It’s like when you smell some fragrance, your memory immediately serves you with a situation from your past, where you smelt the same smell. Or you see some thing or item that reminds you of your previous experience…. Or, as it happened with the shopping bags in my local County Market grocery shop, it gave me a chain of associations.

Sometimes you think, how come that people don’t feel the coming tornado in a sudden smell of rain. Little hints can give you far leading warnings if you have stuff to compare with. There is a saying that we learn from our mistakes. There is a better saying that we should learn from somebody else’s mistakes. Why do we act sometimes and don’t think that the same actions didn’t work right for somebody previously? Why do we have to go the same way as somebody else went and didn’t succeed? Do we really have to err where we can just use someone else’s example? Do we need a tornado come and ruin the house to understand that the green skies gave us a clear hint beforehand?

“Setka-avos’ka” is a reality of socialistic times. It is a knitted “shopping” capacity to transport products. People went shopping with their own “setka”. The convenience of it consisted in its compact manner, one could carry it in a pocket (crumpled in a lump, so to say) and take it out when a lucky chance comes. Under “lucky chance” I mean the situation when a grocery shop (or a shoe shop, or a clothes shop) puts out for selling SOMETHING! And you get into a line and have in your pocket a capacity to carry the product! In those happy socialistic times, when there were no rich people (what a comfort for envious!) there was one thing in abundance and the thing was “deficit”. It was a name for products, any products from meat and cheese to shoes and boots, to kids clothes. Apart from regular scarce set of essentials you wouldn’t find much variety on the counters. And if yes, chance is that you would get it wrapped in a harsh brown paper, another reality of a socialistic service.

Setka-avos’ka was just the right thing for shopping needs, because you wouldn't like to carry everything in your hands, right? You were not getting any bags in the soviet shops, oh no.

My more distinct flash-backs from the socialistic past are here.