May Days

The boy is upstairs playing guitar and I am downstairs playing mah jong. The mah jong is slow-going because I am a beginner and I am still getting a grasp on the pungs, chows, and kongs. I comprehend the tiles quite well, thanks to my mother's tutorials some 20-odd years ago in the enjoyment of Mah Jong computer games. (It is a perpetual delight of mine, that my now-80+ year old mother can navigate her computer better than some 20 year olds.)

Husband Paul is due home from Kenya in 2 days. Yay. This trip, 3 weeks in duration, has shown an amazing improvement in world communication from what he & I experienced in our Year in Egypt in 1984. Then, he might be delayed out in the desert for several days and I, in Cairo, would be without so much as a phone call telling me thus. I frequently wondered if I was a newlywed widow.

Fastforward only a few years later to "the internet" and "cell phones", (and my mother's tutorials on Mah Jong), the likes of which are now looked upon as so archaic as what I might envision ringing the operator a la Sheriff Andy Taylor, "Sarah, get me Aunt Bee."

This month, I have simply called Paul w/ a quick 15-digit phone number, and his cell phone out in the middle of rural Kenya picks up my call from out in the middle of rural Kansas.

And now: back to the mah jong conundrum.