A little son came to his father,
and the tiny child asked:
What is good
and what is bad?
It is good when it is summer! When shady trees protect you from our scorching sun! When you can settle down in a park, a square, an alley, or in a courtyard on a bench at the foot of a mighty green tree, and read a book, chat with friends, simply sit and admire the streams of a life-giving fountain or sprinkler system.
It is bad when you walk along Komsomolskaya Street and the trees, pruned for rejuvenation (oh, I recently came across something about rejuvenation in Bulgakov!), have grown old before their time and gone bald forever. And those nice little supposedly evergreen trees planted on the Embankment right by the Volga have shriveled and become ever-yellow. And really: where would water come from on the Embankment?
It is good when the city has holidays and cultural events! Premieres, Nights at theatres and museums, festivals, screenings! Bright, festive, joyful!
It is bad when people settle scores with someone who can never answer back. It is bad when a grandmother failed to teach in childhood that beating a person who is down is unacceptable and vile. It is bad when everyone sings in chorus that something must be destroyed to the ground, and then... then, as a rule, the singer either leaves, or the funding is cut, or someone forgets to water it. (Bulgakov, by the way, wrote about singers too.) There is plenty of space: build your own new world in a new place, and sort out the old one later. The old can be wise, antique, and simply attractive to tourists.
It is good when there is repair and renewal! When you come to Volzhsky on a weekend and there, in a residential building undergoing major repairs, every week a full crew is whitewashing, painting, strengthening the basements! It is good when parks are laid out, reconstruction is carried out, something new is built!
It is bad when you drive along the dam every Saturday and see two or three people either sitting sadly side by side, thinking about the further course of the repairs and looking at the traffic jams of cars barely moving back and forth, or talking on the phone, apparently debating which is more important, process or result. It is bad when our children grow up convinced that a good playground with slides and a place to play volleyball or tennis is called a park, rather than simply being installed in the yards of homes, schools, and kindergartens, while a park is something different and must have trees. It is bad when children think that garden-and-park sculpture means painted clay fairy-tale gnomes or plastic Zabivakas, and not girls with oars, workers and collective-farm women, or at worst Davids and Goliaths.
It is good when people are joyful and kind! When they smile at one another, offer a glass of water, and share salt and matches, as well as lard and Turgenev in eight volumes.
It is bad when they push their neighbor with a shoulder or
strike him in the back. And stones hidden in the bosom are bad too.
It is good when it is summer! When there are strawberries and gladioli! Tomatoes and watermelons! Ice cream and shorts, sundresses and beautiful girls! It is bad when there are mosquitoes, ticks, and prices for gladioli, tomatoes, strawberries, and sundresses.
And in general, little one, go outside already. It is summer.
