Almin Muric, Almin “Something” Muric… I can’t recall his middle name for anything now. I know we talked about it. I think he even tried to keep it a secret. I might be wrong about that. All I know is that I can’t remember it at all now. Maybe he’d prefer that anyway.
Oh, oh… wait. I think I got it. I wrote the rest of this, and now it’s finally coming back. I think his middle name might be Edison or Addis, something like that. Don’t tell him I told you, okay?
How I met Almin Muric
I was walking or riding my bike by a friend’s driveway, and he saw me. A few weeks before, I’d talked to this friend, and she’d said, “Oh, yeah, they have an older brother.” That’s when I first found out about him. I didn’t meet him, though, until that time in front of the driveway.
We played together, probably some kickball, but I don’t exactly remember. We asked each other questions. I know we didn’t ask for each other’s names, though, until the end of the day. I told him mine, and I thought he said, “Almond,” like the nut.
The next day, I found out he wasn’t named after a nut. That next day, he also told me that when he first saw me, he thought I was a girl.
Who Almin Muric is
- The son of a Bosnian carpenter
- A kid who lived down the street from me
- My best friend through middle school
What Almin Muric likes
- Soccer
- Basketball with me
- Nutella (before it was popular in the United States)
One fact about Almin Muric
He was born in Bosnia, moved to Germany during the war, and then ended up making his way to Florida before moving down the street from me in Louisville, Kentucky. Since he moved around so much, when I knew him, he said he could speak five languages: Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian, German, and English.
He said English was easy but that he spoke it the worst of the languages he knew. I’m guessing that’s changed now, since he’s been away from Europe so long. But I still respect his language skills, probably more so now than I did even then.
One reason I like Almin Muric
He was a boy who lived near me and was just a little older than me. Everything else fell into place from there. He wasn’t a punk – he was really respectful. He had his own opinions but valued mine. We tried to learn the same games together, basketball and chess and kickball and others. We laughed about the same types of things. We had a lot in common, and we made even more.
One memory I have of Almin Muric
He and I attended a church camp when I was 13. The camp itself wasn’t that great, leading one of my other friends to say in front of everyone who organized it, “This camp sucks.”
I didn’t think it was that bad. At one point, after getting a ton of complaints from everyone about the food, they bought everyone tacos from Taco Bell. It couldn’t be that bad, right?
On one of the last days of the camp, I came back to the dorm room to hear that someone had been teasing Almin because he was Muslim, not Christian. Yeah, what up with that? That did suck.
Almin Muric in one word
Corn.
