The Day We Celebrate

"The Day We Celebrate" is a charming short story by O. Henry that delves into themes of love, surprise, and the joy of human connection. Set against the backdrop of a seemingly ordinary day, the narrative unfolds with whimsical twists and clever dialogue characteristic of O. Henry's style. As the characters navigate their intricate relationships, the story highlights the unexpected moments that make life special, ultimately celebrating the essence of togetherness and the small joys that can transform an ordinary day into something unforgettable.

• Short story

								
“In the tropics” (“Hop-along” Bibb, the bird fancier, was saying to me)
“the seasons, months, fortnights, week-ends, holidays, dog-days,
Sundays, and yesterdays get so jumbled together in the shuffle that you
never know when a year has gone by until you’re in the middle of the
next one.”

“Hop-along” Bibb kept his bird store on lower Fourth Avenue. He was an
ex-seaman and beachcomber who made regular voyages to southern ports
and imported personally conducted invoices of talking parrots and
dialectic paroquets. He had a stiff knee, neck, and nerve. I had gone
to him to buy a parrot to present, at Christmas, to my Aunt Joanna.

“This one,” said I, disregarding his homily on the subdivisions of
time—“this one that seems all red, white, and blue—to what genus of
beasts does he belong? He appeals at once to my patriotism and to my
love of discord in colour schemes.”

“That’s a cockatoo from Ecuador,” said Bibb. “All he has been taught to
say is ‘Merry Christmas.’ A seasonable bird. He’s only seven dollars;
and I’ll bet many a human has stuck you for more money by making the
same speech to you.”

And then Bibb laughed suddenly and loudly.

“That bird,” he explained, “reminds me. He’s got his dates mixed. He
ought to be saying ‘E pluribus unum,’ to match his feathers, instead
of trying to work the Santa Claus graft. It reminds me of the time me
and Liverpool Sam got our ideas of things tangled up on the coast of
Costa Rica on account of the weather and other phenomena to be met with
in the tropics.

“We were, as it were, stranded on that section of the Spanish main with
no money to speak of and no friends that should be talked about either.
We had stoked and second-cooked ourselves down there on a fruit steamer
from New Orleans to try our luck, which was discharged, after we got
there, for lack of evidence. There was no work suitable to our
instincts; so me and Liverpool began to subsist on the red rum of the
country and such fruit as we could reap where we had not sown. It was
an alluvial town, called Soledad, where there was no harbour or future
or recourse. Between steamers the town slept and drank rum. It only
woke up when there were bananas to ship. It was like a man sleeping
through dinner until the dessert.

“When me and Liverpool got so low down that the American consul
wouldn’t speak to us we knew we’d struck bed rock.

“We boarded with a snuff-brown lady named Chica, who kept a rum-shop
and a ladies’ and gents’ restaurant in a street called the calle de
los Forty-seven Inconsolable Saints. When our credit played out there,
Liverpool, whose stomach overshadowed his sensations of noblesse
oblige, married Chica. This kept us in rice and fried plantain for a
month; and then Chica pounded Liverpool one morning sadly and earnestly
for fifteen minutes with a casserole handed down from the stone age,
and we knew that we had out-welcomed our liver. That night we signed an
engagement with Don Jaime McSpinosa, a hybrid banana fancier of the
place, to work on his fruit preserves nine miles out of town. We had to
do it or be reduced to sea water and broken doses of feed and slumber.

“Now, speaking of Liverpool Sam, I don’t malign or inexculpate him to
you any more than I would to his face. But in my opinion, when an
Englishman gets as low as he can he’s got to dodge so that the dregs of
other nations don’t drop ballast on him out of their balloons. And if
he’s a Liverpool Englishman, why, fire-damp is what he’s got to look
out for. Being a natural American, that’s my personal view. But
Liverpool and me had much in common. We were without decorous clothes
or ways and means of existence; and, as the saying goes, misery
certainly does enjoy the society of accomplices.

“Our job on old McSpinosa’s plantation was chopping down banana stalks
and loading the bunches of fruit on the backs of horses. Then a native
dressed up in an alligator hide belt, a machete, and a pair of AA
sheeting pajamas, drives ’em over to the coast and piles ’em up on the
beach.

“You ever been in a banana grove? It’s as solemn as a rathskeller at
seven a. m. It’s like being lost behind the scenes at one of these
mushroom musical shows. You can’t see the sky for the foliage above
you; and the ground is knee deep in rotten leaves; and it’s so still
that you can hear the stalks growing again after you chop ’em down.

“At night me and Liverpool herded in a lot of grass huts on the edge of
a lagoon with the red, yellow, and black employés of Don Jaime. There
we lay fighting mosquitoes and listening to the monkeys squalling and
the alligators grunting and splashing in the lagoon until daylight with
only snatches of sleep between times.

“We soon lost all idea of what time of the year it was. It’s just about
eighty degrees there in December and June and on Fridays and at
midnight and election day and any other old time. Sometimes it rains
more than at others, and that’s all the difference you notice. A man is
liable to live along there without noticing any fugiting of tempus
until some day the undertaker calls in for him just when he’s beginning
to think about cutting out the gang and saving up a little to invest in
real estate.

“I don’t know how long we worked for Don Jaime; but it was through two
or three rainy spells, eight or ten hair cuts, and the life of three
pairs of sail-cloth trousers. All the money we earned went for rum and
tobacco; but we ate, and that was something.

“All of a sudden one day me and Liverpool find the trade of committing
surgical operations on banana stalks turning to aloes and quinine in
our mouths. It’s a seizure that often comes upon white men in Latin and
geographical countries. We wanted to be addressed again in language and
see the smoke of a steamer and read the real estate transfers and
gents’ outfitting ads in an old newspaper. Even Soledad seemed like a
centre of civilization to us, so that evening we put our thumbs on our
nose at Don Jaime’s fruit stand and shook his grass burrs off our feet.

“It was only twelve miles to Soledad, but it took me and Liverpool two
days to get there. It was banana grove nearly all the way; and we got
twisted time and again. It was like paging the palm room of a New York
hotel for a man named Smith.

“When we saw the houses of Soledad between the trees all my
disinclination toward this Liverpool Sam rose up in me. I stood him
while we were two white men against the banana brindles; but now, when
there were prospects of my exchanging even cuss words with an American
citizen, I put him back in his proper place. And he was a sight, too,
with his rum-painted nose and his red whiskers and elephant feet with
leather sandals strapped to them. I suppose I looked about the same.

“‘It looks to me,’ says I, ‘like Great Britain ought to be made to keep
such gin-swilling, scurvy, unbecoming mud larks as you at home instead
of sending ’em over here to degrade and taint foreign lands. We kicked
you out of America once and we ought to put on rubber boots and do it

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