(….as your mother’s mother would likely put it: “Kept fixing until mucked up.” She liked to use Ukrainian bywords in her speech…)
After the New Year holidays, the stack of subscriptions they dropped in the mailbox on our door got thicker by the addition of The Pioneer Pravda. Of course, I still was only an Octoberist, but at school they told us that we already had to subscribe to that newspaper and in any other way prepare ourselves to become pioneers in the future.
Handing me The Pioneer Pravda, Mom said, “Wow! They started to deliver a newspaper for you like for an adult.” I felt pleased with getting admitted to the world of grown-ups, at least from the postal point of view. And I kept reading the newspaper all day long. Each and every line printed in its four pages.
When the parents returned from work in the evening, I met them in the hallway to proudly report that I had read all, all, all of it!. They said, “Good job!”, then hung their coats behind the cotton curtain in the corner, and went over to the kitchen.
You can’t help feeling disappointment when paid for all your pains with a polite disinterested indifference. Like, a hero after a life-and-death battle with Gorynich the Dragon to free a beautiful captive is nodded off with her fleeting “Good job!” instead of the regular kiss on the sugar-sweet mouth. Next time he would think twice if the scrap was worth the while, after all.
Thus, never again I read The Pioneer Pravda entirely—from its red title, with the statement of the printed organ affiliation, down to (and including too) the editorial office telephone numbers and street address in the city of Moscow…
The omission of desired and deserved reward incites to the restoration of justice. And the following morning I readily forgot Mom’s instruction that 3 spoonfuls of sugar were absolutely enough for 1 cup of tea. At that moment, I was alone in the kitchen and, while adding sugar to my tea, I got distracted by considering the frost patterns in the kitchen windowpane, which was the reason why the count of the added spoonfuls was started not with the first one. That mistake somehow coincided with a slight negligence and instead of a teaspoon, I loaded sugar with a tablespoon… The resulting cloy treacle was good only for pouring it into the sink. And that became another lesson to me – filched pleasures are not as sweet as might have been expected…
The fact of having read an issue of The Pioneer Pravda so exhaustively inflated my self-confidence and at the next visit to the Detachment’s Library, from the shelf of French literature, I grabbed a weighty volume with a bouquet of swords in its cover,