“I’m looking for a little white flower that looks kind of like this,” Thalia said, indicating a tray of white alyssum, “but it’s perennial. You see it in rock gardens, and it can be pink or white.”

“Oh,” I told her, “you’re thinking about creeping phlox,” astounding myself with the accuracy and rapidity of my recall.

“Did you notice that?” I asked her. “I wanted to say ‘creeping phlox,’ and the words were right there. I just said it: creeping phlox!

“Yes,” Thalia said, laughing.

“I know what you mean. My daughter Calliope just sent me a YouTube video of an SNL skit about how parents can’t remember celebrities’ names.”

I Googled it later. The skit, called Mom Celebrity Translator, is presented as an ad for a handy device to help sons and daughters understand what their moms are talking about. Simply type in the name of a celebrity and a little background information as told to you by your mother, and the name she was mangling pops up correctly spelled on a little screen. It even has an audio feature that allows your mom to hear the celebrity’s name pronounced, and thus Keith Ragu is revealed to be Keanu Reeves.

I wish the Mom Celebrity Translator really existed. The skit was aired in 2009 and is still relevant in today’s society, so much so that you’d think the Mom Celebrity Translator would have become a reality by now. Life imitates art and all. Still, I must admit that Google has progressed to the point where it is almost as good.

Thalia was telling me about some Greek meatballs she makes that are served with lemon instead of a tomato sauce. These meatballs are so good that, as her family story goes, everyone is too polite to eat the last one on the plate. Instead, family members sneak downstairs one by one after nightfall hoping to score the remaining meatball, only to find an empty plate. I Googled something like “kafdaddies with lemon” and came up with several recipes for keftedes (alternatively spelled keftethes) with avgolemono. Thank you, Google!

While social media has certainly given a platform to some groups promoting divisive policies and hate speech, it has also done the opposite, connecting people around the globe.

My childhood friend Marianna and her family have washed around the globe’s oceans. Born in Peru, Marianna has lived in Michigan, Florida, France and Spain, and is now residing in Deia, on the Spanish island of Mallorca.

Marianna sees nationalism as a threat to world peace. How many people wander the earth this way, seeing themselves as children of the planet and not as citizens of any one nation? It is hard for me to imagine a person not identifying as American, Canadian, African or as a member of some other country or territory. Marianna and her family seem to me so free in this way.

My family once had a dog named Duck who was ferocious inside our yard, vigilantly keeping intruders, including certain dogs, the mailman and the paper boy on his bicycle, at bay. In the time and place where we lived, dogs were allowed to roam at will around the neighborhood, and when Duck met up with these same characters around the town, she gave them a sniff or two and then either ignored them, or wagged her tail in joyous greeting. She never bothered to bark at anything other than a squirrel or some mallards on the nearby pond except on our property. Duck’s aggression was territorial.

Maybe Marianna is right.

Maybe people are like dogs in this respect. Maybe globalization will eliminate the kinds of war our world has been waging for millennia. Then we’ll just have to intensify our search for life on other planets to find someone to fight with.

Meanwhile, the discovery of one mouse-or at least I hope it’s only one mouse-in my pantry has thrown my entire kitchen into disarray. Not that it wasn’t disarrayed enough to begin with. I have to go deal with it now before I tackle Thalia’s gaddafis and avogadro sauce.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)