Preserving the Past Through Pieces of Your Life
Collecting Memories for future generations
Today, I had the pleasure of speaking at a senior center. It was a typical “author talk” about my writing career and books, but I spent considerable time sharing how my novel, Let Us Begin, was born.
Let Us Begin was inspired by true events in my parents’ lives. But the way that I learned about these events was by reading letters that my father wrote to my grandfather and his responses back. My grandfather had the foresight to save these letters. Perhaps it was because these letters were his only connection to his youngest son, who left Argentina as a twenty-two-year-old man to live in the United States. Maybe he planned to give these letters to my father one day to remind him of his adventure. Who knows? After my grandfather died, the letters remained in a thick notebook that my grandmother stored in a closet.
Little did my grandfather know that I would be the one to read the letters with fascination and that he would be introducing me to a younger version of my father and to him. Since I was a baby when my grandfather died, these letters were a way to meet him. My grandfather was a kind and wise man. He loved his children and his wife. He encouraged his son to be a man and always to do the right thing. I wish I’d gotten to know him while he…
