Every saturdays, I take part to a Tale Hour with kids of the children hospital. It's basically just recounting a tale, but making the kids interract with the story, change it, control it, reinvent it.
I may be 35, but somehow I'm still a kid myself, I watch animes on TV on sunday mornings, I always amaze myself in front of little things, imagine magical stories behind every little objects...
But every time, when I come back home from the tale hour, I feel even younger, because most of the kids there seem to be older in their mind than I am (and, in fact, than most of the grownups I know are). One kid in particular always caught my attention : Little Thomas.
Little Thomas is 9 years old, and all he's seen in the past 3 years is hospital.
Yet he has a big smile which seems to be carved on his face, I've always wondered if he was smiling because he was finding happyness in his inner world, or if it was just a front to soothe people around.
But what impresses me the most about him, it's his eyes. They are neither young nor old, no, they are timeless. They observe everything and everyone around him, carefully, without ever letting any sign of surprise or annoyance appear, like if he knew before everyone else what he was going to see. It's always an awkward and uneasy situation.
Every saturday, it's invariably the same ritual, he sits down on the side of the group, never really takes part, and seems to be somewhere else. In fact, he's drawing on his notebook, drawing the tale, but the characters always unmistakingly have the features of people in the room... always here and somewhere else at the same time, participating in his own way.
Scarcely saying a word, I've heard his voice only twice, but I remember what he told me then, like a sybilline spell : "Time is the importance you give to things you do, then you never run out of it".
That's in essence what he is, a riddle in the form of a smile and green eyes, one which will remain forever unsolved.
Little Thomas won't be there next saturday, the Sandman sprinkled magical dust onto his seemingly timeless and restless eyes this morning, but he was right about Time...
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them” (Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Le Petit Prince)
“People never seemed to notice that, by saving time, they were losing something else. No one cared to admit that life was becoming ever poorer, bleaker and more monotonous. The ones who felt this most keenly were the children, because no one had time for them any more. But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.” (Michael Ende, Momo)
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