I think a lot about breakfast. Probably because I have a memory that sneaks up on me often about a recurring breakfast from my childhood. My dad would place me on the cafe’s counter, and I would sit in a pile of flour, criss cross applesauce.

My dad’s hands were slick with butter and flour, worn and rough. Picking me up left flour handprints on my yellow pajama pants. With my back against the wall, he’d go back to work. He would bring me mint chocolate chip gelato and the first croissant of the morning as soon as the little hand on the clock on the brick wall was half way around.

Six thirty am. I would kick off my shoes. Immediately I would press the croissant against the gelato. Six thirty AM loved the way butter tasted with gelato. My five year old eyes loved to watch the way Tuesday woke up the world around me. Opening the cafe was the most special thing for me. All the work that went into the bread and muffins and coffee. I sat in the corner on the aluminum countertop, silently. I wrote stories on the scraps of brown paper towels on the counter beside me. There was enough going on to just watch, to just imagine, to just write nonsensical stories-The only time I was ever quiet in my whole life. My dad told me my grandfather used to say (to my habit of never shutting up) “Even a train stops sometimes Eli.” On the counter in the cafe, I was quiet. Those early mornings in the sleepy cafe with its sleepy customers and sleepy loaves of bread lit a fire in my chest. If I had to pinpoint the very moment I fell in love with observation and words, it would be the mornings in the cafe. With my dad’s worn hands and butter and gelato all over mine.

I’m sure the train probably did stop once and awhile, but since I was five years old I was never on it when it did. Being five years old and exposed to simple things like the sunrise and opening a cafe on main street in Red Bank, New Jersey taught me about observing. I grew up and we sold the cafe. It’s closed now. That didn’t change the speed of the train, that didn’t change what it taught me about observation, people, words, writing. There are people in places doing incredible things. There are people in dark places doing nothing at all. There are people in and out of a cafe on main street buying bread. I am intrigued by them all. There are one million stories dodging the cracks in the crowded sidewalks and getting on the bus or drinking a cappuccino at Starbucks. We are so lucky to be here, in this place, with people so alluringly and indescribably different from us. We are so lucky to be here. How lucky are we, to get the chance to collaborate, to listen to ideas, to turn on the radio, to turn it off. To have opinions. Different opinions. To argue them. There is so much to observe, there are so little hours in the day. There are so many stories to write. There is barely enough time to write them all. I acquire obligations and due dates and reading assignments but I don’t forget about observing and writing. I acquire stressors and boyfriends and bookmarks. But I keep the five year old alive inside of me, with the writing, with the observing. In the cafe, at five years old, with my butter hands, I could imagine anything, I could write down any story that came into my mind on brown paper towels. I envy that little girl. She had no idea she would fall in love with words and observations. She had no idea she would keep a myriad of journals and take a myriad of writing courses and always feel so incredibly stubborn. She had no idea that the train would never stop. She didn’t know the first stories about little girls with ponies and little people on MARS that she wrote on brown paper towels over croissants and gelato would turn into thousands of notebooks splashed with coffee. Hundreds of horrible drafts, and some really good ones. She would get good at something. It would be words. She romanticized the cafe in her tiny little head to the point that thinking about it now fills her with a sense of nostalgia that feels like coming home. How she wished at five she would know that the place right under her nose fostered the storyteller and the poet inside her. The cafe would close its old doors with a sigh. All good things end. All discoveries that make us who we are become old, and we move forward. Never forgetting that first discoveries importance, in the space between our paper and pen.

The memory of the cafe recently washed over me when I was prompted with the question “why do you want to be a writer?” which was followed with “when did it all begin?”. I had to think about it for a minute, which turned into an hour. I never answered the question. But now I can. When did it all begin? It began with butter hands and a face smeared with gelato. It began criss cross applesauce in a pile of flour. It began at six thirty AM. And the train never stopped.