June

As the daytime became boringly longer and the heat unbearably shrewder I started a 3-week-vacation. It will not take me anywhere except maybe a weekend by the sea, since it is mainly devoted to the preparation for a new stage of my life where new territory will be stepped into, new challenges will be faced and new faces will be met. Travel never ever failed to fill me primarily with joy and excitement  before any other feeling might or might not appear.

And while June is passing through I can not recall a special place of this month in my history except for two reasons.

It was the month in which I received a phone call from my sister 11 years ago breaking the news that my father passed away in our summer house by the Mediterranean coast. He, Mama and my sister went there in mid June to open and clean the house before the rest of the folks would follow in, but in that June morning the crying and quivering voice of my sister came as a first blow to our family. I still remember my first worry after the call was how mama felt and how she would face the life alone after being one of two for more than 45 years. Amazingly the course of time after the death showed her much-more-than-expected strength and independence.

Without being a big believer in astrology, a Gemini hurt me! That happened long time ago and although the scars became, in a reasonable span of time, completely healed, the illogical in me still find some correlation between June and pain. Some very foggy and distant correlation I barely recognize but hardly forget.

In The Army Then (5)

My friend M approached my bed in the middle of the night and almost whispered in my ear "Do you smell the hash?" I was not fully asleep, so I got easily alerted by the question. I thought it might not be the best moment to tell him I did not know what the hash smelled like, so I just said "Yea, I think so" He sneaked back in silence to his bunker bed. 

In the morning he opened it up with me again, adding that had the junior officer or even the sergeant of the sleeping hall smelled it, we all would have been screwed up. We guessed N must have been the hash smoker. 

Then the rumor spread out that the junior officer himself was smoking hash with N that night. At hearing the rumor it did not sound very unlikely, since the officer seemed to have a sort of friendly bond with N who used to give us, every now and then, interesting information about the officer himself like he never kissed his fiancée saving their physical intimacy for marriage, or information about the his family in the coastal hometown. The officer was very tough and strict with us though. Of course he never imagined that N circulated personal pieces of information about him. That if we supposed they were true. 

The talk about the incident faded away after few days as we became more preoccupied with the rigorous training for the ceremony of the end of the first phase of the service. The ceremony itself came as a complete disaster, but that was another story.