03 Belgrade
- Peering like this through the viewfinder at my sister’s garden in California, I wanted to make out a different time & a different place:
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- Paradise,which was (apparently) Belgrade when I was one & two, my days spent under the fruit trees of our back yard, doted upon by the Serbian gardener, Radisa, whom I trailed everywhere.
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- So goes the family legend, my personal Garden of Eden, setting me up for the inevitable expulsion, a sudden uprooting by Pan Am prop plane back to the States, all of us airsick.
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- More of my first words had been Serbian than English, but never did I speak them again, now that jabuka no longer put a real apple into my mouth.
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- Struggle as I might, English confined me ever after.