The knife-grinder

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. Get full access to Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud! at javiertruben.substack.com/subscribe