Grew up in a grey concrete dirty city out of which I only escaped during the Summer vacation. The winter vacation was far too short and the weather was far to cold to spend too much time away or outside.
First thing I would do at the first of every new year was to make a count down calender. Every day, I would mark off another day until freedom day, the 1st day of summer vacation.
I did not study too hard. I would spend most of my unsupervised study time preparing my freedom days supply of tools n fishing gear. I was distracted by making bobbers out of goose feathers I had collected over the previous summer. I spent a lot of time sealing them with super glue, painting their tips bright red with my mom's nail polish, putting them on a line n making the perfect weight to get them to float straight in the bathroom sink. I also tied off hooks- many many hooks n stored them on cork bottle caps. I made sling shots- out of my uncle's electrical gloves, once, old bicycle inner tubes, the insides of old soccer balls. The electrical gloves worked the best but burring the evidence left a bad aftertaste of guilt n fear of being found out on my childhood conscience. My uncle was a stern man. I would make the leather pouch, which held the projectile, out of old leather shoes I swiped off my almost blind grandfather who, I knew,
would not miss them or could not see or care about a hole here or there. Doing all these things allowed my childhood mind to run freely even though I was physically confined to a school, a city and its concrete apartment blocks so characteristic of communist Bulgaria n the other USSR friendly countries.
I would often pray that I would pass the grade as to not spend my precious freedom days in summer school. God, who I did not know at the time, must have heard my ignorant but fervent prayers as I always managed to scrape by with a passing grade n breath in the relief of being out of school n on the bus to my grandma's village.
I spent days fishing - from sunrise to sunset. My Grandma didn't care as long as I came home. I would take n follow a creek going through all kinds of weed, thorn, n snake infested areas in search of the perfect secret fishing spot. I used manure worms I had dug out of the village's coop
farm the day before.
I roamed the local mountains with my friends, played demolition derby with our bikes, found n rode grazing cattle that was tied off n could not get away, raided cherry orchards, ate walnuts (that were sometimes too green n gave me a bad case of vomiting), ran from old ladies, target practiced with sling shots on old bottles or innocent frogs sun bathing by the creek, played with fire, investigated a cave, which turned out to be nothing more than old WW II machine gun nest. There is nothing much funnier than me n my friends making a plan to go into a cave for days, arguing who is first on the line of rope we used not to get lost, making sure we had a supply of spare flashlight batteries, etc etc n then walking in the dreaded cave only to find ourselves in a 6' by 8' old machine gun nest full of dust n trash.
We did not have guns, not even Beebe guns but we still played war. We mounted/taped long thin pipes we got from outdoor antenas on to pieces of wood to act as rifles. We took strips of slick magazine paper n made thin long funnels that were cut to fit in the diameter of the pipes n were blown through them. They flue so well that they would climb 5 to 6 floors high on a windless day. The funnels dipped in super glue hurt bad if they hit you right n slid right into n inder your skin. The funnels with pin tips hurt even worse n at times were known to take eyes out or so we heard stories of.
There was a training/firing range so close to that village that I often heard machine gun fire. Mortar and what sounded like canon fire of some type sometimes shook the windows of my grandma's old house. I knew not to venture in the direction of that range. There were unfriendly soldiers with kalashnikov's coming down to the village pub for cigarates every once in a while n I had had a classmate who missed a year of school because he n his brother found an abandoned shell, threw rocks at it n got peppered by shrapnel when it exploded.
At the end of every summer I came home to the city with many stories to tell, think about on boring school days, n a whitish line on the back of my otherwise tan neck caused by the way I wore my trusted slingshot all summer.
Anyway sorry for the long post. I just could not help but reminisce
about my childhood.
Nik
You're only 49?