Partner in Crime

Something I mentioned in my soliloquy at my father's funeral this summer was that while my mum has always been in charge of "voice communication", i.e. regular phone calls, dad was the master of written conversation and our family WhatsApp group (that is now no longer active as it just consisted of the three of us and Mum and I can just as well write to each other 1:1) mainly consisted of exchanges between Dad and myself. In fact, I would sometimes write to ask him to "poke" mum in real life and tell her to answer my question if she was available for a call as she had been "ghosting" me. I still call my mother twice a week just as I used to do before she became widowed, but now she is the recipient of daily messages and is much more responsive than she used to be. Dad and I would often gang up on her and make fun of her occasional autocorrect mishaps or the fact that she still mostly used the old German spelling she learnt at school, while he had switched to the new one once it became official. My father was known for his sarcasm and love of word-play and sometimes you could already anticipate a deadpan reply when you wrote, in fact looking forward to it.

Back at the beginning of the pandemic, when we were confined to our respective houses, we came up with a kind of "photographic telegraph" by sending each other a picture of lunch and/or dinner. This tradition is still ongoing and all my colleagues know by know that I take pictures of my tray at the office cafeteria, as do my friends who I eat out with or whom I am invited to dinner with. The downside of this tradition is that you tend to get worried when no photo comes from the other party. 

It was always Dad (an excellent photographer with any kind of device, too) who sent those pictures, but now Mum sends photos of her meals-for-one and we also exchange short messages daily. It still occasionally feels strange to have so much written interaction with her and I sometimes imagine Dad replying with one of his favourite emojis - the typical "dad emoji" thumbs-up or the eye-roll one - or a one-liner in dialect or with deliberate misspelling.