Nettie and I were in Terminal C at Boston Logan International Airport last Wednesday morning when we came to a fork in the road — literally and metaphorically. “Which way is our flipping gate?” We urgently needed to find Gate C28 en route to Orlando on JetBlue, and with my middle-aged myopia, I couldn’t decipher from the overhead signage whether we needed to turn left or right after the New England Collections shop where the Red Sox and Harvard hoodies are sold. We stood there a moment bickering as the flood of travelers rushed past and then Nettie, who is 17, grabbed both her own rolling suitcase and my cumbersome no-wheels carry-on, nudged me, and led us directly to an open seat at the correct gate.
“See?” she said. “Right again. I’m always right. My sense of direction is infallible.”
Having an infallible inner compass is a running joke in our family, and I have always prided myself on always being correct about which way is north or south or how to find the correct highway off-ramp, but all the way to Florida and back it was Nettie who led me in the right direction, not the other way around.
Our trip last week was for the most unexpected and felicitous of reasons: She had won a place at something called the Disney Dreamers Academy, which is a five-day annual leadership and mentoring retreat hosted by the Walt Disney Company. Off to Disney World we went so Nettie and 99 other high-achieving high school students — the majority Black, but a diverse group of go-getting teenagers from all backgrounds, hailing from Arkansas to Wisconsin — could meet astronauts and radio D.J.s, Disney executives and television personalities, and learn a few lessons about networking and reaching for your dreams.
On the Mears bus from Orlando Airport to Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort we met a family named Sproles from Little Rock who Nettie stuck close to for the rest of the weekend; the Sproles twins, Cami and Colin, had incredibly both won the honor of becoming Disney Dreamers. We met aspiring teenage filmmakers from the Midwest and motivational speakers in the ninth grade from Chapel Hill, N.C. The 100 Dreamers had the ride of their lives, listening to inspirational advice from journalists and gospel singers and doing workshops on space flight and cardiopulmonary resuscitation, sandwiched between death drops on the Tower of Terror and screaming flights on the Tron Lightcycle Power Run. They were too exhausted by the time they got back to the resort each night to even put a toe in the hot tub.
My new role is to watch and congratulate. It was a pure pleasure in a weekend full of surprises and parental pride. The 100 Dreamers marched down Main Street USA in a parade led by the mouse and steppers from one of the H.B.C.U.s. Nettie waved from atop a parade float, positioned behind Donald Duck and next to a chipmunk who may have been Chip and may have been Dale.
“Aim for the Moon,” they told her, “and even if you fail you will land among the stars.”
On Sunday morning there was a celebration commencement breakfast at which each Dreamer was presented with a silver class ring. The applause for the corporate sponsors who made it all possible was sincere, for once: I, for one, take off my hat to Delta and Sprite for throwing their support for the Disney Dreamers Academy in times such as these, when anything remotely associated with “diversity and inclusion” is under aggressive attack. (Seriously, thank you for that corporate courage! Nettie will be drinking Sprite instead of 7Up or Starry lemon-lime for the rest of her days. No cap, as the kids say.) Tamela Mann sang “You Deserve to Win.” Everyone cried. Nettie’s new friend Colin from Little Rock, a youth minister and captain of the football team who wants to go into medicine, was named Dreamer of the Year and Nettie cheered louder than any other Dreamer in the conference hall.
It’s apparently no longer my job to drag my daughter where she is going; she will be the one dragging me, it seems, from here on out. I can’t wait to see where she takes me next.