Page 6 - To Family with Love

interest as he yaps on and on about something they’d taught him long ago, with the sole purpose of getting his hands on his salary. Well, if you’re not an experienced student, like me, for example, and you gawk at your professor as I gawk at my Marina, he im- mediately gets a strong need to demonstratively include you in his lecture. That’s why school is an uphill battle, because it’s hard to find the balance when it comes to focused gawking, so my pro- fessors would often interrupt me while I was writing this, mis- taking my creative enthusiasm for interest in their lecture, getting me into all sorts of situations that humored the rest of the class.
So, today is a big day for our household, perhaps the big- gest one of all; the day my family marks the holiday celebrating their only child’s birthday. My only task is to dress nicely and receive gifts – they take care of everything else. They deal with the cake and relatives and so on. I can say that it works perfectly that way. The organization includes such trifles and details that every year everyone gets me identical gifts, which is very like- ly closely related to the Chinese horoscope. Two years ago was the year of The Brave Adventures of Hlapitch1, last year was the year of the soccer ball, and this, I hope to God, will be the year of the dog. Even a thoroughbred would be okay. Man, fourteen full turns around the Sun! Isn’t that a lot? Almost half of my life has passed, which is not easy having in mind that I was not a regular only child, but the family’s absolute only child, such as, for example, the only unknown, only proprietor, only winner and the like, which is to say that you have absolutely no right to a brother or sister, let alone pets. Even when I was given that right,
1 A 1913 novel by Croatian children’s author Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (Croatian: Čudnovate zgode šegrta Hlapića)
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