My mom is constantly annoying me by not knowing how to search for things on Google. She'll be wondering about something and I'll say, "Mom, just Google it" and she'll say, "I don't know how to do that" and for the gazillionth time I'll explain. We always end up with her asking me "what's a browser" at which point I conclude that if she doesn't know what her browser is, then I can't help her.
When she was here over the weekend we exchanged Christmas gifts. (We didn't get home for Christmas.) For the past few years, I've been asking for things that I know she has stored somewhere in her house and isn't using -- things that I remember that have meaning to me or that I have a use for. For this past Christmas, I asked for a little serving dish for nuts (that I can use for bookclub). I have fond memories of it, because she always used it for cashews when she hosted their couples' bridge club. (I liked the couples' bridge club best of all their friend groups because it included our veterinarian who was an outstanding storyteller and always had lots of animal stories. He was also the veterinarian for the zoo, so his stories weren't limited to cats, dogs, cows, and horses.) When I was little, I liked that the nut dish had a matching scoop and a place for the scoop to hang.
On Sunday, I was happy to unwrap the nut dish, but her story behind the nut dish was much better than the nut dish itself.
Her own nut dish had taken a fall from a top cupboard and cracked eons ago. So when I asked for it for my Christmas present, she went on EBAY and found one just like it and ordered it. I cannot get over how cool that is -- that she had the idea to look for it on ebay; that she figured out how to search for things on ebay; that she found the exact same nut dish; that she trusted it with her payment; that the seller of a silly old nut dish found a buyer looking for the same silly nut dish. The ebay one is the same vintage as hers, with an identical paper label on the bottom. (Yes, she still had the old broken one because she never throws anything away.)
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3 comments:
I love that story. Those stories.
Mom does use the internet to play bridge games and occasionally use email. She'd love ebay if she could get used to it.
If I have to explain how to google one more time my head will explode.
My parents are all over the net. Watching things, searching things. The one thing they are not comfortable with is buying stuff over the net.
Mom would NEVER buy anything on the interwebs. Do you shred everything before it hits the trash? She's convinced that cyber-thieves will get to her.
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