A love story about a unique family tradition

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“You, more than I, will have to do the most changing,” she said abruptly.

“What? Why?”

She grew quiet again, but not as long as before, until she answered. “Because I’m not going to live forever. I’m in my late thirties now, Conrad. Even now, just a few weeks after giving birth to Amity, I’m starting to feel my insides changing. I fear that she will be our only child, that I’ll start going through menopause soon. When that happens, I won’t be able to have any more children and…” My mother heaved a great sigh. “I’m going to be too old, son. Hell, I’m ALREADY too old. I’m… the world I saw is not the world I know anymore. I see glimpses of it in the movies we see on TV, in the new books I read. I guess I’ve always sort of known that it was changing, but it didn’t really hit me how much until I saw it with my own two eyes. Everything’s being computerized now. I barely even know what a computer IS.” She let out a small chuckle. “You know what a computer was when our father was a kid?”

“No, what?”

“A Chinese man, sitting in the back of a room with an abacus and a notepad.” She let out another giggle but managed to squelch it into a snort. “Oh, don’t look at me like that! I WASN’T being racist. Back when he was a child, that’s literally what they called a computer- someone who COMPUTED arithmetic. Accounting, inventories and what-have-you. Not always a Chinaman, mind you, but usually so. Hmm. Maybe that WAS a bit racist. As may be, it was a hallmark of his time, when he was younger. When I was a child, a computer was a fictitious device in sci-fi novels and Batman episodes. The smallest computers we had when I was a kid were as big as a sofa and only a few dozen people in the country knew how they worked and not many more than that actually USED them. But now? Now it’s this little box of plastic and metal that makes a typewriter look like an abacus. The technology I grew up with and understand is provincial by comparison. I… WE have been so secluded from the world for so long that we can’t possibly catch up to it. Well, I can’t, anyway. You’re young enough that you might be able to.”

“I know what a computer is, Mother,” I said drily.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Perhaps. But I don’t think you know yet what they can do. You’ve read a lot of science fiction here over the years. The same stuff I read. Asimov, Heinlein, Bova, Robinson, Gibson… those gentlemen had glimpses into the future and I think we’re about to see a lot of their dreams become reality. Maybe not space ships and robots and Star Wars, but certainly a large world made smaller by computers. You’re a smart man, son. If you want to do our daughter any favors in the coming years, you’ll learn as much about them as you can. BEFORE I die.”

That alarmed me. “What? Mother! Don’t say things like that!”

She put a calming hand on my chest and locked eyes with me. “Conrad… son… listen to me carefully: SOME day I WILL die. It’s a fact of life. And, God help me, it’ll happen sooner rather than later. There is every good likelihood that you will be left holding the bag where Amity is concerned. We will ALWAYS have money with which we can live comfortably. That will never go away and you know it. But if you’re going to raise our daughter responsibly-”

“I’m not,” I interjected and leaned up a bit in alarm. “Not alone. I couldn’t, not without you.”

“You can and you will,” she said sternly. “In due course I will get too old to keep up. By the time she’s your age now, I’ll be in my fifties. I’ll be an old fossil by then, son. And I’m going to have to rely on you to chase after her, to make sure she’s okay, to keep her safe. You’re her father and you’re going to keep that busy, dangerous world at bay when she’s ready to jump into it head first. And she will. I know she will, because I’m her mother and even though she’s a harmless, witless bundle of cute and dirty diapers right now, she’s going to be a handful when she’s older.”

“Not if I can help it,” I rejoined sourly.

“Son, you CAN’T help it. Or, rather, you’re GOING to help it. You’re going to help her, when I can’t.”

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