His story lessons

 The conversation in the car was lively. 

With his father driving and me in the backseat, my son rode shotgun as we drove four hours west. 

“Can you imagine getting to Buffalo before the interstate system? How about the canal system? Major trade center of the whole #%*€€?!> world. The canal system was made so merchants from the South could bring goods up North without traveling along the coast. The steam-powered boats traveled relatively fast up the canal -- a straight line to where they wanted to go: up the Mississippi, all the way to the Great Lakes, and over. 

"Yeah, yeah," I said, but he wasn't finished.

"Tobacco and indigo and cotton was the cargo ... they were the most profitable, in that order, probably because they only thought this special cotton produced in a small area of North Carolina was lucrative. Mainly they sold indigo and tobacco back to the British. 

"Meh. Mercantilism." But my mind was swimming. 

The last time I made this trip my mother and I got caught in a spring blizzard. The year was 1987 and I was visiting the school to which my transfer was a foregone conclusion. Of course, as I steered my parents’ brand new Accord into the fourth skid of the journey, I was having doubts.

It was a good trip, though, and one I remember fondly. My mother was charmed by all the things that went sideways: the white-out snow, a packed and peppy Peter’s Pub, a campus tour that featured a coed dorm where a flood of frat boys filed into the hall at just the moment our group passed wearing nothing but towels. 

A part of me thinks she was disappointed I went elsewhere. 

I suppose I was, too, when my son said the university was on his “list.”

We’d passed two or three locks before my husband started to explain how they work and how many they number.  

"See that over there? It looks like a couple of guard houses in the water? Those go down into the canal to keep the water high so boats can float on through. They can also aid in flood control, backing off some of the water.”

“What used to be commercial is now recreation.”

As the conversation started to get a little heated, traffic in front of us slowed down to a crawl. The husband took it as a sign to try his car’s autopilot feature. He readily admits he’s robot overlord curious, but only to a point. 

With his hands hovering at five and seven, the car inched forward on its own. An alarm dinged loudly whenever the steering wheel felt neglected. 

“I guess it doesn’t trust itself much either,” the boy sneers. 

“What is that,” he points at the map on the dashboard screen. “Is that … a poop emoji?”

Well, it’s pretty sh*tty.

When the traffic clears, my husband returns to analog steering and my son returns to DJing and lecturing on his understanding of Drake and Kentrick Lamar’s discography of diss tracks. It is a history lesson in its own right. 

Pretty soon we’ve made it to the finger lakes. 

"The fingers are pointing down, but they can seriously hold wine," quipps my husband. 

The boy is not amused.

"Seneca Falls is where women’s suffrage started," he retorts. "You know they had to get a man to rent out the hall - the Wesleyan Chapel -  where they held the convention because women weren’t allowed to.”

That’s when the conversation takes a left, careering into his own family’s feminist history. 

“Remember that time we went to Grandma’s house and we all thought she had gotten a Dodge Charger, but it was just a muscle-bound looking Prius? 

We pass the next hour reading roadsides aloud with snarky commentary.

“Oh look; the greatest exporter of American Freedom, Lockheed Martin!”

“Rome? 

“Liverpool… Can we not think up our own names?”

Maybe we should change the subject, our driver suggests.

"Don’t you think bucket lists are creepy?" his co-pilot obliges.

“No. It’s not like people do them on their deathbeds. It’s something you do when you're young enough to enjoy it.”

“Let’s ask Mom: Hey what’s on your bucket list?”

“Nothing. Bucket lists are creepy."

“Thank you!”

"I just enjoy spending time with you weirdos."