Bag of Toys

“What is this?” Patch, age seven, asks, holding up the tiny black key fob.

“That,” my eleven-year-old Little One says, “is a flash drive.”

“A flash drive?”

“Yes.”

“What’s a flash drive?”

My ears perk up and strain to listen in on the backseat conversation as I navigate the slushy roads.

“Say you have files on one computer,” Little One explains, “and you want to put them on another. You just stick the flash drive in, here, wait for a window to open up on your computer, and then you drag the files you want to move onto this, here. Then you take the flash drive out and insert it in this slot in the second computer, wait for that box to open, then you drag the files you want to move onto, say, the desktop area, or you can search for another folder if you want to put it there.”

Patch is quiet. I can’t see her in the rear-view mirror, but expect that face is scrunching up a bit as she’s trying to make sense of what big sister just said.

Time for an intervention.

“Patch,” I say, “think of it this way. Imagine you’re in your room and you put all your toys in a bag. Then you take that bag over to Grammy’s house. That bag is like the flash drive. It moves stuff from one place to another.”

More quiet.

Then, Patch says: “So … wait. There’s toys in this flash drive?!?”