My friend Ken gave me a single sentence to incorporate into a short story that I wrote in an hour. "French toast used to be my favorite food, until I deleted my Orkut account." The story follows.
My father was not what you would call tech savvy. More often than not, he troubleshot computer problems by yelling at the monitor and slamming his meaty palms on the keys. It’s funny from an outside perspective but I didn’t have the luxury of an outside perspective. When it came to tech support, I was first person narrating all the way.
Similar to a lot of dads out there, he was embarrassing to be with him in public, but things only got worse when he started carrying that damn laptop with him. Helping him defrag his computer at Dennys while the waitress lifted the coffeepot to her face to hide a smirk was not my ideal meal.
For some reason or other, one of Dad’s old Army buddies hooked him into the social networking craze. Luckily for me, rather than using Facebook like everyone else on this planet, Dad used Orkut. Unluckily for me, the invitations started showing up in my inbox shortly after he joined.
I humored him of course. Despite all the idiosyncrasies and signs of what I could only assume were early dementia, I loved my old man, at least loved him enough to play along. I joined, uploaded a picture and friended my father. He was my only friend on the site and it was easy for me to forget that I even had an account. My own virtual life stay contained to Facebook and Twitter, lands my father dared not tread.
You’re never prepared for the death of a parent. One minute, they’re healthy, yelling at both you and the computer to, “Defrag! Defrag!” The next minute, a routine and the man who followed it are gone from your life for good. Immediate grief I could deal with, but the hollowness ate away at me. As much as I complained about helping my father with the computer, it was a solid and predictable part of my life that I no longer had. It was a few weeks after the funeral when Mom asked if I could blank out dad’s old machine. She wanted to use it, but didn’t want constant reminders of him every time she opened it up. It wouldn’t take long, so I took his laptop to breakfast with me and figured I could have the machine back to factory settings by that afternoon.
The restaurant had WiFi and as I booted up the machine out of a long sleep, Dad’s last webpage was still up and running. Not surprisingly, it was Orkut and he had hundreds of posts. Some were from his friends, but most of them were his own personal observations. I scrolled through a few of his messages and posts, chuckling as I did when I saw a link to my own profile as a friend of my fathers. I had nearly forgotten about my account. I clicked on my profile and was expecting to see the blank page I had left, but was presented with a flowing wall of posts and messages from my father.
I swallowed hard and could barely log out of my father’s account in order to log into my own. I read every single message my father had written me . At one point, the waitress had brought my breakfast, but I hadn’t really noticed.
When I was done reading, my food was cold and there was a knot in my stomach I knew wasn’t from hunger. And then, because I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else finding my profile filled with a year of messages and love, I locked away my personal shame and cowardice for good.
Truth be told. French toast used to be my favorite food, until I deleted my Orkut account.
