14-I-1961.
They started buying me kids' newspaper, "Politikin zabavnik". It boasted an episode of Flash Gordon on front page, an episode of Miki Maus (spelt so) inside, Bim and Bum (by Joe Musiel), Paja Patak (aka Donald Duck) and "Tale of czar Saltan" by Đorđe Lobačev in the rear. Later in the year, they had Popeye too.
From that day, we kept buying it every friday (though officially it came out on saturday, but appeared on kiosks a day earlier). Late in 2019 all the old issues were finally scanned and made public, so I could now go back to the oldest episode I remember reading, and this is it. I'm not sure I exactly was able to read everything, far less to understand, but I managed a lot and I actually followed the plot, specially that of Flash Gordon, friday to friday.
The print was a bit less contrast, and the scan is true to it, I just enhanced it here so it's easier to read. The picture is actually wrong, from a year before, because I somehow remembered th third frame, but then didn't remember the following episodes. So traced it forward and this date is the correct one.
This is the how the yard regularly looked every winter. There was, as a rule, lots of snow. I was happy to see it, just like any other kid. Luckily, I wasn't big enough to clean up the snow, and when I once was, it was for only a few years, there around the eighties, when we didn't get as much snow every winter anymore. The trouble was in the shovels. To clean the snow one needs a smooth and thin shovel, preferrably a bit wider, for those days when it needs to be cleaned but there's not so much of it to shovel it, simply shoving it does it. Of course, it helps if it fell on smooth surface. None of those - the iron shovel was never smooth, it always had some stuff on it, whatever it was it was rough and baked in. There was the wooden one too, but dad made those of inch thick planks, without thinning out the business edge, and the slat which doubled as a handle went all the way down. Dad never bothered too much to have good tools, just as long as he had them, and the condition of it was a given, whatever it was. He sharpened the axe and the saw, the rest he didn't bother with. And the flat surface was out of the question, as the paths in the yard were laid bricks, and on the street it was smooth in the summer, then it got muddy, and all the ridges and grooves left by wheels and soles would just freeze as they were. I didn't like to clean the snow until the conditions were met, but after that I did.
The yard was still pretty much of peasant type at the time - there's the chicken wire fence, flowers in the front, hens in the back, though by now it was hens no more, had vegetables there. I don't remember when exactly we planted strawberries. They grew like crazy and gradually moved, from that fence to the back neighbor, and then to the right.
The wheel and the cabin on the right are the well, i.e. its santrač. The wheel wound the chain to lift the bucket with the water, and then there was a hook to hold the wheel from unwinding. It will stay like that until 1963, when the paths will be made of concrete and the santrač replaced with a hand pump. We didn't drink that water, it was more for washing, chicken and plants, it's the first water, three meters below, not quite potable. In the summer the bucket was often used in the bostan season, the watermelon was lowered in it to cool down in the water.
Granma used to scare me with a baba Roga (granny Horns), probably to wean me off from leaning over and falling in. I had a nightmare of that once or twice, enough to remember.
Behind the well one can see the shed roof and not the outhouse beneath, it's behind the santrač. The toilet paper we didn't buy, nobody did, we had newspaper. The newspaper were of two kinds. Politika and Nin, and later also the Ekspres, were for cutting and arsewipe. Ilustrovana Politika (no network at the moment to find when did they issue the first one), Zabavnik, later Kekec and Mali Jež, were collected and bound. Dad would bind them like a real book binder, except he never put any kind of hard cover. At the time I was already a shitter big enough to stop using the bucket in the pantry, so I learned to do it fast enough before freezing out there in the outhouse.
Mentions: bostan, in serbian