My Dad and the Internet

My Parents are not on-line. They were for a while. But they were using a Mac they purchased when My Little Brother was in Kindergarten. He’ll be a senior in college this fall. Fortunately for him on many levels, our parents decided when he graduated from high school that he needed a new computer.

In addition to an antiquated computer, they were on a 56K. Not sure why when they have cable television. So, Dad would get really pissed off because the pages would take forever to load. And then Mom would say, “Well, I don’t know why it’s so slow. Let’s call Amelia!” because she’s always looking for an excuse to call me.

Then My Little Brother moved out to attend college, taking his new computer with him. That’s when they disconnected their ISP.

My Little Brother is on-line, and I send him pics of my Bulging Baby Belly and he thinks it’s cool that we can communicate for free. Being Jews, that’s important, yo.

The other day, I had an Internet Lessons from my Dad.

My Dad was telling me about a girl that my Little Brother went to elementary, middle, and part of high school with. She was hiking in the Andes and she and her brother fell into a crevasse and were killed. They were both experienced hikers; they had hiked to the top of McKinley. She was majoring in something to do with the outdoors or environmental issues from my alma matter.

“Not sure if you saw it. It made national news,” Dad said. Zel and I don’t watch much television; we get our news from the web. And, no abc.com and cnn.com aren’t on the list of news sources (and just for the record, neither is fox.com).

“What a horrible thing. I didn’t read about it. Maybe I’ll go to your local newspaper’s web site and check it out,” I said.

“Well, it’s on the Internet. You can go look up Peru and it’ll come up,” he said. “Don’t you guys get a lot of your news on the Web? Well, you go look up Peru and you can read all about it.”

Just what an expecting mom wants to read about: someone’s children who were hiking in the Andes and died.

My Dad continued: “That’s what this guy at work did. He got on the Internet and then he said to me, ‘Well, what do I look up?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know. Try Peru.’ And he typed in Peru and we read all about it,” said my Dad.

Bless his heart. He truly has no concept of how to use the Web. Just for kicks, and because I’m a good kid, I Googled Peru. There were 446,000,000 hits, and the first one was from cia.gov.

And, then I remember that I have the luxury of talking to My Dad. And I remember that I have no idea what she feels. And I remind myself to be patient with him.