I love my folks. They are great people, and, among their other qualities, they are both sharp thinkers.
I was talking with Mom on the phone over the weekend. “I just wanted to let you know,” she told me, “that I got something in e-mail that didn’t sound quite right — so I looked it up on Snopes myself.”
Okay, so when my folks first started getting into e-mail, they were among the most egregious forwarders of every urban legend and “too good to be true” e-mail meme that came down the pike. So I started sending them corrections — just to them (since I don’t believe in “shaming” well-meaning people by pointing out their errors to all their friends). And, God bless ‘er, my mom would actually send out retractions.
Eventually, it got so that, before they’d send something like that out, they’d send it to me, first. “Does this sound right to you?”
And now — my own Mom is doing her own urban legend research on Snopes.
My little parents are getting all grown up! 🙂