Inside my head, I knew it was a summer morning. But I didn’t know anything else in my childhood. And yes, indeed. I could hear the thirty-second notes coming from that wooden pipe, a pan flute. Like a migratory birdcall, blew many times announcing the peddler’s arrival, after a full year of absence. All of a sudden, the help comes with big scissors too, and many men pack the knives with a cloth.
The knife-grinder, maybe the last of his kind, bends over the stone rolling fast, and everybody is expecting luminous sparks when the blade gets sharpened enough, and the steel is solid. But I don’t have a knife. I don’t want one, I just don’t need one! I just want to hear again the knife-grinder playing the thirty-second notes. Children of the hood, beware of the malignant Pied Piper!
I was fascinated like any other child by that pan flute because the knife-grinder was the herald of summer with plenty of rice salads in Tupperware, eternal beach days, and reading German legends about Hamelin’s rat-catcher. However, legends have many versions. Children’s Crusade in 1211 was a historic failure that wound up in thousands of slaves on the shores of Tunisia.
And, the popular way to tell the story afraid of the parents of the royal’s wrath was a malignant and greedy Pied Piper who tricks rats and children with thirty-second notes.
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