en barranquilla se baila asi

I’ve been wondering a long time about my family history. It’s always interesting to learn about the lives of your family members from generations past, or at least it is for me. I had vaguely heard while I was growing up about an uncle I had who was a successful author. But I never asked for details. It always stayed with me because I wondered if I inherited my constant need to write from him. so I asked my dad about it recently. He told me the whole story while we were waiting in the hospital for my sister to give birth. My dad loves to reminisce. It turns out that my grandmother (father’s mother) had something like 6 siblings. I had no idea there were that many. One of them, my great uncle, was the writer. He was named Carlos like my dad. He wrote 6 books and several articles for the local paper in Barranquilla, Colombia called El Hiraldo. This was around the 50s and 60s.

I wanted to get my hands on something he had written so I can be enlightened as to where I came from, but my dad unfortunately doesn’t have any of the novels in his possession, and he can only remember the name of one of them. I thought I’d try looking up the newspaper online (because they usually list the author’s other written works in the byline), and I did find a site which I believe is the same paper, but the online archives only go back as far as 2001. what I have not done is a search for the title of that one novel that my dad remembered the name of. He said it was a good story, not too thick of a book, and that my uncle had been pretty successful in selling his written works. I felt proud at that moment to have that as part of what makes up my family history.

My great uncle Carlos Delgado Nieto was an eccentric type, the way my father described him. he was a chain smoker, and therefore appeared much older than his years. He used to take my father to the side of a river and let him play there when he was a little boy, around 6 or 7. my father would notice him staring out at the water, and then filling a page or two quickly with words. He would ask him, why does the river make you want to write? My father thought it was such a curious thing.