Driving was a reward for my good work, and it was usually on country road where we drove to plant bakhcha gardens (places for growing watermelons and sweet melons). Despite the fact that the garden work took several hours and the trip behind the wheel lasted 5-10 minutes top, I was still looking forward to the trip.

The first hours of training were very hard for me, and I got out of the wheel sweating and wet like a drowned rat because of stress. There were moments when I was ready to give up and get out of the steering wheel, but my dad, as a professional teacher, was pushing me into continuing the ride. He took a big risk, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him to teach me, because we had a lot of moments when I could crash the car. To make it clear how he felt about the car, I’m going to tell another anecdote from those years.

A car used to be not a necessity but a luxury those times. We lived it a district called simply “116 km”, and this is such a small, as if separate, part of the city, where everyone knows each other. And everybody knew dad very well, because he was the school principal at that time.

And then one day, coming out into the yard, dad noticed some boys circling around our car and licking it. Dad got confused and came up to the boys, and asked them what they were doing. What they told him was that they often hear from their parents that the principal licks his car into shape, and they wanted to know how it is and what it tastes like.

He cared about it a lot: washed it, waxed it, in winter we put it on bricks in the garage so the springs wouldn’t deform.

In the evenings, we used to go to the garage with him, get in the car and smell it. We really liked the way her plastic smelled.

Can you imagine what dad felt when he saw his treasure heading into some roadside post?

After many years, I felt it all on me, teaching my wife and son how to drive.

So much worrying, screaming, tears…

In spite of my cherubic appearance, I was no angel, and my weakest point was my behavior, or rather, being bad.

I don’t use the word “hooliganism” because it feels too harsh for that young age.

Now, remembering things I can still remember, I wonder and ask myself a question: how did I do it and how was I even capable of it back then, being so young?

It’s even a bit scary to tell.

I messed around a lot, some antics were forgotten for good and ended without much destruction, but there were those who left a mark on my body for a long time, and some – for life.

One day, I was fooling with a pillow on my bed again, as many times before, trying to hit the head of either of my parents,

badly missed and smashed my forehead into the back of the bed.

I cut my eyebrow open. What can I say, there wasn’t enough blood and screaming! The scar will be here forever.

I must say that my brain did not work then at all, or I had no brain at all, because any adequate human capable to do even the least bit of thinking would never have thought of what came to my head.

Now, when I think back to my antics, I’m just baffled. It confirms to me once again that I had no brain at all. And neither then nor now do I understand or can answer a simple question: why did I do it?

Another time I did such a thing that I’m ashamed to admit I found a little piece of wood, and I can’t remember if it already had a nail sticking from it, or I put that nail there… So, what I did:

I’d catch a moment to put the piece of wood with a nail under my mother’s foot for her to step on, naturally with the nail facing upward.