mama's on the internet, pilgrim

Hi!! Yuhri and Yan,
Sorry I did not contacting you so long,
How are you ?
I am going to go to Leavenworth WA 4/27-29.
will be back on fryday night.
I hope I can walk around a lot !!!! and finish tax.
Talk to you after I come back.
Please take care both of you !!
bye mamma!

It's the first email I've ever received from my mother. There is certainly no intimation that it will be the last. There is a kind of -- if not apocolyptic, certainly mythic -- quality to the event, a feeling of historical portent that has hitherto been absent from any other email I have ever received.

Except, okay, for the first penis enlarger email I ever got. I have to admit that one gave me a little thrill. ("Little." Heh.)

It cannot have been easy for my mother to write the email she sent, no matter how flippant its text may seem to the idle eye; I, who have personally witnessed the hunt-and-peck mechanism of my mother's typing, can attest that those 8 little lines above likely constituted several hours of labor on her part. I am not a patient person, and the strain of watching her attempt to type even a small word like 'the' will drive me out of the room and out of earshot.

For the rest of us, email is a convenience. For her, the keyboard is an exercise in the type of torture she was never able to legally inflict on her children during the 70s and 80s.

It's a huge step for her to step across the dividing line into our territory, and I applaud her for it. Our own forays across that same border in the other direction have never failed to give her amusement. She still fondly recalls the postcard my sister sent her from somewhere, on which Sako had attempted to write 'Mama' in Japanese. Unfortunately, through some vagarity of memory or lack of practice, Sako had ended up rotating the characters and wrote 'Mumu' instead. It took years for Mom to stop sharing that story with Japanese-speaking friends and acquaintances.

Anyway. Mom's now driving on the Internet.

Look out, world.

I was watching TV post-work one day, when the Guy came tromping back into the apartment bearing hats. Great big black ones, all stacked together like ice cream cones.

He was more interesting than the television, so I muted it to watch him instead. "Is there dinner?" he asked, placing his hats carefully on the table.

He disappeared into the kitchen to get food. Sensing a lack of ongoing interest, I went back to watching TV.

It took him a while to finish eating, sitting in front of his computer -- "recreational computing," which is a bizarre concept for a software engineer who spends all day in front of the computer. Considering all he does in his free time is look at stuff about computers on his computers, it's rather like a bulimic who goes to Sears to look at larger refrigerators and toilets.

I watched TV.

After dinner, he retrieved his big hats, claimed a roll of tin foil from the kitchen, unearthed a pair of nail clippers, and began cutting out little aluminum squares.

I watched TV.

He'd purchased some sort of spray glue, somewhere, and used it to glue his little silver squares onto his black felt hats, one by one. "How does it look?" he demanded, holding one up for inspection.

"Just fine," I said.

"I have a $40 rubber chicken in the car," he announced.

There's a strangeness to watching a 33 year old man doing a kindergarten arts and crafts project on your living room floor.

"What are you doing?" I asked at last.

"Making pilgrims."

"Why?"

"Work," he said, briefly.

Of course, work. Why else would a software engineer be making little pilgrim hats out of tin foil? "I'm just making them," he added, "I won't have to wear them."

"Ah." Well, of course that makes sense.

"This is going to be a peace pipe," he confided, waving something in a plastic bag at me.

"That's nice," I said, and went back to watching TV, where grown-up people were doing strange and dubiously legal things with a microphone.