: Re: Can the first-person narrator use both past and present tenses? My first person narrator is telling his story in the past tense but there are present tense realities too that get me confused

@YK4692630

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Llewellyn's answer is good, but I'm going to add on another angle:
You can do first person POVs in two basic ways. First, you can have a first person narrator who is telling this story from some specific point in time in the future, which I'm just going to call first person POV #1 . (If anyone has technical vocabulary for this, please let me know - I'm writing this answer based on intuition formed by writing and reading first person stories.)
However, you can also have a first person narrator without that extra layer. In this case, there is no "future point in time" for the story and the first person is more of a conceit than a real narrative device - you're asking your readers not to think too hard on how and when they're "telling the story". There are a number of consequences depending on which one you choose, but the important one for your question is that for #2 , everything is in past tense and happening at the time of the story's events.
The reason is that whenever narrator #1 relates a thought or opinion, there are two possibilities: either they are giving commentary from their current perspective (which can be either present or past tense), or they're relating something that they thought or felt at the time (always past tense). Narrator #2 can only do the latter.
So there are actually three options for how the tenses pan out:

I am six-foot six, burly and bronzed from working so much in the sun, and I am used to ladies staring at me in a roomful of other men.

Narrator #1, commenting on events at the time from a point from a point in the future where all these things are still true.

I was six-foot six, burly and bronzed from working so much in the sun, and I was used to ladies staring at me in a roomful of other men.

Narrator #1, commenting on events at the time from a point in the future where these things are no longer true (maybe it's fifty years later and he's an old man)...
OR
Narrator #2 or theoretically narrator #1, faithfully relating what they felt at the time. Which of the two it is for narrator #1 will depend on context and character voice; this particular example doesn't work well for "felt at the time" because it's high-level meta-commentary but the later one in your passage...

But there was something in the way she looked at me that made me take off my hat and stand up even taller. I knew that look, too.

would work better for it, because it's a direct reaction to a minute detail and it makes sense for this to be something the guy thought/felt directly back then.
In general, the first thing I'd do if you start writing a first person story is figure out which of the two narrator options you're going for, because it determines a lot about the narration. Frankly, I would also probably default to #2 unless you plan to do fun things with your story's framing, really push the idea of the story being told by someone, have the narration heavily affected by things future-POV-character knows but the one going through events does not, or do something else that #2 bars you from. This is because in #1, juggling the two different points in time your story belongs in ("back then" and "now when I am telling you this"), your narrator's opinion now and then and how to distinguish the two, etc. can be complicated and a headache, so why bother if you're not going to actually make real use of it? Similarly, because #2 is more straightforward, you're not asking your reader to split their attention and you don't have the implicit spoilers of the future POV hanging around, it can come off as a lot more immediate and suspenseful. It's simpler in a lot of ways, and that can be a very good thing.

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