Everyday
“Everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book.”
--Elvis Costello
The question:
What was the pivotal event in my becoming a writer?
The answers:
- When I was a baby in Belencito, Colombia, the window near my crib
was open and the tiny room filled with rustling and eucalyptus.
- When my parents brought my brothers and me to Pittsburgh to begin
a new life, there was snow falling in the mill town where my father’s
parents lived, and it fell on the Elizabeth Street Bridge. I was
staring through the rusted wrought iron down at the engine and endless
boxcars and the snow falling everywhere like a new language.
- I remember sitting with old women in lawn chairs a hundred yards
away from the Monongahela River. They were raised in Hungary,
Slovakia, Italy. They told me stories, showed me what Time does
to the feet of old women. They laughed and touched my face
amid a constellation of fireflies.
- On day in the Projects where we lived, they took away Harold, old
and black, and cut off his foot to make him better.
- At the bottom of the stairs—now we were in Baltimore and still
poor—my mother wrapped her hand around mine and helped me to write my
name for the first time. Mauricio.
- Yesterday my nephew heard a blackbird, “Caw, caw, caw.” He
said it sounded like his sister calling their mother from another room,
“Ma, Ma, Ma.”
Almost a conclusion before I stop:
In my case, I don’t think there was any one thing
that was the deciding factor in my becoming a writer. In fact,
that’s the way I think it is with most people who stick with any
complex art or science. It’s not the extraordinary but the
ordinary. I thank the stars that my ear and nervous system love
language, music, narrative, that I had parents and grandparents who
were inveterate talkers and puzzlers. I love the human voice
making Sense keep up, step for step, with Sound.
I’m thankful that everyday there’s a word-gift
waiting for me in the world, a choice to write or not.
Maurice Kilwein Guevara