I don't know how they found me, but I started giving math lessons, to college students. The first guy was in the neighborhood, near šećerana, in that once villa where I seemed to know everyone from somewhere. These were some dad's friends from work (not same enterprise, but same circles). Dad was an alkos*, mom an ex beauty, spitten image of Liz Taylor (Szabó Bözsi), she used to visit us from time to time, I think she worked with mom for a while, and the son was studying electronics, and his maths weren't going. Finished that in just a few visits, he passed the exam. (later: the old guy threw the spoon**, mom started drinking, and the engineer son did too, some twenty years later)
Then, descriptive geometry to some kid on Gradnulica, to pass entry exam for architecture. It's about 5km to there, so I rode a bike. That also didn't take long, perhaps 2-3 visits, he passed.
It took the longest in some village where I'm not even sure whether it's in our municipality, perhaps it belongs to Trbnjevo or Njujork (which may not even have a high school), where he couldn't learn much anyway in that directional education. I took a bus there and stayed for 3-4 hours straight. The guy is not dumb, he'd actually cheer up every time the logic of something he learned would click into place, he'd just exclaim „hey, it connects!“. Here and there we'd even have lunch during the break, have a beer. He once walked out into the yard to pick some green onions for salad. And he was an ex rocker, even played in the local band, and then switched to folksers. He had some organ, and so it happened once that I went for a leak and he started playing, Miroslav Ilić of all things, which later someone commented as „if this was not playing to the dick***, I don't know what is“.
This lasted a whole month, and I guess he passed the exam. Later, I heard, he started giving lessons to others. Though, I don't know whether he ever graduated. Some fifteen years later we met again, on business.
This month my promotion was also held. The real deal, unlike the decade or two later when the word suddenly meant an advertising campaign. I went to the faks, there were some twenty-thirty of us, from all groups, including physics, chemistry, biology and even the fucken geography, handed us our diplomas, so no I'm officially a graduated mathematician, and that was it. Except it was still rather early in the day, so I walked to downtown, bought a bouquet of flowers, and brought it to the faks library. Because I remembered how much trouble Ljuba and I were to them, we'd take sometimes a dozen books and these girls had to climb shelves to find each, then put them back when we returned them.
Đuđa started readying her daughter to get married, bought her a bedroom, as it was said, which meant just furniture for it. Perhaps not the whole set, just the bed and what went with it. But the bed was something... luxurious, with radio and lights in the headboard, which was upholstered in fake leather and curved around the ends to make some kind of shelf/nightstand extension. The lights were imitation of the orange/white spheres that some manufacturer in Slovenia launched a couple of years ago, and which were quite popular, I think even Oma had one like that. I saw that before, it was exhibited in some furniture salon, probably Simpo, and was named „garnitura Đžems Bond“ [đž would read as dyzh, the dy as in wouldya], not Džems (which would be James, though proper trascription would be Džejms, but this is one of the many cases when precedent makes tradition, fuck the rules). That's how it was written on the clip with the price, and I wouldn't be surprised if the bad spelling originated from the manufacturer. I didn't realize at the time that this was the first swallow in the spring of new illiteracy. It will only get worse later.
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* alcoholic
** died
*** any speech or action which serves no purpose at all
29-XI-2022 - 6-II-2026