Growing Up Envious of Panama


Growing Up Envious of Panama

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Written by Matt Landau

Tuesday, February 19 2008

My childhood on the continent of North America pales in comparison to that of my Panamanian counterparts. It was this youth of relatively little adventure that eventually landed me on the isthmus of Panama; my eyes wide open and my mouth gaped in envy.

As kids, my brother and I were lucky enough to have been raised in the noble town of Princeton, New Jersey where we enjoyed weekday afternoons in the family den watching cartoons and eating Chex-Mix from a big plastic bowl. Weekends were spent traveling to various soccer tournaments around the state and having afternoon get-togethers on the patio in the backyard. We took occasional vacations to exotic places which acted only as temporary windows into the lifestyle I liked to fantasize about.

I'd sit in school often paging through my course guides, in pure admiration of people like the Aztec Warriors of Mexico or the Zulu Indians of Swaziland, but at the end of the day, the extent of those fantasies would be stunted there on the pages of my textbook. I had a safe and innocent upbringing. And I liked it that way.

A byproduct of this lifestyle was my family's inherent ability to exaggerate when it came to telling stories. Because our experiences were so far out of harm's way, we liked to find touches making them dangerous. We liked to find accents to make them somehow raw.

When relaying one of our anecdotes around the dinner table to friends, the evening air would eventually crescendo with gasps and awes, eventually exploding in laughter followed by some sort of qualifier to the punch line. "Can you believe it? The pizza was on the roof of the car the whole time! Just crazy!"

Dinner parties like these were oftentimes highlighted by small incidents which, to us, made them memorable. Take the time our Dalmation C.C. had a shocking string of smelly farts. Seven, eight, nine farts in a row from under the oak dinner table. Amazing! Or the night when Oprah randomly showed up for my mom's surprise birthday party with her boyfriend Stedmond. Family friends had brought them over. And they didn't even bring a present! These were (and still are) significant things to us.

It was not long ago, encircled by a group of Panamanian friends, that I decided to communicate a story from my adolescence in which my mother was comically trapped in a hotel closet without any clothes. I described the scene in detail to my friends, one of whom responded by saying that something similar had happened to her mother. "Only mine was locked in jungle compound" she said, "and she try to escape the Columbia drug man Cesar."

This was the kind of childhood I had only dreamed about. Jungle prisons and Columbian drug czars named Cesar were not real concerns to me or my parents in Princeton, where probably the biggest risk we'd take each week was ordering a new special from the Mrs. Chow's take-out menu. So it astounded me with jealousy to find that some of my Panamanian peers had been privy to such civil liberties.

Over the course of my years in Panama, various stories like these began to emerge; the types of things that blew the mind of a child from seersucker New Jersey. "When I grow up in Panama" a friend once told me, "I have sloth for a pet. His name Skip. He nice the Skip. Very big. Large hands." This was incredible. When I was growing up, the only pet I could truly call my own was a stubborn Chinese fighting fish who lived in a plastic cup. But here was my good friend Loisa referring to Skip the Sloth, who slept beside her bed.

Life in the Panama Canal Zone, as I understand it, was close to paradise for a kid. Here you had normal, adventurous, mischievous boys and girls like me from the States plopped down into a tropical bubble, all the while with the safeties of home. Sure they had the luxuries I was used to like pools and bowling alleys and parks. But they also had things like massive cargo vessels floating through a canal in their back yard. They'd be amused by fresh mangos falling from the trees and wild bass from Lake Gatun while I'd be sitting in on my duvet eating baby carrots. Theirs was a life of natural adventure and exploit, mine one of canned suburbia.

There are a number of different accounts of growing up in Panama, some of which are obviously more savory than others. And it shames me to realize that as a child, I had little idea anything else existed. Textbooks were textbooks to me back then; if nothing other than distant accounts of upbringings in another world. But upon arriving in Panama, and hearing people speak firsthand of their youth with magic eyes, I can't help but wonder, deep down in my heart, if they've ever truly appreciated the wonder of a farting dog.

Comments (1)

Rich: I can relate...

I can relate but from a different angle. I grew up listening to all the stories my parents and relatives, who were canal zone youth, would tell to us as kids. My mother talking of her pet monkey. My uncle telling of his shark fishing adventures. And all talking of Taboga Island and beach outings. It made for vivid images I could only dream of one day seeing for myself. Until that time I had to be content with feeding my bluegills I had caught from the local pond.
My first trip to Panama was in 2006 and upon meeting some relatives for the first time I was asked if Panama was as I had envisioned. Before I could respond I was then asked if I was surprised about how modern Panama actually was. I responded with a simple "yes." But then I just had to know where I could find a place that sold pet monkeys. I had not seen any pet stores at Multiplaza mall.