Beatrice – Feliz Cumpleanos

Our Beatrice celebrated her birthday on Saturday.

She tried to hide it from us, she knew that one of my rare faults is precisely the chronic forgetfulness of birthdays, but it was without counting on the detective talents of M. who by a process of complex deduction involving secret codes revealed the case. Sunday we sang to her a great classic of world musicology, 'Joyeux anniversaire', then 'Happy Birthday to you', the version which punctuated my childhood and in my world is always accompanied by Christmas carols, (my birthday being December 30).

Then, some overly religious souls immediately sang 'God bless you' to the same tune, and frustrated me as I was about to launch the renegade sequel to the English version 'How old are you now, How old are you now, how old are you Beatrice, how old are you now?' And if you think this is a simple request for information, think again because the rest is sung 'As old as the hills (old as Herod), as old as the hills, as old as the hills, as old as the hills'. Obviously this only works when it comes toa young girl like our Bea.

We met up afterwards in our Sunday refuge, and we enjoyed the birthday cake that M, always M, had managed to order in the greatest secrecy, granted, she was in collusion. She had forgotten the candles, so Béa, with the same aplomb as when she leads worship and imagines a large crowd in front of her, played along and imagined a large number of candles on the cake and blew out her candles. It was moving. She had no more tears, she had already poured everything out in the church when we sang. It wasn't just her, Martine and Antonio, whom I invited to come and pray for her, accompanied her tears with their own. However, the emotion in no way altered the appetite; it seems that the cake was good, Béatrice having carefully cut and shared it (as evidenced by the concentration on her face in the photo), there was nothing left at the end. As for me, I wrapped myself in the virtue of my current fast and refused the proposed cake. One must suffer for Jesus.

Happy birthday, Bea. One more little song.