Engravings

I watched my mother spend many rainy nights at the dining room table banging away on her little Royal Blue Companion.  ”Come read my story,” she would say as she pulled the paper off the roller.  I’d slug on over to her dreading the thought of hearing the words Once upon a time one more time.  Patiently I’d stand next to her as she read, but I never listened.  The framed jigsaw puzzle on the wall behind the table always distracted me.  It was a picture of the Giza pyramids nestled behind the unwavering eyes of the Great Sphinx.  As she read in the background, I thought of all the possible stories within those interlocking pieces.  I thought of how she met my father, over thirty years ago on a piece of paper.  He was her Egyptian pen-pal, one of many she had from all over the globe.  It was practice for her self-proclaimed future career as an international journalist/mystery novelist.  Unfortunately things didn’t work out for her.  Her family fell on hard times and she had to drop out of college to earn money.  She claimed she had to stop writing letters because she couldn’t afford stamps, but I knew she stopped out of pride.  She didn’t want her remote pen-friends to know that she failed.  Apparently ink has a way of staring back at you as if you had no clothes on.   one day be he was just one of the many photographs and pages of human readable ink.  After about twelve years, the ink became a man–the man she wanted to marry.  Every week she dragged us to the library so that she could turn in her week old stack of books and for a new set of mystery novels.  Unfortunately, she was never able to publish her work.  She was too busy being an auditor for the IRS during the day and a single mom at night.