Hero doing well

Imagine starting your computer programming career way back in the ’70s, in those Watergate-hazy, Archie-bunker-ish days between A Space Odyssey and Star Wars.

Then imagine — in those dark ages, just 10 years after the era that Mad Men depicts — you’re a woman.

Borders are broken up and walls are cracked open person by person, achievement by achievement. My Mom is one of those people who did that.

And she taught me to program — she taught me about code elegance and about how the best programmers are lazy and never want to write the same thing twice. Software architecture was dinner-table talk when I was a boy.

Her heart valve replacement surgery — relatively minor, as heart surgeries go, but still, sheesh — went very well today.

Change comes when a bunch of people say, “Hey, I want to do x. And it doesn’t matter that I’m a y — they can’t stop me!”

I’ve never had to say that, but my Mom — like millions of Americans and people around the world, yesterday and today — did say that. And kept saying it, and did it.

In a day or so she’ll get out of ICU and get her iPhone back and she’ll read my weblog.

Cheers, Mom. You’re my hero. I wish for everybody to have a hero like you.