Stephanie came home from college for 24 hours because she was sick. This is one of the advantages of living only a trainride from home–you can get a sore throat, a sinus headache, a stomach ache and a bump on your tongue, and you can come home for a good night’s sleep and a fried egg sandwich.

It was lovely. We sat out on the screened porch working side by side on our computers. I was doing–what else?–my novel, and she was working on a final paper for one of her classes.

We were enjoying the companionly silence of staring into space, trying to think of the next thing to type when I heard her say, “Hmm, I should check out how the bump on my tongue is doing.”

And then, to my astonishment, she stuck out her tongue at her computer, clicked a button–and voila! There was a close-up photograph of her tongue filling the entire screen.

“Oh,” she said. “It looks like it’s healing up nicely,” and went right back to work.

A lot of people have to get up and go look in the mirror to get that kind of information.