The Bay City Rollers in Panama

I was at the gym today and one of the songs that played on Spotify was “I Only Want to Be with You” by Bay City Rollers.

 

...and just like that I am back in Panama.

 

There was a department store in Panama City called Gran Morrison, right across the street from the Ancon Inn—if memory is still telling the truth. Or maybe it was another block over.

The Ancon was often the first stop for many young GIs on their first night in town. The bus would pull up out front, brakes hissing in the heat, and boys barely out of high school would step down into a world that felt louder, brighter, and far more complicated than anything they had known before.

 

Across the street was the Canal Zone, which somehow made the whole scene feel even stranger. One side of the road belonged to one world, the other side to another. Borders do that. Even when invisible, they can make a place feel dreamlike.

 

The Ancon itself was one of a handful of bars that catered to servicemen in those days and the hostesses were mostly from Colombia. But this story is not about the bars, or the kind of trouble young men sometimes go looking for when they are far from home.

 

This one is about memory.

 

Or more precisely, the odd little things memory saves while letting larger moments drift away.

Because for reasons I still cannot explain, what I remember most vividly about that one day in Panama City that was far removed from the Cuba Libres, Cerveza Panama, and monkey meat (it was actually beef grilled on a stick, but we all called it monkey meat) was walking into Gran Morrison one afternoon and buying a copy of the latest album by Bay City Rollers.

 

The year before, the band’s seminal hit “Saturday Night” had been everywhere. Along with “Rock and Roll All Nite” by Kiss, it was part of the soundtrack of youth in the mid-1970s. One song was bright and carefree. The other loud and defiant. Between them, they seemed to explain what being young felt like.

So when I saw that newer Bay City Rollers album featuring “I Only Want to Be with You,” I bought it without much thought.

And yet, decades later, I remember it—that afternoon, the department store, an eighteen-year-old in Panama, barely six months in the Air Force.

Why?

I suspect memory is less interested in importance than feeling.

We imagine we remember the biggest moments of our lives because they were big. But often we remember what we felt in those moments, and feeling can attach itself to the strangest objects: a song, a doorway, the smell of rain, the sound of traffic, the cool air of a department store after walking through heat.

Sometimes memory saves contrast. The coldness of the store against the hot street. Familiar music inside a foreign city. Order inside the chaos of youth.

Sometimes it saves who we were. That young man buying a pop album in Panama did not know what would become of him. But memory knows he existed, and so it keeps a few artifacts on his behalf.

Sometimes memory saves what comforted us.

And sometimes it saves what had no meaning then because it would carry meaning later.

I do not clearly remember what I ate that week, or every face I met, or conversations that once seemed urgent. But I remember the polished floors. The murmur of shoppers. The record sleeve in my hands.

We think memory is an archive.

It is not.

It is more like a poet—choosing symbols, fragments, odd details, and small scenes that somehow contain an entire vanished world.

So perhaps I do not remember the album at all.

Perhaps I remember being young, far from home, standing in cool air for a moment, with music in my hands and the whole unknown future still waiting outside.

That is the strange power of music. A photograph can show you what a place looked like. A song lets you live inside it again.

Certain songs attach themselves to seasons of our lives without our permission. We hear them casually at the time, never realizing they are binding themselves to youth, loneliness, excitement, homesickness, possibility. Years later, a few opening notes are enough to summon it all.

Perhaps that is why the past can find us in the most ordinary places—at a stoplight, in a grocery aisle, on a rainy street, or halfway through a workout.

It waits quietly in melodies.

And maybe the reason we remember what we do is that memory is less interested in facts than feeling. The song is only the key. What opens is the person you once were.

Today, for a few minutes between sets, I was no longer an older man in a gym.

I was young again. Far from home. The future unwritten. A warm tropical city outside. Cool air in a department store. The record sleeve in my hands.

Then the song ended, as songs do.

The gym returned. The mirrors. The machines. The present tense.

But for a moment, Gran Morrison was open again, and Panama lived.