I'm having my second cup of coffee of the day. The first cup I had at home; it was Cafe Bustelo, which is my preferred coffee to brew. It is Cuban and strong, and I fell in love with it the first time I had it with Juan Carlos and Enid on New Years Eve 2001. This cup was brewed in the ktichen here at work. I'm not sure what brand they use, but it reminds me of coffee I used to drink with my grandmother, when she was still a nurse and getting up early in the morning to go to work. Sipping this, I can see us sitting in the dim early morning light of the "front room", listening to the radio, and waiting for my grandpa, or "the old man" as he was called up until the day he died, to come home from his job working at the harbor. Smells and taste are as attached to memory as the memories themselves are.
When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a
writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill
either. But not books. However systematically you try to destroy them,
there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to
enjoy a shelf-life in some corner of an out-of-the-way library
somewhere, in Reykjavik, Valladolid, or Vancouver."
-Amos Oz
I found this quote in the front of "Seducing the Demon", and I fell in love with it immediately, because it embodies everything I feel about writing. Long after I am gone, I want my words to still be here. It is making me more aware of what I am leaving behind. Like pictures and scrapbooks, our words say, "I was here."
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