Did you hear the one about...

"How do I send this to someone else?"

You know those people in your e-life with whom your only contact is forwards of jokes or sappy expressions of friendship replete with lame animated gifs?

Yes. I fear the parents have become forwarding fiends. As soon as I walked in last time, dad wanted to know how to forward an e-mail to my brother. Then he enthusiastically shows me all these off-colour jokes their friends have sent them, even covering up the punch lines so I don't jump ahead and ruin the joke.

Finally I'm like – Seriously, dad, you're showing me this stuff? And sending them to my brother at his work address?

Now my mom wants to make sure we forward one to her sister, because it's so funny. The one about the man in the nursing home who prefers the company of a certain woman because she has Parkinson's.

I've created monsters. Dirty monsters.

It's not made out of wood

"Is this real water?"

So I was trying to show the folks how to transfer e-mail addresses to their iPad's contact book and add phone numbers, etc. (Okay, that's something they're not ever going to get.)

My mom's address book is a random, non alphabetized list in a journal book so I was entering all their names and numbers for them when mom says to dad – Oh, you wanted to ask her about the water.

Water?

Dad tells me to pass him 'the thing' – that's what he calls the iPad. He goes to the home screen.

Is this real water, under the glass? he asks.

Ha! No. That's just wallpaper, I laugh.

Wallpaper? both mom and dad say at once.

Uh. Just an image, for the background. You could make any picture the background image. Here look, I say, going into settings and calling up the built-in wallpaper, now it's wood.

Oh, dad says. But why would they make it look like there was condensation under the glass? Because that could actually happen.

I dunno, I tell him, still chuckling. Later, I call them from my car. Mom answers. I say, Hey, tell dad even though I changed it to wood, it's not made of wood now.

Are your laughing at us? mom asks.

A little bit.

It knows where we live

"Where's South from here?"

So I'm sitting with mom and dad, going over how to delete e-mails (again) and feeling quietly joyful about how engaged dad seems to be with his new digital toy. He shows me how to play a game that I couldn't figure out, and at one point reminds my mom (again) to "tap it, don't press it!"

Cool.

Then it occurs to me he's always been a gadget guy so I shouldn't be surprised that he's taken to this new one. I tell him about one of my bosses – a guy in his 60s, who got a tech to come in consolidate all his remote controls so now he has this giant mega remote that controls every electronic device in his house – and how that sounds like something dad would do. We laugh.

I tease him about how, in the past, he had bought all these GPS devices and then never learned how to use them, and how ridiculous it was for someone like my dad to even own a GPS. Because, I said, "you could be dropped from a helicopter, blindfolded, in the middle of the Amazon jungle with a handful of salt and piece of string and still find your way out. What the fuck do you need a GPS for?"

We laugh. Hard. Now, it occurs to me we've been laughing more lately.

I tell him the iPad is actually a GPS device too – he had noticed how the mapping App had marked their address. "Hey, it knows where we live," he tells my mom. She thinks that's kind of creepy.

Unfortunately, I did not inherit dad's highly tuned sense of direction, and mom has none at all. Then dad asks mom, "where's south from here?" She thinks and points at a wall. "I don't think so" he says. As they are discussing it, I think, surely there's a Compass App... within seconds I'd downloaded it and handed it to dad.

"what do you know, she was right." he says quietly.

This thing is going to be the ultimate argument solver.