Posts

Showing posts from February, 2009

Uncle Tirso and Me

Image
By Luis K. Feliz Poised on the edge, my legs wiggle. 20 seconds. 10 seconds. 5 seconds. Go! I dive. “Nadie nace sabiendo,” my uncle, Tirso, tells me as I spring up from the bottom of the pool. “No one is born knowing.” This has become my mantra. Yet, it took me many years to know the meaning of those words, to frame them accurately, to render them honestly. In many ways, quoted words are elusive: they cannot capture the full meaning their speakers intended. Trying to capture what my uncle was thinking that day, I have attempted to immerse myself in his world to understand his pain: a fisherman who wrote poetry and dreamed of becoming his town’s mayor. From his struggles, I have learned about the vitality of persistence and the joys of creativity. My uncle didn’t write poetry because it came easily to him. In fact, he was not formally educated, and never won recognition for the poems he crafted. He didn’t fish because it was easy either. Actually, he almost drowned once. He did these