First Entry

I realize that Nettie needs a blog, a place to tell her stories. At 93 (almost 94), mind sharp as a tack, she has stories to tell. I'll be visiting her in January and I'll bring my laptop along (her computer is a mess and seems to have deteriorated--the one I bought her has gone away somewhere--but I'll get it started and let her add to it later.

I have to learn how to do links, because Nettie has a website, too. This was a present I gave her for her 87th birthday, and when she got a call from my son Danny, all the way from Italy, saying "Grandma, you're famous! We're all looking at your website here in Italy!" she understood what a website is and was very happy indeed.

Since she was 3, in 1915, she's been the techie in the house. Her family was one of the first to have a telephone in their home, which must have given them some prestige in their immigrant neighborhood, but the baby, Nettie, was the only one who really knew how to use it. (Just as my baby brother, at the age of 3, maybe younger, was often woken up to fix the picture on our TV set--the first in the neighborhood--in the 1940's, while two adults and two teenagers sat helplessly by.

The thing about the blog is, you can write stories. The best autobiographies don't start at the beginning, they're just full of stories, without regard to a timeline, just whenever you happen to remember them. That's what I hope this will be.

Happy birthday, Mom. You've told me lots of your stories through the years and they're wonderful. Now we've got a way to put them up so everyone can see them!

I love you,

Yr dotter, Barbara