Roger Porter

June 25, 2011

There is a night from my boyhood that reverberates so frequently in my mind that it becomes hard for even me to believe it happened over a quarter century ago. It was a warm night much like tonight and my mother was out in the living room banging away on the typewriter. This was back in the day when my whole family shared one medium-sized bedroom. There was very little personal space but there was a whole lot of love.

At any rate my brother and sister tossed and turned until eventually they fell asleep but on this night I couldn’t, or rather, I refused. I had to be about 3-years-old and I didn’t know much but I could hear my mommy struggling to put her thoughts together. That’s one thing I miss about that old typewriter that we used for way too long; it made the writing process audible.

I could hear way too much space in between the punching of the keys and my mommy had been at it for far longer than was normally the case. So I rolled out of the bed in my old Transformer pajamas with the broken zipper and I went to her. I hugged her as she sat in her reading glasses with a scarf upon her head and a furrowed brow on her face. She looked at me, smiled, and without speaking picked me up and placed me in her lap. She balanced me there as she filled one page up with thought, took it out, and inserted another. I went to sleep right there in between my mommy and her typewriter listening to the divine rhythm of the written word.