At exactly 12:04 am, my mom sent me a message on Facebook with a tiny little cupcake attached.
Backstory: I live in the deliriously wonderful Central Standard Time Zone, where puppies never grow up and trees are made out of marzipan. But I was born in the nitty gritty Eastern Standard Time Zone, in a dark, shadowy land called Detroit. I escaped several years ago with the help of a flying horse and a blind clairvoyant lawn-elf, but my entire family, entrapped by a generations-old Polish sauerkraut curse, remains.
So at 12:04 am – let me clarify, that’s EST – my mom hit the “send” button on a Facebook message.
And here in the magical, ribbon-draped CST, at 11:04 pm, a little red blip popped up in the corner of my Facebook page. “Someone has sent you a gift!”
The eFrosting on my eCupcake read: “well, it’s your birthday in Detroit!”
And nothing has given me much more delight today than the image of my mom, sitting at her computer, humming a Broadway show tune, ankles crossed, a dog or two asleep at her feet, my dad asleep in front of a sports game in the den upstairs, the minutes passing and passing and passing, the wind at the windows carrying a breeze from the gigantic westward lake that separates the promised city I live in and the hours it takes up from the barren whispers of the empty motor city. She has uploaded several pictures from the 1970s of herself and her friends from high school and commented on every status that has been updated. She has refreshed the home page a dozen times.
“Joan,” she says to herself, “there is nothing for you to do now … but wait that shit out.”
