My parents come to my mind every now and then. More often than not, I remember something that one of them had said either to me or to each other. But sometimes I can just see in my mind’s eye one of them or both of them together. These images are almost always both silent and still. At best, they are in slow motion, but there is never any sound associated with them. And they do not last very long—say, a few seconds at most. Still, my parents are very much alive in my mind. Alive and well, as a matter of fact. Even though their ages differ from image to image, usually ranging from their sixties to their eighties, they are very real. Flesh and blood, as it were. My parents are as real in these unexpected images as they are in my dreams, and I dream of them pretty often.

I frequently see my mother in the kitchen of my parents’ apartment in Kosovska Street in Belgrade. She is alone. Most often, she is sitting at the kitchen counter and eating something. Seeing her like that, I always feel sad. Very sad. I feel that she had spent too much of her time completely alone while my father was at work and I was in school. I occasionally see my mother sitting on the sofa in the livingroom of the same apartment. Covered with a woolen blanket, her legs are up on the sofa. My father is sitting in an armchair across the table from her. Wearing leather slippers, his legs are crossed, and the free leg is bouncing up and down. There are coffee cups on the table. Seeing them together like that, I feel much better. Every now and then, I see my father at the till of his sailing boat on the Adriatic coast. He is wearing one of his many captain’s caps and looking now right, now left. This scene makes me smile, for my father loved his boat.

As I am getting longer in the tooth, I hope that there ever more images of my parents will come my way for no rhyme or reason. More important, I hope that I would see them over a greater range of their ages. For instance, I would love to see my parents in their forties and fifties, as well. Along these lines, it would be great to see them more often in their apartment in Jovanova Street in Belgrade, where they lived when they moved from Zagreb. Will such images ever come to me as I age, I wonder? To tell the truth, I would not even mind a touch of senile dementia just to have a chance of revisiting the distant past every once in a while. Seeing my parents in their late thirties, when I was a toddler, would be my just reward. Or so it seems to me at this stage of my life. Come to think of it, perhaps I am a bit too young to fathom what I am actually wishing…