Tejka), Snežana Stojanović (Sneca), suština, Vera Stojanović (Veca), vodotoranj, Zadar, Zdravko Smetovački (Zova), in serbian