A Mommy Thing

When I told my tiny elderly mother that I'm doing the blog again, she said she wanted to see it. It's a mommy thing.

So I did what anyone would do. I took out my phone, loaded it up and tried to expand the font to something her macularly-degenerated eyes could read. That didn't work well enough, so I closed it all up and promised to print the posts when I got home. (Which I did.)

That's not the story.

This is the story:

She was genuinely afraid that the posts were deleted because I turned off my phone.

Go ahead. Patronizing chuckles are appropriate here. I'll take you down in a second when you're finished.

Done? Good. Moving on.

Here is the point, and your comeuppance. See, it's all about perspective.

My mother knows nothing about the Internet (obviously). This doesn't make her foolish or stupid, it was a conscious choice on her part. When I first offered her a laptop fifteen or twenty years ago, she said "At my age, I have a limited amount of time and attention. I prefer not to learn how to use a computer."

Instead, she knows the latest theories and developments in physics, astrophysics and engineering, with a lesser emphasis on anthropology and archaeology. She is reasonably up to date on modern art and adores street art. For a while she was even up on contemporary music, but that stopped last year when she moved to assisted living.

The point is that she is an extremely intelligent person who chooses not to bother with the Internet. For someone who grew up during the Depression when radio was high tech, the fact that she's a whiz at Netflix is pretty impressive even without all that science-y stuff. Oh yeah, and she's still a kick-ass artist despite her bad eyes.

That's what I mean about perspective. The next time you think someone is stupid because they don't know something you think they should know, remember that they probably know tons about something you know nothing about and are very good at something you can't do.

The corollary is that right now when your Auntie is feeling stupid, I'm trying to think of what it is that I actually know quite a lot about. There has to be something.