RESIDENTS OF BOBAN’S DARLING IN 1957.

Comment from: Mile Boban, Otporaš | Commented: February 14, 2014 9:54 pm

I Milan, congratulations! I learned many things from you as I used to. Write more about our old customs. For us younger people, it is history for us.
Greetings from our sunny Herzegovina.

Dear and very dear friend Lilith,

Here I am back. I had to listen to my wife and run to the store to buy her something that she forgot yesterday while we were in the store buying groceries. I said, “had to”, because there was no other way. I know my wife very well, so if I listen to her immediately, in the blink of an eye, she is satisfied and so am I, because I avoided the worst, which is to be called a LAZY MAN. And me, my mouth is full when I say to myself: Ah, “ME”!, born in Ercegovina, so as not to disobey my one and only single wife. If I had a thousand of them, it would be a different story, because I would get lost in (not) finding my way around and I wouldn’t know which one to listen to and which one not to. This way I have only one wife and I only listen to that one, so I’m not lost, that’s why I got the TITLE: HUSBAND OF THE YEAR forty (49) times in a row, especially!!!

Let me go back and answer your “question about how guys thought about the values of girls back then, in your time”.A very good question, and every serious guy of that time, when he came out of the army, considered himself serious and looked most seriously at girls. Namely, it was a great shame to see a girl walking down the street anywhere without some knitting in her hands; whether it was socks, injuries, bells, etc. Serious guys would immediately say: she is not for my house. As if it were yesterday, I remember how my recently deceased mother Iva Boban Vićeka spoke to my sisters and her daughters and “caressed” them on the fingers with a spinning wheel or a quill, saying the name: God bless you, I don’t want that your husbands, whoever they are, to curse you because of me and to say that I didn’t teach you anything. Our Mother always taught us how we should behave in society. I believe that this is how other Mothers raised their children also in this spirit.

Here is an example that the guys looked at and made their judgments about the girl or girls based on that. The girls would agree in the village where they would meet that evening and in whose house they are going to be that evening. Truth be told, in my house, in the house of Petar and Iva Boban Gabrić, in which was almost always MEETINGS, in Croatian= SIJELO, simply because at that time our house was the biggest in the village, and I had three sisters ready to settle down and get married. The custom was, as soon as the boys knocked on the door and received the answer “come in”, the boys rushed into the house, and the girls, as their mothers had taught them that the chair should always be given to a man, because a man is always older than any woman. Real girls, as the “first” guys called them, would stand up and offer their chair to the first guy, while some others would stand up and guard the chair so that she wouldn’t give it to the guy, that she could sit down on it, as snarky guys would say about those girls who didn’t give up the chair to the guy. It was not a universal rule, but it was still a rule of our rural and honest parents, which on the one hand gave us the direction of life, which we had to follow in order not to get lost in ignorance. When I say in ignorance, I mean that in my time when I was in my village of Bobanova Draga, there were 87 households, 483 inhabitants, 17 horses and 12 carts, 13 wells, 3 cisterns and 90% of the parents were illiterate, who could neither read nor write; my parents were among them.

There, my dear friend Lilith, why did both girls and boys, for the same purpose, for the same concern and for the same family goal, watch each other’s behavior closely, because then there was nothing in the wall like today, neither electricity nor water. When I say in the “wall”, I mean that today’s girls in the “wall” have water, so they don’t need to go to the well to bring water to the kettle and for household needs when they are tired, in the “wall” they have electricity, so they don’t need when they come home from the fields tired and immediately go to the hill to get wood to cook food for the family, in the “wall” today they have a phone to call anyone without having to run around trough the village to take a message to anyone in need, as was the case before. I personally ran to Velika Gospojina on August 15, 1953 to inform my cousin Dinka Boban, Rapišić, who was married in the village of Drinovci, to tell her that her father had died. Her father was Stjepan Baban, Rapišića.

Mile Boban, Otporaš.

Croatian-American wedding in Bobanova Draga on May 20, 2007.