I think I was 8, no, I was 10, and fatherless on one of those hot St. Louis days when I was this little boy who would spend so much time with the old firemen at the station house down the street.

They would sit in stocking feet facing the street, watching the girls in cool summer dresses. Soon, one of them would give me a stained coffee cup to refill from the kitchen faucets and I would walk slowly back with a coffee cup full of cold water and chips of ice.

I recall being in love with water.

In later years, as a tired, wilting actor walking the hot streets of Manhattan looking for a glass of water, I would pass Manhattan’s many cold, splashing fountains. That was the summer I fell in love with a girl from Maine who always shared my love of water.

But back to St. Louis. In our back yard on a hot August day while we were sitting under the grape arbor, a man came out of nowhere. He came and left without leaving a name. He wore a tattered old jacket and dirty gray hat like so many of the men in those terrible Depression days who jumped from empty freight trains and came up the hill hoping for a piece of pie or bread and yes, a glass of cold water.

This fellow stepped over the wire fence to where I had left the hose running behind my father’s line of tomato plants and picked it up. When he saw me walking toward him, like the gentleman he surely once was, he let the hose fall to the ground without drinking.

“Good afternoon,” he whispered from cracked lips. “I see you’re watering your crops here.” It made me laugh. As my mother watched silently from the porch, I picked up the old hose and handed it to him. I remember now his hands. He took time to drink as the water spilled down his shirt, and then he let it drop and he said, “Thank you so much for your water. I was just so thirsty.” Something like that.

I was a little kid in his family’s yard watching this strange man pull his dirty old hat from his sweaty head, wiping his shaking hands on his shirt before he made the sign of the cross and then tipped his worn hat to Veronica, my mother, who had brought him a piece Wonder bread wrapped in a clean napkin. “They come all the time,” she said as he walked through the convent and down to the tracks. “It’s so sad.” I didn’t feel any sadness, I really didn’t. He spoke well and just needed a taste of water, the kind Father Keating said, which another woman named Veronica brought him.

Years later I told this story to Mary O’Hara, who was about to enter the cloistered convent of the Sacred Heart, on our last autumn walk in Central Park. Mary O’Hara playfully punched my arm and said, “Jesus? Yes. He was just another thirsty Jesus.” I thought about the hose. I remember it still.

In the 1950s, when I wanted to practice my Japanese on the streets of Fuchu near my base, I came upon a small clutch of villagers pulling trash from an old area where old and young still-displaced citizens were still rebuilding what our bombs had torn apart.

There was this aging man, probably a veteran, leaning on his shovel. I paused and pulled my water bottle from my bag and said “Mizu?” and offered it. He smiled and accepted it as the man did with my hose. From the American boy in Japan, the simple gift of water.

Before I leave here, I think I will take a case of cold water and hand it out to the young men with dirty hands on the streets. She who loved me last is telling me to do that.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.