The week my mother became a meme

My mother does not know that, for a week in February, a forty-second video of her — bewildered, in a yellow sari, mispronouncing the word "podcast" — was circulating, lightly, in the corners of the internet that produce reaction GIFs.

She will not know. I will not be the one to tell her. The video is not, in any specific sense, cruel. It is, mostly, fond. She is, mostly, charming in it. The mispronunciation is, mostly, the kind of mistake any of us would make if we were sixty-eight and being asked, on a hot Sunday, by a nephew with a camera, what we thought of the new world.

I have laughed at the video. I have laughed with the video, I would prefer to say. I am not sure the preposition holds up.

I have been sitting, this week, with the small fact that the love and the laughter, in my case, are not separate things, and that they are also not, quite, the same thing — and that the gap between them is, perhaps, where most of the affection between adult children and their parents lives.