The Circuit of Youth?

The holiday season is one filled with contradictions. It is a season of good cheer that stands out more because it is mixed with the killer instinct (Mall shopping for instance. Or parking lots.) A season of cursing the weather while hoping it snows that one day. A season of sharing love with your family … when you are not trying to throttle them. A season in which we embrace the past while we make room for the future.

This last one stands out in my mind a bit at the moment. As I might have mentioned in a few posts here, my mother is a bit … old school. She and technology agree to co-exist, as long as the technology recognizes its proper place. Which is generally in another room.

I have been trying to get her to use things technical more because SOMETIMES it does actually make life easier. And have even had a bit of success.

Maybe too much.

I might have created a monster.

""For instance, there was a time not to long ago that mom was hesitant to use a credit card anywhere except in person (if at all).  Yet in the last couple of years she has become quite fond of catalog shopping, which basically meant the credit card has got to be used from afar. At first it was just over the phone. But somewhere along the line she had to do it online.

And that first sweet taste of ease (when it WAS in fact easy) hooked her. She is now quite taken with online shopping, as is evident by the several bags of goodies I lugged into my sister’s house for our recent holiday meal.

The other day there was a little incident that has me concerned though. It has been hard to get my mother to recognize that a cell phone actually works better if you … well turn it on when you are out and about. Having a pretty purple phone that takes pictures has helped get that message across. However, I was a bit surprised when the other day, as I was sitting in the "thinking" room, with my own phone on steroids being a more than adequate substitute for a magazine or book, my phone rings. After getting over the shock of a phone actually being used as a phone, I noticed that the person who was calling was … my mother.

The last time I checked, she was downstairs with my dad. Apparently she had moved to the computer, and after a bout of checking on her most recent wave of online purchases, she was having difficulty … printing an email! So she did what any 11-year-old child of this generation will do to ask a question of someone two rooms over. She called me.

Who knew that embracing technology also caused age regression!