Over The Transom

 I used to find it odd that my wife would send me emails from ten feet away. Our desks in the office at our house are adjacent, and from time to time as I am perusing messages from other far-flung colleagues and associates I will open up a electronic note that came with blinding speed from just over my shoulder. Look at this! Check this out! Can you believe? These exclamations were not uttered, but were instead headers that enticed me still further. 

For a while, I would turn around in my chair and stare at my wife. Always a pleasant view, but also an effective means to get her attention. Eventually. When she did look up from her keyboard and screen frenzy, she would meet my gaze with a surprised, "What?"

"You couldn't just tell me this, right?"

"What?"

"This email. The one you labeled 'Wow.'"

"When did I send that?"

"Just now."

"Oh, I know that one. I was just reading that and thought of you."

And so I came to understand that this is a compliment. In a heads-down, stare at Al Gore's Internet world, the parceling of information is asocial interaction. My son sends me messages on Twitter all the time. It is not, as I might have feared, a substitute for conversation. It is instead shorthand for moving chunks of stuff to talk about. It is an entree to interaction. "Did you get that thing I sent you," is a conversational gambit. As we pile on through our day, there are mountains of intrigue and amusement, heaps of news and tons of cat videos that simply cannot be ignored. 

I get that now. I try to return the favor, but often I get the presentation wrong. Instead of forwarding a link, I sometimes get stuck playing it on my screen, interrupting my wife's work flow, forcing her to stare across the room at what I was just watching. Literally. 

"You couldn't just send that to me, right?"

Touche, my dear. I still have so much to learn about Al Gore's Internet.