1960s

KATE SPENCER

Growing up, whenever my mom saw I was upset that something wasn’t going my way, or whenever I complained about some rule she made me follow, or something she didn’t let me do, she’d say, “When I was fourteen, my friend Sue invited me to a Beatles concert in New York, but my parents wouldn’t let me go.” My mother often told me this tale throughout my childhood. It was a rebuttal when I complained about her and my dad’s parenting choices, or when I was dealing with a frustration of the teenage variety: not being allowed to stay out past 11 p.m., a strict ban on co-ed sleepovers, no tongue piercings until I was eighteen. Other times she talked about it wistfully—what could have been. She, a shy, quiet teen from a small town in New Hampshire, had been invited by a friend’s family to fly on a commercial plane to New York City and see John, Paul, George, Ringo, and their soft mops of hair—in person. But her parents, adhering to the strict New England WASP code of conduct to never impose on other people even when invited to do so, refused to let her go. Even decades later, the injustice of it all was always implied, her disappointment palpable.

When I started seeing Phish shows as a teenager, my mom—the kind of protective parent who cautioned against driving on “wet leaves” because they were as dangerous as black ice—let me head off down the highway in a friend’s dad’s station wagon, chasing my musical idols for days at a time all over the East Coast. It didn’t dawn on me until much later that maybe her memory of being refused her teen self’s greatest dream influenced her parenting in ways I never realized or appreciated.

Recently I found her old high school yearbooks. Inside were gushing messages from her friends all about the Beatles, complete with mentions of that concert in New York, verified in faded blue ink that still seemed to pulse with promise and excitement.

I don’t know where this photo of her falls on the timeline of things. Was it taken when she thought she was going to experience the big city and the Fab Four, or was it snapped later, when the sour taste of parental letdown and unrealized hopes had set in? Either way, I love her in it; her face has that perfect teenage mix of skepticism and hope, brimming with disappointment but also the possibility that something amazing might just happen to her at any second.