Member-only story
The Devil May Care
Or may not. An old man’s tale
My Geriatric Journal #11
It’s my birthday, so I am allowed to be young again, dear diary, at least for a day!
This photo was taken in 1956 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, by a boyhood friend who was practicing to be a photographer. I am 79 and look nothing like this now, of course.
I was struggling at the time to learn a little Spanish with Mrs. Baker at Bethlehem’s Liberty High School. (I eventually learned a lot with Mrs. Kromayer at Moravian Preparatory School.) I can’t remember the name of the textbook, but I remember a photo of La Garita del Diablo (The Devil’s Sentry Box) at Castillo San Cristóbal in Old San Juan.
Even then I was a skeptic. I was certain the idea that the devil would snatch away anyone who entered the Garita was nonsense. When I first visited Puerto Rico two years later, one of the places I went to was — you guessed it — the “haunted” sentry box. The only way to get to it was by walking through the dangerous La Perla neighborhood, a shantytown outside the city walls. This was long before the insanely popular song and video “Despacito” was filmed there and the gentrification…
