In the morning, I’m off on my bike to the local library. Next to the main entrance, for who knows what reason, there’s a tiny henhouse, in which five chickens are enjoying what is either a late breakfast or an early lunch. It’s a bright, clear day, so before going inside I sit down on the pavement next to the chickens and light up a cigarette. I watch the chickens pecking at their feedbox busily. Frenetically, in fact, so that they look like one of those old newsreels with too few frames per second.

After my cigarette, something’s changed in me. Again, who knows why? But for what it’s worth, the new me—five chickens and a smoke away from what I was—now poses myself two questions:

First, Who could possibly have any interest in the exact date when I met my first Chinese?

And second, What exactly is there to be gained by spreading out those Year In Newses on a sunny reference-room desk?

Good questions. I smoke another cigarette, then get back onto my bike and bid farewell to fowl and file copies. If birds in flight go unburdened by names, let my memories be free of dates.

Granted, most of my memories don’t bear dates anyway. My recall is a damn sight short of total. It’s so unreliable that I sometimes think I’m trying to prove something by it. But what would I be proving? Especially since inexactness is not exactly the sort of thing you can prove with any accuracy.

Anyway—or rather, that being the case—my memory can be impressively iffy. I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else’s. At which point, can you even call it memory anymore? Witness the sum of what I’m capable of dredging up from primary school (those pathetic six years of sunsets in the heyday of postwar democracy). Two events: this Chinese story, for one, and for another, a baseball game one afternoon during summer vacation. In that game, I was playing center field, and I blacked out in the bottom of the third. I mean, I didn’t just collapse out of nowhere. The reason I blacked out that day was that we were allowed only one small corner of the nearby high school’s athletic field, and so when I was running full speed after a pop fly I smashed head-on into the post of the backboard of the basketball court next to where we were playing.