Fighting Fear

My slug-a-bed self said:  "The room is cool, safe, and all that you need.  The city is crowded and full of strangers waiting to .........."  Well, I'll let you fill in the dots with wherever your mind goes.  Mine went to 'take your money, your health, your trust, and your innocence' (however much of that I may still retain at my age).

Another voice chimed in, though not a fearless one.  It is perhaps what Robbin calls the voice of shame:  "Shame on me that I would think about lying here in my room all day.  Next I'll be calling Alaska Airlines, changing my ticket and heading out to the airport."

A third voice spoke through the microphones in the subcutaneous layers of my skin:  "That was a mosquito bite!  There's another!  And another!  The room is full of mosquitoes!  Why can't I see them?  They can't be Anopheles because the literature said that although they possess a tiny chainsaw to hack through the skin, prior to hacking they inject an anaesthetic so that the victim (me!) can't feel the bite."

The fourth voice won out:  "Shuddup and go!  Now!"

So I did.

I walked around the corner, down the street, sat in a cafe, and drank a cup of cafe con leche while watching a beggar's legs flopping back and forth from a vestibule down the street.  I asked a waitress nearby the prices that I should offer to cabbies for various destinations that I was interested in, then flagged one down, haggled him down by walking away twice, before joining him on the ride to the Miraflores Locks.  I had difficulty understanding him due to his rapid-fire speech and heavy local dialect (which I'm finding to be the usual case here in Panama City), but I believe that we made a deal to have him wait an hour for me, then take me to the Amador Causeway for an hour, the Old Town for an hour, then home.

He wasn't there when I came out.

Despite the entreaties of a dozen different cabbies, I walked a quarter mile to a bus stop; then I rode a city bus back into town for free. But its route terminated in a location that brought up the fear factor again.  I didn't want to stand around looking lost, so I headed in the direction that a different bus had taken, hoping for a bus stop and a bus employee that I could quiz about routes.  I found both less than a block away.  But the dialectical impasse arose again.  I could make out the gist of what was being said, but not the details.  I had to buy a ticket around the corner somewhere.  More people, more questions, more partial understandings, but always some helpful person would stop long enough to explain enough to get me to the next point.  The cook at the Hilton around the corner from my house led me off of the final bus and through the last few blocks to my humble home.

And I have no mosquito bites.