My mom's birthday was September 29. In the Land of Good Intentions section of my pee brain, I drove over in a clean car, wielding presents of frankincense and mir (wait, that's a different story... sorry).

In addition to my lovely fantasy of gifts and cleanliness, I offered her a fish plate from Jerry's Famous Deli (her favorite), followed by a black and white cookie, topped off with a steaming cup of Yuban with non-fat milk. In the Frenzied Land of Two Kids-I'm Working-I'm a Crappy Daughter reality I live in, I just phoned her.

While in some ways I feel guilty that I wasn't there on the actual day, overall I don't feel too bad. My mom is not passive aggressive. If she wanted me to throw a fiesta with Trapper John MD look-a-like strippers and Doritos, she'd have said so. Instead, good ole Grandma Nancy told me to come on a day that we could really be in the moment and enjoy it.

And so yesterday, after dropping Stink at school, Pip and I picked up my mom and went out for an Italian lunch at Maggianos. (I love that place. For a chain restaurant, it's such a cozy, warm atmosphere. Frank Sinatra would have been so happy there, booking his next Vegas gig and cheating on his wife. Ah, those were the days.) 

Despite being some what relaxed, I can't say I was 100% in the present. I was thinking about work and politics and am I really making a difference on the planet or should I go away from the internet world and live my own little quiet life?

But the flipside for an artist like myself is that if I never wrote my brain would spin more dramatically than it already does. What's the balance? I mean, are we living our lives so much in cyberspace that we forget to be good neighbors, friends and family members? And yet, to ignore the big bad internet dinosaur would be a shame. After all, there's power in monsters - we simply have to learn to tame the beast. Translation: Set boundaries.

I asked my mom, now 78, how she felt about technology. She had the wisdom to say that in her day people were seperated by the cities they lived and were isolated. God forbid you got pregnant at 16 or didn't have the same thoughts as everyone else in your town - you were considered totally wacky. And then we all got more advanced and started to connect through the computer and could find others who felt and lived like we did - even, God forbid, made mistakes! But now, we're back to being isolated in our tiny little bubbles once again. She hopes that people will swing back to the middle again.

It's amazing how forgetting your mother's present, but listening to her talk about living in the present, can turn out to be the best gift there is.


 

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