The Old Man And The River

Chronicle Number 3

Panama, 2019

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Many years ago, in San Antonio, I was on a riverboat. I was a child, perhaps five, perhaps six, though this memory is so hazy that I’m not even sure whether San Antonio is, in fact, the right city. Have I ever been to San Antonio? I’m not certain, as these moments, in this very boat, are my sole memories of this trip. If pressed, yes, I would say that I’ve been to San Antonio, and that there was a man on a boat who was irritated after I revealed his secret.

Only his face remains in my mind. Leathery, wrinkled, with a stern, menacing glare. His small, hawk-like eyes don’t blink when he stares. My sense is that he’s short, perhaps a bit stocky, too, almost like he’d spent many years digging ditches or stacking bricks or lugging wheelbarrows of concrete.

I also don’t know whether this memory of the man conforms to the reality of the man. And I have my doubts, as the man who feels sixty or seventy or eighty to the five year old might be, perhaps, a well-worn thirty or forty. Although I don’t believe that accuracy is important here. What the man actually looked like, who he actually was, the way he actually acted, doesn’t matter much at all, as compared to the memory that lingers in my mind. Even if a fictional memory kindles these sensations, the sensations themselves are accurate.