I’ve been tooling around New England again with my teenage daughter in the passenger seat. She’s hard at work, button nose to the grindstone, on a complex scheme involving traveling “club teams,” lacrosse sticks, and college admissions, and I have become the (apparently willing?) accomplice. She is determined never, ever to need a student loan. She is much more practical-minded than I ever was.
It’s all news to me, this teenage-athlete farm system. While I wasn’t paying attention — during that drawn-out, actually endless, period of my 20s and 30s during which I was a big-city singleton, oblivious to what was happening in the suburbs, drinking my Manhattans and wearing my stiletto heels — a whole industry grew up for ambitious parents. They set their progeny to work learning soccer or lacrosse by the age of 6 or 7 and then devote a decade and many thousands of dollars pursuing the attention of college coaches, with the goal of son or daughter getting recruited to play District One, D2, or D3. Nettie got a very late start in team sports, but is making up for it with natural athleticism and determination.
We were in Massachusetts this week so she could try out for a lacrosse club team based within striking distance of her boarding school. The sun blazed down on the bleachers and I got a sunburn on my right cheek as I watched Nettie dash up and down the field, the lone Black athlete in a sea of white girls in French braids. Apparently, I approve? Despite the obvious truth that the whole thing — the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the airplane flights to tournaments in Texas, the $250 lacrosse sticks — is a game played by parents of privilege. The sports-admissions system, as ever, is rigged by the affluent.
We drove the suburbs of Boston listening to her patented Spotify mix of old Kanye West and newer pop-country ballads with killer hooks. We, mother and daughter, agree on Tyler Childers, a red-bearded country-folk singer from Kentucky. Tyler Childers’s “Feathered Indians” is the theme song of lacrosse recruitment Phase One. Nettie is 16, and I am no longer in a position to pretend I don’t use bad language, so we sang along together, loudly:
If I’d known she was religious
then I wouldn’t have came stoned
to the house of such an angel
too F-ed up to get back home.
We had a big mother-daughter argument in Old Sturbridge Village on Friday. I’d sort of tricked her into going, arguing that if I could devote several days and several hundred dollars (that aren’t in the domestic budget) to her lacrosse ambitions, she could hand over two hours to my weakness for historical re-creations. I soft-sold it as a visit to museum houses, rather than a stroll through the sort of re-enactment village she’s grown to loathe (due to her mother’s relentless insistence on marching her and her brother, sweating and bored stiff, through Plymouth Plantation, Old Bethpage, and, multiple times, Le Village Historique Acadien de la Nouvelle-Ecosse).
She doesn’t have her learner’s permit yet. I’m still the driver of the car, and as we pulled into the parking lot of Old Sturbridge, she looked around and began to object forcefully. I bought tickets, we went through the gates, and she laughed scornfully at the early American costumes worn by a troop of elementary-age children who paraded with fife and drum. She scrolled her iPhone during a demonstration of butter-making. I just wanted to see the wallpaper. She just wanted to go to the Burlington Mall. Words were exchanged. Bad words.
As if to compensate for our mother-daughter fight on Friday, on Sunday Nettie agreed to go on the Liberty Ride Trolley Tour in Lexington, Mass.
We boarded a bus painted to look like a trolley, with wood-slat seats and brass poles to grip. Our tour guide was dressed in breeches and a tricorn hat. He wasn’t a young man. I leaned over to Nettie and joked in her ear: “He’s been leading this tour since 1776.” Nettie didn’t hear me: She had an AirPod in the ear, hidden beneath her box-braids, and was listening to Morgan Wallen sing “Seven Summers”:
But I wonder when you’re drinkin’
If you find yourself thinkin’
About that boy from East Tennessee
And I know we both knew better
But we still said forever
And that was seven summers of Coke
And Southern Comfort
Were we dumb or just younger, who knows?
The aged tour guide took us down to the Old North Bridge to see the site of the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, a blindingly lovely meadow, hip-high in sunshine and wildflowers. The trolley bus stopped also at the spot where Paul Revere was captured by the Red Coats, a roadside memorial composed of an unremarkable horseshoe of boulders. The tricorn tour guide brought up the subject of Revolutionary War amputees so he could tell a grandpa joke about bunnies; it turned on a pun between “ether” and “Easter.” The ride was pleasingly dozy, under the trolley bus’s air-conditioning.
The tour guide told us — all seven of us on the bus, including a very wired little boy using a stick as a sword, banging the wood-slat seats — that the word “windfall” came from the storm-felled trees that occasionally provided free, valuable lumber to the early Americans. I rocked along in my seat and thought sleepily about how I had not taken due fiscal care, when I was young myself, in choosing a profession. Print media pays essentially no one in the 21st century. Unless you are Dave Barry or Dear Abby, weekly newspaper columns pay essentially no one.
I let my head loll against the window of the trolley bus and mused on windfalls and my many brilliant business ideas that might deliver one, even at this late a date and this late a century.
Brilliant Business Idea Number One: better pajamas. (Visualize pajamas. Why do they have to look like that? Always that pajama shape. Platonic pajamas. Ur-pajamas. No one looks good in those.)
I need a windfall to pay for the sporting equipment.
Brilliant Business Idea Number Two: a window-box service. We rolled along, listening to the tricorn tour guide talk about the lantern in the window at the Old North Church, and passed white-clapboard house after blue-clapboard house with the fullest, prettiest, most colorful window boxes bursting with blooms. Even the window boxes at Rancatore’s Ice Cream were gorgeous. Doesn’t East Hampton need a window-box-only gardening service? A “Build Your Own” visualization tool on the website, with your selection of periwinkles, fuchsia, creeping Jenny . . . lantana, dusty miller, sweet alyssum. . . .
Brilliant Idea Number Three: slushies for grown-ups. An adorable little shop on Newtown Lane with a wall of churning ice machines, serving up frozen, organic, honey-limeade and frozen Earl Grey and frozen beach plum sweetened with agave. I’d pay $8 for a cup of that! Imagine the markup.
I think I fell asleep for a moment.
Brilliant Idea Number Four was more sleepy and less fiscally sound: It was the wind-tree garden. A public garden with tall specimen trees planted at wide intervals and selected to produce different wind-sounds as the branches rustled differently, depending on the shape and density of the leaves and the force and direction of the wind that particular day, that particular season. The music of the trees.
The wind-tree garden would have tall oaks, like the oak by the beach at Northwest Harbor under which we pause — to listen to the wind — when walking back to the car from a swim on a hot August day. The wind-tree garden would have elms, and lindens. Windfall, windfall.