The false start happens again: I sit to write one story and then another slides into mind, like one car careening into another.

And the new story is almost always more compelling than my original idea, the one I’ve been drafting into sort of a blueprint all week. Very orderly. And a little dislodged from any genuine passion by now.

Besides, the new idea sees stuff I can’t. And is a lot smarter than I am. Even when it resorts to manipulative ways of wrapping me around its little finger, while, at the same time, craves a meaningful connection… a lot like my mother.
So I pour another cup of coffee. Try again. Because, now, I can’t rely on my master plan and I have a deadline to meet.
I started to write about the road runners on the Burke Gilman Trail, the cyclists who yell like army staff sergeants, “On your left!” as if I don’t know that’s the side they are going to take me on, seeing as how I’m nearly riding on the grass already, in fear for my life. The ones with all the expensive gear and middle-age behinds that should, by the grace of God and REI, never, ever be seen in bike shorts. The ones who ride like the wind instead of like a woman (me) peddling along on at a pace that lets her peer into the windows of all the lovely lake view homes and imagine herself having a cocktail in a living room nice as that.

But then, as I said, the new idea shoved its way in: DRUG RING BUSTED!

Remember the headline in the Seattle Times a few months back, the story about the Honduran drug ring busted in
Belltown?

First, it made me remember my last editor at the Times, now retired, Lee Moriwaki, who used to like my stories, compliment my stories, once in awhile even publish them, a gesture that always made my day.

“Why not write more about the street violence in Belltown?” Mr. Moriwaki asked me once.

Like I know about that? I was too embarrassed to tell him I know more about the boutiques on First and the happy hours on Second. But brawls and gunfights?

No clue.

Like most, I rely on his paper and King 5 News to make me fearful. Though on any given Saturday when the bars empty out, I do hear the sidewalk free-for-alls that don’t subside until around 3 a.m., during which time I usually pick up my novel and read a few chapters. No part of me, not one single cell, willing to go down there to chat up the bullies and dealers just to get a better story for Mr. Moriwaki who’d pay me, what? A couple of hundred bucks, tops.

Second, it made me think of one of the Honduran crack dealers arrested in the sweep of my neighborhood. The one I met. In fact, I shook his hand. And soon as I saw the back of his body in handcuffs in the newspaper photo, I recognized him as the man, a boy really, who stood outside the Belltown Salsa Dance Studio on Fourth watching me rehearse, peering into the studio as if his life depended on it.

I believe it did.

Let me establish why I met this man before you run off thinking I wanted to contribute to one of our nation’s few growing industries. The dance studio amplifies Latin music onto the sidewalk to attract students. And because these drug dealers, these dirt-poor men often rounded up in their villages, persuaded to deal as if it will make them rich, who won’t inform on their bosses because they fear for the safety of their families, well, they aren’t all that at home on
the streets of Belltown. Neither am I, really. And I’ve been here ten years.

So, I conclude it was the music that brought the boy home, filled him in a way I could see in his eyes. And I, the naive Belltown writer/dancer thought he’d stopped to inquire about classes. So I opened the door, handed him a schedule, while he was transported, I believe, to a better time in his life. A time when there was music rather than a harsh, high rise world. Back to a time when he may have danced the Salsa to the same tune that streamed overhead.

Because music can do that, turn abjectness into prayer, iniquity into basic human need.

marylousanelli.com