Unexpected windfall puts mom online

One day out of the foggy gray sky, my mother got a call from Sheila, an old college roommate of my sister’s. “I saw your name in the paper!” Sheila said. “I’m sure everyone is telling you by now.”

My mother assured her that no, no one was telling her anything by then. “My name is in the paper?” she said.

“I was reading the fine print,” Sheila said, describing the list of all those people for whom the state is holding unclaimed property. “Your name is on there!”

My mother never reads those things. Who reads those things?

“Get the paper!” Sheila said. “This could be a windfall.”

My mother got the paper, and a magnifying glass. She went down the list, and there it was: Claire W. Laskas. Well, there couldn’t be too many of those. She racked her brains trying to figure out what the mystery property could be. Some old savings bond that had matured? Some long-lost inheritance?

She called the phone number provided, gave her information, and a few days later got a form in the mail. She filled out the form, got it notarized, sent it back in.

Months went by, and nothing happened, and she forgot all about it.

Then one day out of another foggy gray sky, she got a mysterious envelope in the mail addressed to Claire W. Laskas. She opened it and inside found a check for $910.

“A windfall!” she said to my father. No information was provided. Just a check from the state.

She called to tell me the news. She said the only thing she could figure was that the money was from an old insurance policy that my grandmother had taken out on her baby brother, my mother’s uncle, whom she had raised before my mother was born.

“In those days poor people really needed to be sure they had enough money to bury people,” she told me. “So there were all these little insurance companies. A man would come by and collect the pennies and give her a receipt. It was something like 5 cents a month.”

My grandmother died more than 30 years ago; she and her baby brother had long since lost touch. My mother handled all of my grandmother’s affairs. It could be that she missed this one. That was the only thing she could figure.

I asked my mother, who is 82 years old, what she was going to do with her windfall.

“Well, my first impulse was to pay for my teeth,” she said. “I have a big dental bill. Then, I had second thoughts. I thought, ‘No, doggone it. I’m going to blow it.’ “

I learned from my sister that the second thoughts were more like third or fourth. Apparently, my mother was having a hard time choosing whether to use the money for her teeth or for getting her curtains and carpets cleaned. My sister intervened. She said windfalls are never supposed to be used on bills or on maintenance. She told her to go ahead and buy herself a treat.

It was a new concept for my mother, a woman who, aside from short stints at the post office and the Red Cross in her 20s, has never had a job that earned her money. The only treats she knew much about were things other people had given her, whether her husband or her kids. Technically speaking, most of the stuff of her life had been funded from other people’s accounts, ultimately the result of other people’s decisions.

Now she was on her own, with $910.

Soon enough she made the announcement that she was going to use the money to buy herself a computer.

A computer? My mother? That didn’t fit at all. Technology was my dad’s thing. He was Mr. Gadget. She was Mrs. Petunia and Mrs. Literature and Mrs. Acrylic Paint.

“I happen to think I’d be very good at microprocessing,” she said, pointing out that she was a courageous woman willing to make mistakes. “If I had my own computer, I could just bash away at it,” she said. Bashing away was not something she ever felt she could do to my father’s old Pentium III; their marriage is strong, but not one that could withstand sharing gadgets. She said she wanted to figure this information highway thing out on her own terms. She wanted to be able to send and receive photos of her grandchildren. She wanted, at 82, her first computer.

I helped her shop. I found a good deal online, placed the order. When the computer arrived, she tore into it. It was her first encounter with a mouse and an Escape key.

By day’s end, she was calling to tell me she had decided to set up Google instead of Yahoo! as her home page because the Google site was so much cleaner.

Hearing my mother like this, an old woman sounding so young, a pilgrim heading daringly into a new world, felt to me like its own kind of windfall.

The first thing she Googled was “George Bernard Shaw.”