The Remarkable Wine Festival
When now I see a bottle of wine, hear the cork being removed and smell the euphoric bouquet, my mind is carried back to the Years of Much Fish, that eleven year exile I spent more than a millennium past with naught but my dolphin saviors. Though I was never without food, albeit primarily the seas great bounty, I found myself ever growing wistful and yearning for the fruit of the grape. Alas, there was no balm for this ache, the dolphins making no spirits in their briny realm, and it was not until the Egyptians rescued me from my tiny island diaspora that I was again to able to savor its ambrosial gustatory delight.
It is not then remarkable that since that time I have, in my countless journeys and incarnations, developed a fondness for those blessed regions that produce the drink the gods celebrate and men ever pine and thirst for.
   As fortune would have it, I was, several hundred years ago, on an errand of some desperate urgency in western Siam. The king had complained bitterly to his helpless satraps of a fickle spleen, a malady not only harrowing in its vigor, but unpleasant to those in close proximity. Also encumbered with a violently spastic colon and unrelenting flatulence, the king was at his wit's end, his majestic throne now but a noisome embarrassment. Luckily, I arrived with the cure for his misery and after a strict regimen of fetal pig entrails steamed with carp's roe, lavender and carrots, coupled with twice daily goat's milk enemas, the king was again, seven months later, his hale and hearty self. However, as he was eighty-nine years old, he died the next day of old age.
   My mission of mercy completed, I now had time to enjoy my leisure. I made my way to the small and ancient inn at Uttardit. The landlord, an old friend, greeted me with unfeigned joy, "Master Akiryon! You are just in time to taste my new wine! It is like no other in its richness and sapor."
   Gladly I accepted my host's compliments and joined him in a cup, knowing full well his skill in winemaking. For in that region of Siam they did not make their wine from the juice of the grape, but from the longan, the brother of the lychee and cousin of the rambutan, and his wine was unsurpassed. Yearly he would enter the great longan wine contest, or ding, as it was called, in the thriving city south of Uttardit. But now a cloud of sorrow masked his round and childlike countenance.
   "Alas, Master," he said, fighting back his tears, "I fear I shall not enter the ding this season and my longan wine shall go untasted by the judges. The contest has been moved to Burma, in Yurdor, a far trek from here with no road to journey on."
   "This is bitter news indeed," I responded. "Yet, 'where there is the consuming desire to get something accomplished a road is likely to be opened' as my father was wont to say. We shall make such a road for you, my friend! Despair not! You shall reach Yurdor and win the ding! Your longan wine shall be drained in triumph!"
Leaving my now hopeful friend deep in his cups, I headed back to the palace. Since the king's death, his young nephew had ascended the ancient throne. On my arrival, I discovered that he too was suffering from the identical symptoms I had artfully healed his uncle of. Mincing no words, I came quickly to the to point, "We must start you on a regimen of steamed fetal pig entrails, roe, lavender and carrots without delay. You, minion, prepare the king's goat milk enema at once!"
   "Mercy, great Master!" pleaded the young king, "Is there naught else that will suffice to heal me?"
   Gazing with great solemnity upon his terrified and pockmarked countenance, I replied, "Well, there might be another way. Sometimes a great labor of philanthropy can have the same effect. Might I suggest to Your Highness that a road be laid between here and Yurdor, that the longan wine makers might enter the ding?"
   "Brilliant, Master," he cried. "It shall be started forthwith! I shall employ all my able-bodied men at once!"
   "Of course it must be completed two months from now, if they are to reach Yurdor and win the ding," I counseled. "In the meantime, I'll have your steamed entrails and enema at the ready."
   "No, no. It shall be done! I promise!"
   So it came to pass that the road from Uttardit to Yurdor was completed and my friend was able after all to enter the ding, winning once more for his inestimable and sultry longan wine. The king recovered and has since enacted a law making the giving of goat's milk enemas a crime punishable by death. But whenever I sip a cool glass of wine, it always takes me back to the longan wine ding road that leads to Yurdor.

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