Today’s date on the wall calendar is framed in red. 

There should be a feast, to-day.       

I have found out lately that my perception of feast dates is growing duller and duller. I can remember them only by chance when strolling about in the boulevard where seasonal lights flash playfully lighting up café-customers’ faces shaded by worn-out flags and crumpled streamers most letters of which are wiped away… 

These are the same feast signs I have been growing old with. The same feast signs which are repeated eternally. Yet, I remember that when I was a child, I would never ignore feast dates to this extent. I would not leave any chance for streamers to surprise me. I even would not sleep the night before the feast day: I would stay awake before the wall clock , waiting for the feast to rise so that I can put on my newly-bought clothes and rent a bicycle to join my quarter-fellows in bike-racing and… I do not remember how sleep and dream would slyly show me up in my dearest clothes signed with the sweetest happy expressions. On my pullover-chest, my comrades would merrily stammer out the catchword:

“Like A Bird”

Their joy would invade me … I run … I fly … Like a bird … I stretch up my little fore-arms to fly… I imitate the bird right over me swimming in the blue sky without shaking a wing… It flies far… I fly far… It flies further… I fly further…

But my comrades

would spoil my flight on me.

They would devour my arm-pits and take delight in making me hysterically kick about. I could never get rid of them before the bird appear on the far-away blue horizon. It is only at that time that they would set me free to ran out shouting in welcome, clapping their hands in excitement and singing the refrain that would link everybody to the skies:

Dance, dance, bird

We’re the happiest on earth

The bird would descend to the level of the long rows of the little houses inclined on one another: The more we sing, the more it dances. Whenever we stop singing, it would fly up high in the sky again but it would return again and again whenever there is singing and dancing. It would dance and shake its wings in exchange for songs and promises:

Dance, dance, bird

We’re the happiest on earth

The bird would fly along to pay us a visit early in the morning of every feast. It would fly around and around in the sky waiting for us to go out and share with it the celebration, dancing and singing… But, in the course of time, the bird disappeared: 

Probably, because people around here has grown older and older,

Or because feast birds no longer exist

Or because the whole story has been, from the origin, a pure childhood illusion perpetuated by innocent children…  

Now, I am turning over the damp calendar pages looking for other red numbers of coming feast dates. 

I turn the pages over one after the other. 

Over and over and over again… 

Nothing.            

Today, then, was the ultimate feast.

***********