The Family Hard Drive

Published February 11, 2026 – Happy 95th Birthday, Virginia

A toast to memory, brandy, and a woman who puts all of us to shame.

The Refrigerator Interrogation

I was standing in the kitchen the other day, staring into the refrigerator. It was open, humming quietly, and I had absolutely no idea why I was there.

Not a vague sense of forgetting. A total system blackout. I stood long enough for the light to warm my face like a polite interrogation lamp, then closed the door and walked away. The refrigerator won. Again.This has been happening more often than I’d like to admit—certainly more often than the "never" I prefer. I am not old. I am not young. I am whatever age makes you forget a word like colander or spatula, only to have it scream into your brain at 2:00 AM while brushing your teeth.

Meanwhile, people far older than me are sharp as a fresh chisel. They remember names, dates, and exactly who said what, and when. Which brings me to my mother-in-law, Virginia.

No Buffering Required

Virginia is ninety-five years old and should probably not be consulted on anything requiring memory because it makes the rest of us look like we’ve suffered minor head trauma.

She remembers everything. Names. Addresses. Dates. Who married who first. Where they lived before they lived where you think they lived. If the family ever loses a birth certificate or a mortgage deed, we do not panic. We call Virginia.

She is our family hard drive. Actually, she is more like an SSD—no spinning parts, no warm-up, no waiting. You ask a question, and the answer just appears. No buffering. No updates required. No reboot needed. She reads the news every day—and not just the headlines. Occasionally she asks a question that makes the rest of us stare into our coffee and wonder if we’ve ever had an original thought at all.

Summer 2025 at the homestead. Virginia in my salt-stained Tilley hat and favorite flannel. She’s not just sitting there; she’s auditing the lawn and preparing a performance review for the ground crew.

By the way, if you want a sense of her sharpness over the years, take a look at these photos. 1976: the living room, slightly soft focus, Bob somewhere in the middle, Jan on the left, and Virginia steady on the right. Fast forward to 2020, the same room, same positions, sharper focus, but the same unflinching presence on the right. Forty-four years and not a flicker of drift from Virginia.

The Supreme Court of Rummy

She plays cards and board games with her five daughters. Sounds wholesome, right? Until you remember that five adult daughters who have known each other their entire lives do not forget anything.

Games here are not recreational. They are historical audits. Every hand comes with commentary. Every rule has a backstory. Every move triggers a memory of a game played decades ago, when someone absolutely cheated and spent forty-plus years lying to themselves about it.

Voices rise. Debates erupt over whose turn it is or whether a rule applied when the game was purchased. Someone pushes their chair back a little too hard.

July 2023 at the gazebo. Court is in session. The family thinks they’re playing for fun, but the Chief Justice is just waiting for someone to miscalculate a meld so she can correct the record.

Virginia sits there calmly, holding her cards. She does not argue. She does not rush. She does not need to. When things get heated, she simply states the facts. Who dealt. Who played out of turn. What happened during the Ford administration—and why it does not apply to this hand of Rummy. She is the Supreme Court of family games. Lifetime appointment. No appeals.

Play resumes. Until the next hand.

The Korbel Treaty

Her body is slowing down, as bodies tend to do at ninety-five. There are aches. There are pains. The careful getting up and the tactical sitting back down—the kind that requires pre-planning and a solid grip on the armrest.

What there is not is complaining. Which is notable, because her daughter, my wife Jan, treats minor discomfort like a breaking news bulletin. Must have skipped a generation. Virginia just adjusts. She shifts. She carries on.

At the end of the day, she enjoys a nightly glass of Korbel brandy, which deserves a mention because Wisconsin is Korbel’s highest-volume sales area in the world. Virginia carries out her part of this state-wide tradition with a single, disciplined glass—a quiet punctuation mark at the end of the day. She sips slowly, pays attention, and remembers everything you said last week, plus half the things you were too embarrassed to say out loud. Her body may negotiate terms with time, but her mind never signed the treaty.

Winter 2020, Florida lanai. No apps, no hacks, no noise. Just a woman, a book, and a ninety-five-year-old processing unit that still runs circles around the rest of us. The sunlight falls across her hands and the pages, and you realize she doesn’t need a calendar or a list to keep track of life—she just shows up, fully present, every single day.

Virginia does not try to stay young. She is just engaged. Curious. Present.

And most days, that feels like the real secret. Even if I still can’t remember why I opened the fridge. I’ll probably find what I was looking for around 3:00 AM. It’s usually the cheese.