Online Gestures and Family Stories

I don't think you can completely convey the detail of a gesture through text, but you can still read the detail. Whenever you make up the details of a character in a book, you're filling in extra meaning that isn't really there. And when you talk online with a close friend, and she sends you :-) or ^.^ or :-D, you know exactly what face she's making because of context and because you know your friend. The same way you can hear the tone she uses or different subjects.

As for family stories, when Aunt Mary Kay and Uncle Bill (who met at William and Mary) were newly weds, they had an orange cat whose name escapes me. The cat ran off and on Good Friday, a man brought its body back apologetically, having hit it with his car. They sadly buried it and mourned. However, on Easter morning, Aunt Mary Kay was in her kitchen, and as she pulled a pie from the oven, the orange cat hopped up on the window sill, scaring her half to death and expecting to be fed. The upshot of all this is, of course, that they'd buried someone else's cat, but he was still the Easter miracle that year.