Sometimes it's hard to resist.

I don't purposefully choose to be confusing, but I do like to play around. Many of Mom's questions about how our letters reached her, or hers reached us, demonstrated a rather basic lack of understanding of how this tool worked. To make matters even more complicated, I used a hotmail account throughout the summer (we were in North America) and how and why that was different from Mom's POP account was far from clear.

When visiting by her I couldn't resist writing the following letter:

To: fayehurvitz@home.com
From: "Jay Hurvitz" <jay_summer@hotmail.com>
Subject: even from here
Date: Sun, 30 Jul 2000 19:47:02 IDT
Dear Mom,
Even though we're in the same room at the moment I'm able to send you e-mail
and tell you that we arrived safely and that we're having a wonderful time
and that soon the kids will enjoy meeting you as well.
Love,
Jay

Actually, this was a technologically updated version of a postcard I sent her when I left for (I think) my first trip to Israel almost thirty years ago. At that time I wrote out a postcard while sitting next to her in the airport waiting for my flight, and slipped it to my brother who put it in the mail. I had hardly landed when the next day's mail brought her the postcard that started something like: "Dear Mom, Here I am sitting next to you at the airport...". But it wasn't only an update, because something interesting really was happening here; something quite a bit more complex than sneaking a postcard into the mail while at the airport. From the same computer we were actually sending mail to each other - mail that went through the "proper channels" that e-mail goes through in order to be sent and delivered. Yes, I suppose that it was inevitable that this would confuse Mom, but it also was fascinating to her, and I suppose that that's really the point.

Go to: My Connected Mom