Up like jackstraws they were never thrown away.
Graduation presents to high school pupils were often ''card cases.'' On the hall table in every house the first thing you saw was a silver tray waiting to receive more calling cards on top of the stack already piled
Everybody had calling cards, even certain children and newborn babies themselves were properly announced by sending out their tiny engraved calling cards attached with a pink or blue bow to those of their parents. In the afternoons there was regular visiting up and down the little grid of In that vanished time in small-town Jackson, Miss., most of the ladies I was familiar with, the mothers of my friends in the neighborhood, were busiest when they were sociable. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make my changes. My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. By now I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other. Whether I am right to trust so far I don't know. The sound of what falls on the page begins the process of testing I have supposed, but never found out, that this is the case with all readers - to read as listeners - and with all writers, to write as listeners. The cadence, whatever it is that asks you to believe, the feeling that resides in the printed word, reaches me through the reader- voice. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. Sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. Ince being read to and after, when I began reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. A collection of her autobiographical essays, ''One Writer's Beginnings,'' from which this article is excerpted, will be published by Harvard University Press in February. The Making of a Writer: Listening in the Dark By EUDORA WELTYĮudora Welty is the author of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ''The Optimist's Daughter,'' and many other novels and short stories. The Making of a Writer: Listening in the Dark