This weekend I visited my younger son Joe in Madrid, where he is spending the first semester of his junior year of college. Saw him, his host family, the apartment he's living in, and the lovely view from their ninth-floor terrace.
All on Skype.
When I was a kid, this is the way I thought telephones would be in the future. And now it's here.
Some of you have no doubt been Skyping for a while. A few weeks ago I ran into someone on Broadway who told me how she keeps in touch with her grandchildren on Skype. Hey, I thought, if she can do it, I can do it.
All it took was buying a little video camera to hook onto my laptop and then nagging my older son David into showing me how to set it up. We did a practice Skype, with him in the kitchen and me in the the living room.
Then, on Sunday, Joe and I hooked up at 9:30 in the morning here and 3:30 in the afternoon there. Saturday had been the annual "stay up all night" day in Madrid, so he had actually been up until about 6 in the morning and had just gotten up when we connected. It's a real event, he claims.
We're planning on really visiting Joe during the semester to see, as my husband says, how our investment is doing. Emails and telephones are great. But it's pretty cool to be able to see, in real time, the person you're talking to -- on another continent yet. And, for a mom, there's a measure of reassurance that comes from being able to look my son in the eye and see that all is well.