Rubenerd

Speaking of my mum, today she would have been 64. This is understandably an important number for nerds; I remember calculating when I was a kid that I would have become a 32-bit human within a couple of years of her going full amd64, and excitedly imagined all the awful jokes I’d tell her.

I’m lucky to be in Singapore right now, so I was able to take Clara to the Starbucks in Paragon that we used to always hang out at when I came back from school, or after the hospital. She often couldn’t go far on account of chemotherapy weakness, so we’d wander down from our apartment up the street to get what she called medicinal keeki.

The décor is different, and we had to have a tiramisu over our normal New York cheesecake, but the overall layout of the store was the same, and we even got our regular couches by the far wall! Fate is a load of snitchnosed whimsy—to borrow one of her phrases!—but I enjoyed that it worked out that way.

As as I said before about those Swensen’s chips, it meant a lot to be sharing this exact experience with Clara after all these years. Debra would have approved I’m sure. ♡