It’s Sunday, and as I’m wont to do on many a Sunday, I spent the day with Mama. In addition to swallowing not one but two comments on my excessive food intake, I also set up her new laptop, which involved a  surprising amount of elbow grease. In this instance, elbow grease includes but is not limited to a trip to Radio Shack to purchase both 7- AND 50-foot Ethernet cords, the latter of which will simulate wireless in her apartment and hopefully not kill her when she shuffles to the bathroom in a 3 am stupor. I showed her some basic Windows functions, including shutting your computer down (which is NOT the same as closing its lid, I was careful to note), turning up the brightness of the screen, turning down the sound of the people in the computer and plugging earphones into the side so you can watch DVDs in silence so your neighbors don’t know you’re home. Good daughter.

Then I turned it up a notch by showing her Google maps. I thought the traffic function would blow her mind, and it did. The red and green and black streaks of commuter pain were quite impressive, even though I knew she’d never be able to find the url again. Take it up a notch? Don’t mind if I do. For a full hour and a half, dear friends, Google street view changed her world. We toured the road in England where I learned to ride a bike, the Pennsylvania street she lived on as a child, a neighboring intersection that housed her father’s 1950’s corner store, the Wimbledon condo she spent five years in before their retirement. She had tears in her eyes as she turned to me. “I wish your dad was here to see this.” Then she pulled out her address book and, as only a relative of mine would, asked to Google map a friend of a friend to see if Sue’s house was all that after all.