Being a twelve year old kid stranded during his summer break on his grandparent’s farm somewhere in western Serbia, things I considered fun were scarce, and I spent this morning trying to avoid grandma by hiding around the farm as she would make me go blackberry picking with her in the field every day. I didn’t like the poison ivy growing around the blackberry vines, I didn’t like the heat, and I definitely didn’t like the fact that this stuff was being bought from us at 5 cents a pound by the local fruit processing factory.

I made the wrong move by going into the kitchen to grab a piece of bread. Grandma was there, and I thought I was done for.

“Get ready”, she said. “Our neighbour passed this morning, and we’re going to her wake.”

My feelings were mixed – finally something to do other than picking blackberries, but I didn’t know the old woman who had passed, and I thought being surrounded by 10 other senior citizens at a wake didn’t have a lot of potential for fun.

Nevertheless, I got dressed, and we trekked through the dirt roads of the village to the old woman’s home. Her son, a 50-ish year old man, greeted us at the entrance, and after shaking my hand he asked me: “You’re the little Canadian, right? You speak English, right? My son speaks English, let me call for him!”

He proceeds to call for his son, let’s call him M, yelling at him to come outside to speak English with me.

M walks out, 5-ish years older than me, sporting a black nike baseball cap and a nice G-Shock watch. Instantly cool in my eyes. We sit down, and he instantly starts roasting everything and everyone around, cracking jokes and making me laugh.

Then, he whips out his state-of-the-art Nokia N96. Whatever this dude does or is, I want to be the same.

“What do you do for work?”, I asked him.

“I make websites.”

“Can I do that?”

He proceeded to give me a quick rundown of the stuff I have to learn as soon as I get to a place with an internet connection. I wrote it all down as an SMS and sent it to myself, as phones of that time didn’t have note-taking apps.

“Install Adobe Dreamweaver. Learn HTML and CSS.”

After a couple more hours, the wake was over, we went home, M went back to the city, and I was once again on my grandparents farm, now daydreaming about how I’ll be a programmer after I learn HTML (so innocent), and make enough money to buy a G-Shock watch.

“Aleks, come on, let’s go into the blackberry field.” says grandma, bringing me back to reality.

“I swear, I’ll learn HTML so I can be rich and I don’t have to think about blackberries ever again in my life.” – I said to myself, while putting on my rubber boots.