Member-only story
Getting the Sky
Of joy and semblances in Southern California
I recently accompanied my younger son on a week-long field trip to Southern California.
I wasn’t a chaperone exactly. More like his plus one. An accommodation by our very accommodating town — there to be my son’s roommate in the hotel and to be onsite if he had a seizure.
Being the only parent on the trip, made me feel like an embedded journalist traveling with an unreasonably big pop band.
If you’re thinking what a drag to be the only one with a mom on a cool school trip, you are alone. My son loved that I was there. He held my hand willingly as we strolled through theme parks, introduced me avidly, and generally hyped me to a very unimpressed tween demographic.
The plan was that I would follow his bus in a car to give him some semblance of independence for the ride. This is what we do for my son — we seek, we lend semblances.
Before it departed, my son staged himself at the door of the bus and gave every boarding kid a fist bump, as if he was off on a junket to get elected to some office or other, and this was his campaign team. Then he turned and boarded himself.
I watched his back as he climbed up the stairs and disappeared into the body of the bus, about to travel the furthest he ever…
