I grew up in a house of books. My mother puttered around, dusting and reorganizing, but really just making excuses to touch them. I often found my father asleep, using one of them as a pillow. I understood. I chose them over toys. Their dusty pages were my many-leveled dollhouse.

My mom says I would clutch the things before I even knew what their pages said. When I did learn to read, their words orbited always in my head. At night, I swear I could hear them chattering. Sometimes I think I became a writer because the sound grew so loud that it was the only way to empty it. Books were everything to me--the movement and the stillness of language, the pause and the stream.

And then came technology, slow at first and then suddenly. Things started changing, but we embraced the new times. Hell, we ate them up. The books were quieter, but at night I could still hear them. Even my father, who found things like can openers to be incredibly daunting, started using a computer. He couldn’t type very well, so he got a machine that he would talk into and an email would miraculously appear.

The first one I received from him, along with a message from my mother, Trish, went something like this:

“This is pop-up on my new voice machine instead of cane by hand. I can just spank into machine. Trash is proud.  Stay attuned. Love fuel, pop-up.” 

And then my mother’s:

“Hi sweetie, this is an email message from your pop-up (otherwise known as papa) from his new voice mail program. Trash is none other than yours truly and she is, indeed, very proud. He and we will get better. Love you.” Her message was followed, as it always was, by the  inimitable emoticon she had thought up all by herself that resembled a cross between a pig snout and a set of exceedingly large breasts:

(OO)

I’m thinking she was aiming more for the cute pig-face, but one can never be sure in this day and age, now can one?

My father did, in fact, learn how to use “the interweb.” He even blogs now, and faithfully blesses my posts with the irreverent, sometimes downright scandalous, one-liners for which he’s famous in our family. These quips are the comic equivalent of overproof alcohol, sweeping in and knocking everyone off their feet. What can I say, my "pop-up" is the W.C. Fields of the blogosphere.

My mother, for her part, started sounding forth from the land of Twitter, dubbing herself a New Media Maven, emailing me at all times of night with updates on the technological happenings of the social mediaverse--my own personal Mashable in mom form. She likes to call at strange times to share juicy Internet tidbits. One night I made the long journey across our tiny apartment to alert my husband of her breaking news: “Stop everything, there’s a clairvoyant octopus that has correctly predicted the World Cup scores.” I slept better that night for knowing.

Despite our apartments filled with books, my family doesn’t view all this computer business as the end of words. On the contrary, we see our computers as sites of written journeys yet to be had. Since I could reach the dusty keys of my parents’ PC, I believed the machine held the blueprint to my undiscovered opus. To me, it was the place where I might one day read beautiful words and find that they were mine.