Basic Joy - Basic Joy

{Preamble: I love our town. And our neighborhood. Just last Sunday we had a block party with kids running all around, live music under a tent (a neighborhood teen singing with her boyfriend on the guitar), tons of potluck goodness, and friendly neighborhood banter. It's a good place. We feel lucky to live here.

Our particular neighborhood is very normal and modest (it's unofficially known as "Mayberry" to townies). However, the larger town we're a part of is quaint, historic, and quite...affluent. Over the top, at times, in a low-key, money-is-no-big-deal way that only the ultra rich have. A certain famous Celtics basketball player calls it home. High school kids not only have their own cars, they drive awesome cars.

It presents interesting parenting challenges. Where growing up I used to envy my friends' Guess jeans, my kids envy their friends' four houses (this is not an exaggeration; one of Maddy's friends indeed has that many). At the very least, a LOT of people we know have a "place on the Cape" where they summer. Whereas we summer at home happily.}

Now for the amble:

Every time someone says they are going to the Cape, I always remember my first summer in the Boston area. Years before moving here for good, I came for a summer in high school to earn a little money and live with my aunt and uncle and cousins. I worked at McDonald's & made a few friends there, mostly college students home for the summer and high schoolers like me. Because I was from a small college town in Utah and younger than everyone else, I was kind of treated as the ditsy mascot, a role I constantly tried to rise above.

One Friday, in between chucking stale fries and serenading each other over the drive-thru headphones, we were discussing our weekend plans. Someone asked "what are you doing, Annie?"

I knew there was a special in-the-know name for where we were going so I gave it a try:

"We're going to The Cod!" I announced confidently.

Uh, the raucous laughter clued me in right away. Not the Cod. The Cape.

Ohhhhh.

So close and yet so wrong.

And, really, who would even want to go someplace called the Cod?

{Postamble: I hope I haven't told that story here before. Lately I worry about repeating myself. Shouldn't I be about 4 decades older before worrying about that?}