Thirty-five years ago, as a young man, I met Silvestre Pantaleón. He showed me how he made rope, baked stones into lime, and bent rods (only certain rods, he was careful to note) into snares. He taught me the flora and fauna. And he talked. I have spent decades recording hundreds of hours in the unusual, melodic Nahuatl of San Agustín Oapan, the only Nahuatl with tone and where consonants and syllables melt away leaving a short wake of a word: a neighboring village's nokxipahpa:kas is in Oapan simply noxí:pá:s ('she will wash her legs'). The language itself is beautiful. But the corpus is dominated by the fervor of Silvestre's tales. Like Proust's narrator whose memory was stirred by a madeleine cake dipped in tea, Don Silvestre's many responses to the simplest of questions—How does one plant? Who taught you to make rope?—could take me on an extended journey penetrating through a very personal past. We grew older and close.