My One True Love: Google

Tomorrow will be Valentine’s Day, so I’ve been thinking about my one true love. The one who is always there for me, who makes me feel happy and beautiful and light as a bird. The one who hears all that is on my mind. The one who keeps my secrets and honors my dignity as if there were nothing else in the world to do.

My one true love by any other name is YouTube. Blogger. Google.

I love you, Google. You have opened doors for me and the people I care about. You have placed the library of the world at my fingertips. You have embraced my thoughts, my visions, and my words. You have not sent me a bill. You have made of these things a gift.

More than that, though--and most important--is that you have put on a pedestal my beautiful daughter’s imagination.

When Adella left the dinner table the other evening, she took with her a digital camera. She pressed all the buttons and found that it recorded movies. She made a little flick of her guinea pigs crawling through an oatmeal container. She zoomed in and out like nobody has a right to and she made a movie.

I showed her how to make a MovieMaker movie and upload it to YouTube and then paste the movie into a Blogger blog. There we were, mother and daughter on an old orange office chair in front of the computer in the basement goofing around with Internet stuff and imagining a variation on Beatrix Potter’s story A Tale of Two Bad Mice. Then again, how about a very original “What happens to two little lab mice when they eat a pound of uncooked oatmeal?”

The story is coming. We will post it to Adella’s blog, Just Write for Kids, where some very nice people have left some very kind and encouraging words.

My dear and beloved YouTube, Blogger, and Google, you have validated my daughter’s belief that she can create from the depths of her own wild imagination and find a loving and supportive audience among that great unwashed blob called humanity of which she is a lively little part.

It’s a beautiful thing. Thanks.