This just in: Mom survives daughter’s travels

If my Comcast browser had a name, I am convinced it would be Shirl.

This browser’s Web page has become the wacky neighbor in my own personal sitcom. Daily she perches upstairs, obsessed with pessimistic news and celebrity gossip.

Every time I head into my office at home to check my e-mail, up pops Shirl. She blasts me with cryptic, but ominous headlines: Boy survives lion, tiger attacks. Man gets death for murdering his kids.

She never shuts up.

A couple of weeks ago, our younger daughter flew to Belize for 10 days, the culmination of a college class that featured a week of community service in a Belize City orphanage as well as side trips to Mayan ruins, a tropical rainforest and a nearby island. Our extroverted daughter relished the chance to venture into the world and make new friends.

You’d think Shirl would see Megan’s warm, generous heart and make a few allowances.

Nope, all Shirl could talk about that week — aside from Tom Cruise — were the grisly details of the futile search for a teenage girl missing in Aruba.

I cannot deny the thought occurred to me: Belize, Aruba. Same region of the alphabet. Same part of the world.

Our adventure-loving daughter threw back her head and laughed. On a Friday morning, off she flew.

Two days later, Megan typed us an e-mail from a hotel lobby in Belize City. This trip, she said, was amazing. Clarissa Falls the most beautiful place she’s ever stayed in her life. The countryside inns cost as little as $10 a night. The meals were a bargain. She was thinking of staying on an extra week or so.

Shirl reminded me of Natalee Holloway.

My husband and I talked it over. We love you, dear, we wrote back, but we think it’s best that you come home as planned.

Days pass. Another e-mail arrives from Belize City. The orphans are adorable, but their living conditions very sad, Megan reports. “They are having a small pox outbreak, so the children are scratching away at those painful pox…”

Small pox.

Shirl hasn’t said a word about this. I could have missed her report between Paris Hilton updates, though. I check Web sites for the U.S. State Department and the Centers for Disease Control. Just as I thought: Small pox is pretty darned eradicated. I breathe a small sigh of relief.

Surely, it’s chicken pox, I type back to my slightly malapropian daughter.

On Saturday, Shirl works herself into a frenzy. Dead 14-year-old on the coast of Florida. Shark attack.

Later that day, Megan sends another e-mail from Belize. She’s on a lovely island called Caye Caulker.

Mom, she writes, I went snorkeling today. I swam with stingrays and sharks and even touched them.

Stingrays and sharks. Yikes.

Shirl butts in. She points out a second shark attack in Florida. A boy loses his leg.

The next day, the phone rings. Megan’s flight has touched down in Dallas. She’s back in the States — right on schedule. The snorkel trip was fabulous, she says. Oh, no, Mom, they were just little sharks with no teeth. The snorkel boat people lure them with bait and it was so cool — you can swim right up and touch them.

Shirl falls silent.

Megan finally arrives home in Spokane. She brings me a tiny box of Guatemalan worry dolls. You tell one worry to each doll, Mom, she explains, tuck them under your pillow and dream sweetly all night long.

I regard my lovely brown-eyed daughter, her curls cascading down her back and her smile beaming wide. She ventures out with such assurance. It strikes me then: She’s much like someone else I know, a man with such confidence the world nearly always smiles upon him – her own dad. And in that moment, I realize she’s going to be traveling into the world like this for the rest of her life, and she’s going to be just fine.

In fact, she so easily scoops orphans and old ladies into her arms that I can see a charmed life lies ahead of her. In a Belize City, she met an elderly woman with bad feet who had walked two hours to reach a clinic in only the thinnest flip-flops. So Megan traced the woman’s feet, took down directions to her house, and headed out to the market. The next day, the woman showed up back at the clinic, a bright white pair of Keds from Megan on her feet.

For the rest of the season, our daughter will be a summer camp counselor. I expect Shirl will bombard me with stories of mountain lion attacks, West Nile virus and freak accidents involving flashlights, rain ponchos and s’mores.

But I think of the alternative. If Megan stayed home this summer, carefully avoiding all danger, Shirl would suddenly dream up new headlines: Library book stacks crash on New Jersey teen. College knitting club member pokes eye out with needle. Scrapbooker contracts flesh-eating bacteria from paper cut.

Megan might choose to stay in our own back yard, braving nothing riskier than tending her own tan. But Shirl’s already anticipated that one. Just the other day, she announced: Woman dies while sunbathing.

I’m tempted to dump Comcast and strike up a relationship with my new Guatemalan worry dolls instead. But, you know, maybe Shirl’s the perfect pal for empty-nester mothers like me. Just call us the anxious and the proud.