Re: childhood memories

One of the most remarkable memories of my childhood is the death of my grandfather (paternal). I remember it to the day - it was on the 19th of November, 1989. I was 7+ years old, a kid in a Russian elementary school who spoke very little Russian.

That day my mother told me we would be going to the grandfather's (we lived in the town and all my extended family lived in the village) - a trip I always took with a lot of excitement and joy. As a town boy with not many friends, I loved going to the countryside where, basking in the attention and affection shown by my relatives, I spent whole days playing with my childhood friends. Most of the days I stayed at my maternal grandparents' house, but my father grew up 10 minutes' walk away from there, so sometimes we would there with my father to eat grandfather's apples and almonds.

I don't have too many memories of my paternal grandfather - I know he was a grim man who did not mince his words, who swore a lot, even when he wasn't angry, for which he had earned a reputation among the countryfolk. He had a deep and somewhat hoarse voice, with which he would greet me every time I visited him. He was a WWII veteran and I liked to study his war medals, which my grandmother kept wrapped in several layers of cloth in one of the chests she kept in her bedroom.

That day I walked with my mother to my father's childhood home and found a crowd of mourning people. The scene that I remember most vividly is my father and my several uncles lined up to the wall and crying in mockingly high voices, letting out in between sobs words of mourning, something like "Oh my father, why did you leave us?" This looked eerie and frightening even for a 7-year-old kid, but I calmed down when my mother explained that that was the custom and that the children of the deceased have to honour their memory by crying loudly in public. A theatre of a kind.