I looked forward to summer the entire school year. Summers were as careless as one could get those days: there was no homework, no need to help dad cut firewood, no need to worry whether my only outfit would dry by Monday morning for me to have something to wear to school (I wouldn’t see a drier until I got to the US), and the sun shone late into the evening, so that we could stay out and play until 9 or 10 pm.
The summer of 1994 will go down in history as the time when I got really good at jumping rope. The girl gang and I had been together for a year now. During this time we had managed to climb and fall out of trees together, adopt a few stray dogs, organize a holiday pageant show and performance, get in trouble for stealing green apricots from a neighbor, and a number of other adventures befitting 10 year olds. But this was the summer that we’d dedicated ourselves to jump rope.
We jumped long rope and double dutch: we would ask some of the older girls for their ropes, tie the ropes together, and play into the evening, until we couldn’t see the rope anymore. I had never jumped rope until that summer and I was determined to get at least as good as the others. I’d practice at home by tying one end of the rope to a chair and making my dad spin the other end (my mom would absolutely not get involved in my shenanigans – that was not what chairs were for). The chair would often come crashing down and I’d have to try and dodge it, but I think that just added to my jump roping skills.
At one point we challenged the boys. They stunk at jumping rope and lost miserably, explaining it away that “jump rope is for girls.” We would regularly challenge the boys: be it to a game of dodgeball, badminton, jump rope, whatever. The games would often devolve into fights, which I think I was pretty good at too – I was the designated rock thrower of the girl gang. You had to chuck it such that it would hurt but not poke an eye out or anything so that your parents would not get called. Our games would devolve into fights all the time, until a couple years down the road they (d)evolved into the boys asking us out. What were they thinking? They were the enemy!
Not having electricity meant that in the summer I minimized going home as much as possible, to avoid having to hoof 13 stories up, to then just come back down. Plus, there was the risk of getting intercepted by parents and not being let back out on the count of it being late. So if we needed anything from home (a jacket because it was getting chilly or a piece of bread because we were hungry) the standard protocol was to stand in front of the building and holler “mom!!!” at the top of your lungs (volume directly proportional to the floor you lived on – I really had to work for it since we lived on the 13th floor). At this point seven or eight different moms would peek out the windows to see whether they were the ones being called. When the correct mom would finally look out the window, you’d make your request, and she’d projectile toss a jacket or a wrapped sandwich at you. There was still the risk that you could be told to come home but at this point you could either beg and plead to stay longer (this would typically work since no parent would ever want to deal with all the yelling back and forth) or you could pretend to have misheard them when you went home (“oh, I thought you said an hour more”).
Sometimes the parental shouting communication device worked in the opposite direction: the moms would stand at the window and yell your name until you came running. There was always the ever present danger that you were about to be called home for the night – a potentially devastating thing, especially if you’re right in the middle of a critical game. But sometimes this was because one of the neighbors had called them to say that the bread store had just gotten a shipment, and since you were already outside, you were it. My mom would put the bread voucher into a plastic bag, anchor it with something heavy (and potentially snackable, like a couple of pieces of dried fruit – always a timely treat) to make sure the stamp card didn’t float away on its way down, and chuck it out the window.
Since this entire exchange would transpire through yelling, it would alert the rest of the neighbours to the fact that the bread shipment had come in. At this point, the neighbours would have two options: they could go to the store themselves or here was a kid who was already going anyway… And so I’d get three or four neighbours yelling to me from their windows to please pick up their bread as well, and I’d end up going to the store with a handful of vouchers (thankfully, each said how many people were in the household, simplifying the bread allotment calculation), trying to remember which floor everyone lived on.
After standing in line at the bread store for a while (and inadvertently filling up on neighbourhood gossip), I’d walk home with 4 plastic bags of bread, periodically patting my pocket to make sure I didn’t lose someone’s stamp card (this was one of my biggest fears as I could lose them their entire bread allocation for the rest of the month). I’d deliver the bread to each respective neighbour who would always thank me and offer me something: an apple, a piece of candy. But back in 1994 the most exciting “thanks for picking up my bread” gift I got came from auntie Ano (pronounced Ah-nó) on the 8th floor: she gave me a can of honest to goodness Coke (this was before Armenia had its own bottling plant and when a can of Coke cost on the order of $3, while a $100 monthly salary was considered making good money). After that, I’d always check in with auntie Ano on my way to the bread store – had they already had a chance to pick up their bread that day?
But really, the summers were as careless as one could get those days.
Packing List for Immigration 