My grandfather missed one train in 1961, and that is the only reason I was born in this village.
He was twenty-two. He had finished the teachers' college in June, and in August a letter came: a school in the city wanted him. A city school. His mother had already told the whole street.
The train left at six in the morning. He had packed his bag the night before: two shirts, a razor, and forty-one books. Forty-one.
He left the house at four, because the station is nine kilometres away. But the little bridge over the canal had gone under water in the night, so he took the long way round, through the fields, with the bag on his shoulder.
By the time he reached the platform, the train had left. Twenty minutes.
The next one was on Friday. He sat down on his bag and did not move for an hour.
An old man sat down next to him and asked why a young man with forty-one books was sitting on a platform with wet shoes.
That old man was the head of the school in the next village. He had lost two teachers that summer. He had been to the city twice and had found nobody.
"You have a bag and no train," he said. "I have a school and no teacher."
My grandfather taught in that village for forty-one years — one year for every book he had carried to the station that morning.
By the time he retired, he had taught about two thousand children. Three of them had become teachers in the same school.
One of those three is my mother, and she has his forty-one books on a shelf that my father made.