Thursday, June 07, 2007

On Finding Humans

Tucking Madison into bed the other night, trying to explain why the Christmas lists she and Ava created on their eMac computer (more than six months early) can’t be transferred to our soon-to-be-discarded Dell PC and printed out. Grasping for examples that might be accessible to a 6-year-old, I come up with the following:

“The two computers don’t speak the same language, they use different programs. So the page that we made on your Apple can’t be read by the Windows computer.”

Blank stare, I’m failing as a parent. I compose myself for another attempt:

“Um, it’s like this... We speak English, and we can understand each other when we talk. But if we went to another country, like Spain, the people there speak Spanish, and they wouldn’t be able to understand the things we were saying, because they use a different language. So we could talk to each other, but the people in Spain wouldn’t understand what we were saying.”

Madison nods. She’s getting it.

“Right,” she says. “Unless we found some humans.”

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