![]() ![]() ![]() What would Samuel Clemens have made of the Riverwalk? He was a grown child who readily took a God’s-eye view of life on earth. A mockingbird kept me company as I sauntered on the buff-colored concrete mosaic and watched kids tumble over the elevation intervals layered on the model’s riverbank, rising from the channel like a stairway of stacked pancakes. The Riverwalk affords an outdoor stroll that covers 1,000 miles on a scale of one step to the mile. I had come to the Rendezvous from the Riverwalk on Mud Island near downtown Memphis-a gurgling scale model of the lower half of the Mississippi from its confluence with the Ohio all the way to the Gulf. You work up a hunger walking half the length of the Mississippi-even along a virtual version of the river. Not until he became a full-time journalist, far from the river, in the alkali dust of the Nevada Territory, did he settle on “Mark Twain.” But “A Son of Adam,” along with “Josh” and “Rambler” and his other experiments, belonged to an amateur, a man who occasionally wrote while otherwise employed as a printer, steamboat pilot and miner. The restaurant’s slogan-“Not since Adam has a rib been this famous”-had reminded me of Mark Twain’s fondness for comic allusions to Adam, to the extent that he based an early pen name on him. I ran through the names in my head as I devoured dry-rub barbecue and piled up napkins at Memphis’ bustling Rendezvous. ![]()
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