GOOD FATHER RIVER

WE’RE PERSUADED BY OUR SAGES that few memories survive from our childhood, and nothing at all remains accurate from before our fifth year of age. That’s either untrue or I’m most certainly the exception. My infantile recollections, particularly of spaces, places and any distances between, might be attended by some distortion or exaggeration. Yet they’re detailed remembrances all and always. They’ve proven precisely true as well, or enough so to be always worth the recollection. Likewise I vividly recall the mind I had then as the very small person that I was.

I can count, for example, can even cherish anew, one dearest remembrance: That’s the appearance of my father as a still young, dashing, handsome man– not yet so kingly in appearance as he became, not yet so sage in demeanor as he is today; but at thirty-six years already a princely master over all his domains. Assertive, confident– despite dire past experiences that would have crushed many men–, thus my earliest memories of him.

Let my father appear so to you, too, my hearers, as I begin to tell about my blessed childhood. I might start anywhere, or any time. But I choose that day, an awful day, when such an exact remembrance of my father .....