It's time you found out about my mother...
Last night, I found a box on my porch from Hawaii. My mom had told me on the phone, a few days earlier, to expect a birthday care package from her, and this was it. Her gifts tend to follow a pattern that anyone on my Christmas list should recognize: Every time she sees something that you might like, or offers to mail you something, she puts it in a box. Then, somewhere around your birthday, she mails it. Mom always gets my birthday (the 6th) confused with Elvis' (the 8th,) so she lets the date slide a little to play it safe, and the box usually shows up in mid-January.
It's always hard to tell, with my mother, whether she's done something really brilliant, or if she's finally lost it. She is at her best when she can be right on the verge of both, and I hope that's a quality I've inherited from her.
Anyway, the box contained:
- One weird lamp
- One woven basket full of catnip mice
- One ceramic vase
- One photocopy of a thank-you note I wrote to my grandmother several years ago
- This beautiful piece of stamped and fired clay, which I gawked at in admiration for several minutes, before I even remembered her promising to mail me "some little plate I did in pottery class." She's one of those people who can fall headfirst into pretty much anything, and produce something beautiful. Ask me sometime about the birthday cakes she made when my brother and I were kids.
- and fifteen printed pages of this:
...for the non-technical folks out there, (of which my mother is, without question, a shining example,) this is what you get when non-text data is interpreted as text. In this case, it's the output of an inappropriate printer driver. Gibberish, though. She'd written on one flap: "Charlie - here are some late happy-birthday letters. Looks like Klingon to me. Have fun decoding. Love, Mom." I sat back, wondering what this could be about, and started flipping through the pages. I found an occasional snippet from Microsoft Word's online help, some misplaced page footers, and an occasional call to a piece of javascript, but mostly just gibberish. I couldn't help but laugh. I could just see her squinting at her much-despised, Vista-preloaded laptop, puzzling over whatever it had just done, and agreeing animatedly with her dog, Samson, that this was one of those days when she just wasn't supposed to use her computer. ("Right, Samson? No computer for us today!") The dog's tail would smack things off the coffee table in enthusiasm, which was still more cooperation than she'd ever got from Windows.
It's possible that she believes that her son, the computer wiz, can actually read this. (Sorry.) But it's also possible, probably more likely, she just knew that I, of all people, would get it. She fought the laptop, and the laptop won. She could prove she had tried. She was good with ceramics, and decorating, and talking to her dog. Computers were my thing. And it was already the eighteenth, and she was pretty sure my birthday was ten days ago, already. (Or was that Elvis, again?)
Thanks, Mom. I love you, too. :)
It's always hard to tell, with my mother, whether she's done something really brilliant, or if she's finally lost it. She is at her best when she can be right on the verge of both, and I hope that's a quality I've inherited from her.
Anyway, the box contained:
- One weird lamp
- One woven basket full of catnip mice
- One ceramic vase
- One photocopy of a thank-you note I wrote to my grandmother several years ago
- This beautiful piece of stamped and fired clay, which I gawked at in admiration for several minutes, before I even remembered her promising to mail me "some little plate I did in pottery class." She's one of those people who can fall headfirst into pretty much anything, and produce something beautiful. Ask me sometime about the birthday cakes she made when my brother and I were kids.
- and fifteen printed pages of this:
...for the non-technical folks out there, (of which my mother is, without question, a shining example,) this is what you get when non-text data is interpreted as text. In this case, it's the output of an inappropriate printer driver. Gibberish, though. She'd written on one flap: "Charlie - here are some late happy-birthday letters. Looks like Klingon to me. Have fun decoding. Love, Mom." I sat back, wondering what this could be about, and started flipping through the pages. I found an occasional snippet from Microsoft Word's online help, some misplaced page footers, and an occasional call to a piece of javascript, but mostly just gibberish. I couldn't help but laugh. I could just see her squinting at her much-despised, Vista-preloaded laptop, puzzling over whatever it had just done, and agreeing animatedly with her dog, Samson, that this was one of those days when she just wasn't supposed to use her computer. ("Right, Samson? No computer for us today!") The dog's tail would smack things off the coffee table in enthusiasm, which was still more cooperation than she'd ever got from Windows.
It's possible that she believes that her son, the computer wiz, can actually read this. (Sorry.) But it's also possible, probably more likely, she just knew that I, of all people, would get it. She fought the laptop, and the laptop won. She could prove she had tried. She was good with ceramics, and decorating, and talking to her dog. Computers were my thing. And it was already the eighteenth, and she was pretty sure my birthday was ten days ago, already. (Or was that Elvis, again?)
Thanks, Mom. I love you, too. :)