Thank you for the happy genes

My grandmother on my mother’s side, baca Nada, was born on this day. We always had a blast. Thank you, baca, I’m feeling the happy gene pool, and keeping on filling it.

In the poem you liked reciting to me in several languages, beautiful Vida is whisked away to a foreign country. Well… how can I explain. You must have known what was coming.

Remember how you took us to Umag in Croatia, my sister, my friend and me, and we had a wonderful time, the first Holiday of the lifetime? It was there that I saw my first breakdancer. Only when you told me that you had hidden your money so well in the hotel room that nobody could find it, would I like to have a go, and I found it almost immediately in a spare pocket in your bag, you looked a little disenchanted.

Or when Slovenia proclaimed independence in the summer of 1991, which was followed by a little war, and you were urgently whisked away to the safety of your home from that same Umag, or thereabouts? You were driven home by an unknown man as if you were royalty, and the first thing you said was how beautifully the flowers were blooming on the way, since he took country roads to be safe.

And during this same war, as the alarm went off notifying the danger of an air-raid, we continued sitting in the sun in the garden because you said this was just a pre-alarm, that the main alarm is yet to come, because you remembered from the second World War this was how it went. And when the second alarm sounded, we obediently went to the cellar (no matter how it was a wholly inappropriate air-raid shelter,  the entire house would just drop on us much more certainly that way, maybe that’s why dad chose to stay in the kitchen playing solitaire old-school style – on the table – instead), only to be told (possibly by dad who heard it on the news) that the danger was over. The second alarm actually meant back to normal.

As it was, in Belgrade Yugoslav army bombers were already in the air. Somebody must have revoked the decision and Slovenia, so little that it wouldn’t take many bombs to blow it apart, was spared. Some say Vatican was behind it. Anyway, we have what we have now, some say it’s better but most say it’s much worse.

Your daughter will be 70 in ten days, and your son, your son is doing all right too: speaking languages and travelling places you wouldn’t believe. And he likes to come over here too. Something tells me you’d like it. After all, what’s not to like? Just look at all these flowers.

Photo: a © signature mmm production