MY SCANNED HEART

After calling a Canon customer
service technician at a place known
only as 1-866-261-9362
and threatening to hurl myself
or my new scanner (or both) out of
the window unless the “Optical Character
Recognition” software was explained to me
in my native language, I was finally
able to scan my mother’s poems
but what I didn’t count on, the machine
not being a phone, neither landline
nor mobile, was the quality of the sound, was
hearing my mother’s voice as I re-read
her poems, and so I proceeded to weep
all over my new scanner, tears making way
for non-digitalized full-on sobs, the way a rivulet
develops into a raging torrent, when
I heard someone cry out, “Ma! Mom!” in
a voice that sounded an awful lot
like mine, and everything ended up
drenched, the memories,
the machine, me.

The scanner worked.
Only my hard drive crashed.

December 10, 2013

 

 



All written material © Bill Schechter, 2016
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