Open Writing

My father and three year old son emerged, after quite some time and much thumping around, from the attic, proudly bearing a long lost train set.

"You're very good looking, Grandpa," my excited son said with admiration.

"Why, thank you," replied my father, bemused yet flattered by this sudden compliment which he thought concerned his appearance.

"Yes, my mummy's good looking too. She can find anything anywhere, even if it is hidden."
Fourteen years on and my son is no longer so easy to impress or so liberal with his compliments. He's in teenage transit, at the monosyllabic, grunting stage where he prefers to turn the music up in the car rather than make conversation with his mother. I have steadfastly been retrained not to talk on car journeys anymore, so I was pleasantly surprised when he jumped in, after a tricky mathematics exam, and proceeded to chat away about logarithms, inverse trigonometric functions and integration by substitution. For the last two years his school maths has been extremely difficult and way over my head but I was simply grateful that he was communicating so I listened intently and did a lot of head nodding. He might as well have been speaking Aboriginal Gubbi Gubbi though when it came to my level of comprehension.

I find that in this family of mathematically inclined men (I married one and seem to have bred another) I have to fight to maintain my credibility and self esteem. Rather than compete on the numerical front, where I am clearly inferior, I choose instead to concentrate on my writing where I deliberately write under my maiden name so as to afford my family a modicum of anonymity. Before joining Open Writing, I did briefly write some verse for another, fairly obscure website, using my married surname. My married surname is also extremely common so I was amazed when my son called me to the computer and showed me that my photo was at the top of the images resulting from a Google search of my other name.

"Why on earth have they put YOU first?" he asked incredulously.

I just couldn't resist.

"Oh," I remarked casually," After our maths chat in the car the other day, I've managed to calculate how the Google PageRank Algorithm works and so I used it to my advantage."

"You managed to do WHAT? How an earth did you, of all people do that?" he enquired, stunned at his mother's sudden and astounding brilliance.

"It's simple," I answered."It's based purely on physical appearance. Behind the scenes there is a Google committee and the person who is judged the hottest and best looking gets put first."

His face broke into a wonderful grin. "Yeah right. As if," he guffawed as he collapsed into great snorts of laughter.