Take your child on a trip via Google Maps

Brilliant idea from Elysha:

Last week she used Google Earth to take Charlie on a tour of all of the places where she has lived throughout her life, complete with descriptions of each locale and stories about each location.

What a wonderful thing to share with your child, particularly if you’ve lived in a variety of homes throughout your life. Charlie listened with rapt attention. Asked lots of questions. Learned so much. Laughed a lot.

I often think about the black box that my parents’ lives have been to me. When my parents got divorced when I was about eight years old, I quickly lost touch with my father, so most of his life – childhood, his tour in Vietnam, meeting my mother, the birth of his children, his work history, his successes and failures – has been lost to me. I’ve tried to fill in gaps over the years through occasional letters and even less occasional face-to-face meetings, but I’ll never have all of my questions answered.

My mother passed away in 2007. When she died, every single one of her untold stories died with her. My protagonist, Michael, in “The Other Mother,” is dealing with the death of a parent and describes the loss as a hard drive crashing. All of the data contained within a human being is lost forever upon their death. If you failed to backup any of that data before the crash, you can never get it back.

Michael was speaking for me on those pages, expressing exactly how I feel about the loss of my mother and the thousands of unanswered questions that will be forever be unanswered.

It’s probably one of the reasons I write relentlessly and tell so many stories – on stages and the dinner table.

I’m backing up my data as quickly as I can.

This is why I love Elysha’s idea so much.

I’ll be going through the same Google Earth tour with Clara and Charlie at some point soon, traveling virtually through the Massachusetts towns of Blackstone, Attleboro, Brockton, and Whitman, the Connecticut towns of Vernon, West Hartford, and Newington, and even the towns of Silver Springs, Maryland, which I spent four months sleeping in a walk-in closet, and a parking lot in Somerville, Massachusetts where I spent about six weeks of homelessness.

Lots and lots of stories attached to all of those places.

I can’t wait to share them all. I just hope they want to hear them all.

If you have a child, I recommend you do the same.