Now there is a number of old scars on my fingers. This one from an awkwardly wielded knife, here a deep cut by ax, and only on my pinky fingers I cannot find any trace from that pulley injury. Because "body dissolves"…
But, hey! I know much fresher bywords, like that recent one: “summer is a miniature life”…)
When you are a child not only summer but each and every day is a miniature life. The childhood time is slowed down – it does not fly, it does not flow, it does not even move until you push it on. Poor kids would long since got extinct while crossing that boundless desert of the static time, were they not rescued by playing games.
And in that summer, if I got bored with a game or no one was in the Courtyard to play with, I had already a haven, a kinda “home” square in the game of Classlets. The big sofa it was, where life ran high indeed, the life full of adventures shared by the heroes from books by Gaidar, Belyaev, Jules Verne… And even outside the big sofa, you can always find a place suitable for all kinds of adventures. Like that balcony by the parents’ room, where I once spent a whole summer day reading a book about prehistoric people – Chung and Poma.
There was hair all over their bodies, like by animals, and they lived in the trees. But then a branch accidentally broke off a tree and helped to defend themselves against a saber-tooth tiger, so they started to always carry a stick about them and walk instead of leaping in the trees around. Then there happened a big jungle fire followed by the Ice Age. Their tribe wandered in search of food, learning how to build fire and talk to each other.
In the final chapter, the already old Poma could walk no farther and fell behind the tribe. Her faithful Chung stayed by her side to freeze to death together in the snow. But their children could not wait and just went on because they were already grown up and not so hairy as their parents, and they protected themselves from the cold with the skins of other animals…
The book was not especially thick, yet I read it all day long, while the sun, arisen on the left, from behind the forest outside our Block, was crossing in its indiscernible movement the sky over the Courtyard, towards the sunset on the right, behind the second block.
At some point, in a way of respite from the uninterrupted reading, I slipped out between the iron uprights of the handrail that bounded the balcony and started to promenade outside, along the concrete cornice beyond the safety grating, and it was not scary at all because I tightly grasped the bars, just like Chung and Poma when they were still living in the trees. But some unfamiliar unclie was passing down there that yelled at me and told to get back onto the balcony. He even threatened to inform my parents. However, they were not home so he took his complaint to our neighbors on the first floor. In the evening they told on me to Mom, and I had to promise her to never-never do it again…
~ ~ ~
(…every road, when you pass it for the first time, seems endlessly long because you cannot measure yet the past part of it against what is still ahead. When passing the same road again and again, it obviously shortens.
That keeps true with the school academic year as well. But I’d never discover it had I left the race at the beginning of the second year at school…)
It was a clear autumn day and our class left school going on the excursion to collect fallen leaves. Instead of Seraphima Sergeevna, who was absent that day, we were supervised by the School Pioneer Leader.