BE OUR GUEST: SATURDAY'S CHILD: DAYS OF THE WEEK NUMBER SEVEN AND THEN WE START OVER AGAIN

Peter Hilty is a resident of Cape Girardeau and a retired professor in the English department at Southeast Missouri State University.

My sister told me that I was born on Saturday. I could check that out with a musty calendar but prefer tradition and legend, afraid that Winifred's memory might be faulty. I am happy to be a Saturday's child, even though that best of poets, Anonymous, writes that Saturday's child must work for a living. In my case the poet was correct, but it has been more of a boon than a mandate.

When the Missourian announced plans for a Saturday paper, the news release a freshest of memories. Seven days. Then we start again. The number is fraught with special meanings, but then so are one and three and nine and twelve and 66 and 666.

I learned to my fright that we might have a 10-day week. The French tried it after the Revolution two centuries ago and had the good sense to tire of it. We sometimes read of efforts to adopt a 13-month year and G.B. Shaw left his money to change our spelling, but no one, I believe, suggests that we tamper with the seven-day week.

When the mystery poet wrote his verse, each day of the week had more of a personality than today, but perhaps the days are better friends than we realize. I do not need my wrist watch - the letters are too small for me to read anyway - to tell me that today is Sunday. That fact is the most important of my life at the moment, and everything I will do today turns around it. Although I might have drifted away a bit from a culture which once believed that a woman might spend time in Purgatory for darning a sock on Sunday, I still have awe-filled respect for this day of rest and gladness.

The cynic argues that the five days after Sunday merge into melted monochrome, but try calling the next five days all Tuesday. After Sunday comes Tuesday, then Tuesday, then Tuesday and Tuesday. Just as sensible to name your five sons all Darrel. My mother really washed on Monday and on windy March Monday afternoons we marched home from school to see stiff white frozen ghosts on the line. Tuesday was Fibber McGee and Bob Hope. We thank him still for the memories. Wednesday brought the weekly Kansas City Star and Ripley's Believe It Or Not, which left us gazing silently at the stars in disbelief. Older siblings went to Prayer Meetings on winter Wednesday nights. Once they returned to report they had passed a ghost on that lonely country road where no one lives - a ghost or an old, old lady dressed in white. Take your choice.

We do not easily abandon all of this Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday business. Literalists argue that the retired live in a blissful boundaryless world without calendars, but rest homes display placards informing all residents of the day of the week and the date. Obviously Tuesday still follows Monday, even when one does not go to work.

But my topic is Saturday. No school. No church. No Kansas City Star. If we were lucky, we got to go to town. We believed the entire world did that on Saturday. Our parents took about one-third of our clan each Saturday and the excitement, when our time came, was boggling. By nine o'clock roads going into town filled, and almost everyone we knew would be there. If we missed someone, we asked about to learn if he were sick. Later I read D.H. Lawrence's descriptions of Market Day in remote Latin America countries and relived our own Morgan County Saturdays. We gathered at the MFA or the Corner Drug Store or Forest Moon's Blacksmith Shop. We did not go to McCollister's Harness Shop to buy a bridal strap but to watch those who did. Perhaps we would see Milton, who had moved to California five years ago and now returned to dazzle us with tales of the Golden State. Or may be Danny would retell the account of his runaway of last summer.

About three we would begin to gather our plunder and start into the country - a pound of oily peanut butter in a white cardboard boat, several cans of salmon, a spool of white, number 40 thread, a 50 pound bag of Expansion Flour, the newly-sharpened plow share which we had earlier left at Moon's Shop.

As we chugged home in the Model A, perhaps the thought of our simple farmstead seemed a bit lackluster after the bustle of the town, and Saturday continued long after the late November sun had settled behind Forest White's twin silos. Someone volunteers that Petty was adding a new mechanic at the Ford Garage and Dad told us that McCollister had confided that he planned to close the harness shop next spring. Tomorrow would bring Sunday, well scrubbed with polished shoes. Then wash day again and the K.C. Star on Wednesday and Winnie coming home on Friday from the school where she taught. And then another Saturday, special made for Saturday's child.