By
Esther Baird
First Published in the Chronicle Transcript, Apr. 5, 2021
It’s happening, the winter of our totally supercharged discontent is fading. There are signs of life including crocuses, daffodils, buds and the return of ticks to let us know that, “we have not,” to quote a very important movie, “gone quietly into the night, we have not vanished without a fight.”
Look, either “Independence Day” is a metaphor for your life or it’s not. I can’t help you if alien civilizations don’t feature prominently into your personal meta narrative. Regardless, like the flowers blooming from beneath the last gasp of unmelted snow, we are emerging to see what’s been going on since we locked ourselves away.
And so in pursuit of that noble cause, and because our newly turned 14-year-old daughter had gift cards burning a hole in the very core of her soul, I took her and two friends into the city last weekend.
Regular readers, I am here to tell you the city is bumping! It’s probably not even close to non-pandemic times — but to my suburban self where the malls still close at 6 p.m. and it’s hectic if I pass three other dog walkers each day — it felt dizzyingly alive. We wandered through Cambridge, ate near Harvard, watched buskers rocking out on various street corners, and lollygagged along the Charles River. Families sat on picnic blankets, bikers whizzed by, rowers rowed and generally everyone was smiling (at least their eyes looked smiley above the masks). It was warm, sunny and we weren’t locked in our homes doing llama puzzles like this time last year.
After we’d had our fair share of teen touring, including a stop at the quirky, but wonderfully fun, Go Pixel Yourself selfie museum at the Cambridge Side Mall, we were ready to go use the gift cards. There was one store in particular that is the current hotbed of teen fashion that our daughter and her friends were set on going to in the Back Bay area. I gamely took them, thinking I had my teen fashion angst under control after I survived the return of mom jeans.
When we got there, we found that the COVID capacity limits meant there was a line to enter. This allowed me to observe that every girl in the line, all 40 or 50 of them, wore either jeans that had encountered a weed whacker, or a skirt that forgot most of its tiny little floral printed fabric. These were paired with a shirt that accidentally stopped right below the ribs, and then — the pièce de résistance — the giant, baggy sweatshirt that made all these fine fashion details vanish beneath a blanket of thick grey cotton.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry that the giant sweatshirt hid the sliced and diced clothes, because on the other hand, it was so huge I could barely find my own child. Not that I could pick her out if I wanted to, given the identical nature of each outfit.
“OK sweetie, just stand with your friends so I can get a picture of you!” I called in the general direction I thought I’d left her.
“Mom!” she hissed. “No pictures, stop it, it’s not the right time.”
I groped forward towards her, “What? I hear you, but I can’t tell where you are … all the girls in this line look alike. Oh no, I’ve lost you! Where are you!? Where is my daughter!?”
“MOM!”
I sighed and took a quick picture anyway because I’m the mom, and I drove their identical little selves there, and quite frankly I was bored out of my very middle-aged mind.
Finally we made it in. I won’t tell you how long it took because it’s embarrassing. This store is known for its “aesthetic” and “palette” which is the new fangled ways the kids talk about what I call “style” and “color.” For example, my aesthetic is Mom in a Minivan, and my palette is eerily similar to “denim blue” and “yoga-pant black.”
This store’s aesthetic was minimalistic and low key. The palette was muted earth tones, cloud covered skies and a color that I whispered to my daughter, “looks like when a baby has a dirty diaper and…”
“Stop it!” she snapped. Nothing low key there.
My daughter bought a giant oversized sweatshirt the color of dried grass clippings and a small piece of fabric — maybe a shirt? It was the color of weathered patio furniture that got left out all winter.
But I’ll take it. The lockdown aesthetic is slowly fading, pinks and yellows and greens are blooming outside, and we did not vanish without a fight — at least with aliens. With teenagers? Well that’s just a sign of things returning to normal.