Hello, and welcome to my page. I did not think I would ever have a "page," and if you had told me two years ago that I would be typing to strangers on a television set hooked to a telephone, I'd have told you to go lie down. But here we are.

Here is how it happened. Christmas of 1998 my son Richard and his wife gave me a computer. A whole one: the box, the screen, the keyboard, the little printer, and a mouse, which I will get to. Richard said, "Mom, now you can e-mail the kids." The kids being my four grandchildren, who live in three states and are apparently never home when I call but are always, always at the computer. So I decided that if that's where they are, that's where I'll go.

This page is the story of that year, for anybody else my age who is staring at one of these things and wondering where to start. I'll tell you where I started: I was scared of it. I'm not anymore. Mostly.

Nobody tells you the mouse is the hard part. Richard set the whole thing up on Christmas afternoon and it was all very impressive and then he went home to Ohio and there I was with a mouse in my hand and a little arrow on the screen that went everywhere I didn't want it to.

Some things I learned that first week that nobody had thought to say out loud:

• You move the mouse on the desk and the arrow moves on the screen. You do not pick the mouse up and point it at the screen. (I did.)
• If you run out of desk, pick it up, put it back in the middle, and go on. The arrow stays where it was.
• "Click" means press the left button one time and let go. "Double-click" means twice, fast, and it took me until February to do it fast enough. My granddaughter Amy said "like knocking on a door, Grandma," and that did it.
• There is a game on the computer called Solitaire and it is there to teach you the mouse. I thought it was just there to waste time. It is that too. I have played it more than I will admit here.

To get to the e-mail you have to "connect," which means the computer calls a telephone number, and when it does it makes the most terrible noise. A screech and a hiss and something like a fax machine having an argument. The first time it happened I thought I had broken it and I pulled the plug out of the wall. Richard, on the phone from Ohio: "Mom, that's normal. That's how it says hello."

It is normal. I don't mind it now. Actually I've come to like it a little, the way you like the sound of the furnace kicking on. It means something is about to happen. I've also learned that when it's connected, the telephone is busy, so if you call me between seven and eight in the evening and get a busy signal, that's why, and I'm sorry, and I'll call you back.

The nice young man at the telephone company said I could get a second line for the computer. I said I would think about it. I'm still thinking.

February the ninth, 1999. I still have it. It went to my grandson Michael, who is sixteen and set up my "address" for me over the phone, and it said, in its entirety:

He wrote back in eleven minutes. Eleven! I had been waiting for the mailman for seventy-four years and here was a letter from Michigan in eleven minutes. It said "it works grandma!!! :)" and I had to call Richard to ask what the colon and the parenthesis meant. It's a little sideways face. Now I use them. :)

I wrote back and asked why he didn't capitalize "Grandma," and he said nobody capitalizes anything in e-mail, and I said I do, and I do.

This was the whole point and it has worked better than I hoped. I hear from them more now than I ever did on the telephone, because I've figured out that they don't like the telephone but they will type all day.

Michael (16) writes me one line at a time, about once a week, usually about his car. I write him five paragraphs back. We have an understanding.

Amy (14) writes long ones, at night, about school and a boy named Jeremy whom I have opinions about. She sends me jokes. Some of them I understand.

Sarah (11) sends me pictures she made on the computer, of horses. They come as a little paper clip on the letter and you click on it and there's the horse. I have printed every one and they are on the refrigerator.

Danny (8) gets his mother to help him, and his letters say things like "GRANDMA I LOST A TOOTH" all in capitals because he likes the big letters. So do I, as you can see.

My daughter-in-law Susan says the children fight over who gets to read Grandma's e-mail first. I don't believe her, but I like to hear it.

About March I started getting letters from people I know — church friends, a cousin, my neighbor Ruth — that were not really from them. They were letters that somebody else wrote and my friends were "forwarding" to everybody in their address book. And every one of them wanted me to forward it to ten more people.

One said a big computer company would send me money for every person I forwarded it to. One said a little girl was dying and every letter forwarded would give her a penny. One said if I didn't send it on, something bad would happen. One was just a poem about friendship, with angels, and it had been forwarded so many times the beginning was forty lines of other people's names and little > marks.

Now I was born in 1925 and I know a chain letter when I see one. We had them in the mail in the thirties and my mother threw them in the stove. Here is what I figured out and what my grandson confirmed:

• No company is paying anybody for forwarding a letter. There is no way for them to even know.
• Nobody's e-mail is going to save a sick child. If you want to help sick children, the hospital will take a check.
• Nothing bad will happen if you don't forward it. I have not forwarded a single one and I am fine, and my hip is no worse than it was.
• Every time you forward one, everybody's address goes along with it to a lot of strangers. I don't like that.

So I don't forward them, and I wrote Ruth a nice note explaining why, and she was a little put out, and then she stopped too. If you want to send me something, send me something you wrote. Even one line. Even about your car.

In the spring there was a virus in the newspaper — a computer virus, the kind that comes in the e-mail and sends itself to everybody you know. It was on the front page of the paper and on the evening news, and my friend Ruth called me and said, "Dorothy, unplug it!"

I did not unplug it. I called Michael. He told me two things that I now tell everybody:

1. A virus can't do anything just sitting in your mailbox. It's when you open a file somebody attached to a letter that it can get loose. So: do not open an attachment you weren't expecting, even from someone you know, because the virus sends itself from their computer using their name. If Ruth sends me a file and didn't tell me she was going to, I call Ruth.
2. Get the virus program and let it check. Richard put one on at Christmas and I had never once let it run because it was slow. Now it runs on Sunday nights while I watch my program.

I never did get the virus. I did get about nine forwarded letters warning me about the virus, several of which were about viruses that Michael says don't exist. See the section above.

Here is a thing I did not expect to love. Amy showed me in June how to look things up "on the Web," which is different from the e-mail, and the first thing I looked up was a recipe for the rhubarb custard pie my mother used to make, because I had lost the card sometime around 1970. I found four of them. One of them was very close.

Then I found out I could print them. You click on the little picture of a printer and the printer next to the computer starts up and out comes the recipe, on paper, in my kitchen. Now I have a whole binder. Every recipe on the Web wants you to read it off the screen and I say no, thank you, I'll take it to the stove with me like a civilized person.

Two things about the printer: the ink is expensive and you should not print a whole page just to get one recipe on the bottom of it, and you should turn it on before you click the printer picture, or the computer will tell you that something is wrong and it will take you a while to figure out that the something is that the printer is turned off.

I've also printed off Sarah's horses, directions to Richard's new house, and a picture of the Beanie Baby that Danny wants for his birthday, so I know which one to look for. There are apparently hundreds of these and they all have names.

I'm putting these here because when I ask my grandchildren they laugh and say "Oh, Grandma," and I'm hoping somebody else will just tell me.

1. Why do you click on Start to turn it off?
2. What is a "cookie" and why does the computer keep asking if I'll accept one? I say yes because it seems rude not to. Is that wrong?
3. Why does it say "This page cannot be displayed" and then if I click again it displays it?
4. Why is the one from Michael sometimes at the top of the list and sometimes at the bottom, and how do I make it stay put?
5. What is the difference between the Web and the e-mail and "online" and "the Internet"? Are those four things or one thing? Michael says one thing and Amy says four.
6. Why is there a picture of a trash can, and if I put something in it, is it gone? (It is not gone. I found out. That was a relief.)
7. What is this Y2K business, and is it going to happen to my computer? Richard says it's fine. The man at the store said to buy something. I'm going to go with Richard.
8. Why does it need to be turned off with the mouse instead of the button? The button is right there.

If you know, write to me. Use small words. And no attachments, I'll never open it. :)

It's September. I've been at this nine months. I check my e-mail every evening after supper and most mornings too. I have twenty-two people in my address book (Michael put them in; I've added three by myself). I have printed 41 recipes. I have not forwarded one chain letter. I have made this page, with Amy on the telephone for three evenings telling me what to type, and I typed every bit of it myself.

Ruth got a computer in August. She calls me now with her questions. I tell her about the mouse and the noise and the door-knock. I tell her it's normal. That's how it says hello.