Mom's Day On Its Way

Just talked with Grandma Barb. We started talking about asparagus. We went on to cover how the culture we know and have lived has changed with respect to acquiring food from the garden or the grocery store. We discussed how she learned to type and then learned three different line-o-type systems during her years at the Bureau County Republican. Later she learned bookkeeping and financial and business management to make things run at the regional community mental health center. Her life is one of constant adaptation.

I make fun of her foibles all the time. She is an innocent around me and so often makes herself vulnerable to my making fun of her and making her look silly. Just recently I turned around in Bethany’s kitchen to see her inspecting some dirty cloth I had noticed in the curb in front of Bethany’s apartment. She had picked it up and brought it inside and was holding it close to her face so that she could see it, pulling it apart and asking what it was and did anybody know to whom it belonged? No particular comedic skill is required, right?

So my children, nieces and nephews might not expect me to admit that these Sunday morning conversations are intellectually stimulating. No kidding. One needs merely to understand the pace of change in Mom’s life and its technological breadth to appreciate her intellect. She lived it. She contributed. True, she might not be all that flexible on political issues, but when it comes to practical knowledge, the stuff of life, she excels.

Take for example the typewriter. The typewriter was the foundational human-intelligence to machine-intelligence interface. Sorry, kids, thumbing your cell phones compares in no way. She learned typing when typing required strength. She learned on manual typewriters. She truly typed at speeds greater than 60 words per minute. She did so accurately. If I had to adjust my word speed by accuracy, I would be lucky to reach a third of her speed. Nor did she do this mechanically. She read while she typed. She processed the information. Unfortunately she worked at a conservative newspaper for a little too long. This may have influenced her politics. But she continued to learn new things such as bookkeeping, accounting and healthcare financial management to advance her earning power and our security. Her life has been constant, self-imposed on-the-job training, intelligence where it counts.

She laments she was not ‘college material’ when she was in high school. Only dweebs are college material when they are in high school, of course. But she thought she was too interested in boys. Thank God she was. She had my brothers, my sister and me all before she was thirty. At about the same time she added to her home management tasks by jumping feet first into the job sector. She made it look easy all the while repeating to herself “Who said it was going to be easy?” She survived with grace. She continues to survive through grace caring for her friends, flowers and the occasional male dependent.

We talked today about those years that she learned first the typewriter, then they interfaced the electric typewriter to noisy clattering machines that converted type to printing keys that were loaded into printing presses and printed newspapers. She drove those, too. She pioneered the dawning of the age of combining human and machine intelligence. She lived it of necessity. She sat for hours translating a century’s old alphabet into digital bits and bytes, the stuff that now seems to mark the divide between our world and hers. She hastened the transition of the mechanical to digital. That may be the biggest fundamental leap any of else will ever perceive. The rest is merely a matter of adding speed and memory and reducing the distances that information travels in the increasingly rapid comingling of human and machine-based intelligence. Now we can send wireless signals to tiny devices attached to our hearts that trigger electrical impulses that cause our hearts to start beating, again. But the old QWERTY keyboard that originally produced one character and one page at a time remains the fundamental tool for programming those little technological wonders.

She swears she will have nothing to do with computers naïve to her pioneering role. The internet is not just difficult. It is evil. Sorry, Mom, if it is, you have no one but yourself to blame. Hence, on Mothers’ Day 2007, I can reveal to the next generation character and intelligence at its highest as a matter of their genetic coding while at the same time reminding my Mom that she is guilty, the core attribute of motherhood.

We love you, Mom, today and every day.

Joel