omg lol rentz

When we bought our hulking Windows 3.1 Gateway computer in 1992, my mom was first to take lessons on how to use it. Where my dad shies away from the ever-changing world of technology, my mom jumps in head-first.

Because of that, I owe my mom a great deal for what I know now about computers. After she took CompUSA's basic training course, she taught me how to master the C-drive. When she bought Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, she encouraged me to learn and soon I was the fastest typing 8-year-old I knew. I sat alongside her as she explained that on this new thing called the Internet, I could press on the blue underlined words to go to (gasp!) a new page. Afterward, she and I signed up to receive daily update emails as the men and dogs of the Iditarod mushed their way across Alaska that March. As a privileged member of the Internet community, I brought the emails into my fourth grade class for our teacher to read aloud.


So that my mom would send me a text message two weeks ago should not have surprised me, but it did. Computers my mom had mastered, but cell phones are another story. While my parents have had a cell phone for over ten years, it was not until they accidentally hit a combination of buttons last month that they knew there was a speaker phone function. I've spent several minutes explaining how to change the headset volume to my mom. We've spent more time together changing her ring tone, and even more minutes poring over the alarm clock function. How, without my help, did my mom send her first text message:

"Did u know eric clapton lives in columbus bye"

Having never received a text message from my parents before, I wondered. Did my parents really mean to send this? Maybe it's one of those text spams? Had Mom and Dad always been such Clapton-o-philes, and why did they think this fact was so important that it needed to be texted to me immediately?

I shook my head with the airs of T9 superiority and threw my phone back into my bag. And while I meant to ask them about the text message, I completely forgot their text the next time we spoke. Then, today they gave me reason to remember with another one. This time, they sent a different kind of message:

"hang in there"


There still wasn't capitalization or punctuation marks, but it really didn't matter. It meant the world to me, and I texted back: "thank u--love u guys."