Polo

So it just happened to come up on my first tour today that I was from Manchester-by-the-Sea. At the beginning of every tour I always start out by asking if there's anyone from out of town (and then when almost everyone raises their hands I say with mock surprise, "Wow. Almost the whole Duck. That's exciting. We rarely get tourists on these things so it's always kind of fun when we do.") and then I ask people where they're from. No one had mentioned that they were from Massachusetts. But then by the stadiums when I asked what baseball teams my passengers cheered for (as you can see, I like to make my tour interactive. This mostly backfires, much like it did when I would use the Socractic method exclusively back in the day when I was a pseudo-teacher), I heard "Red Sox" and that lead to a brief back-and-forth when we established we were all from Massachusetts but apparently at the beginning of the tour they had said New Jersey because they were with a group and half of them were from NJ or maybe they moved there recently or something or other. So I'm like, "Oh, I see, you're from MA but you're embarrassed, so you tell people that you're from New Jersey instead." I thought this was a funny thing to say.

Anyway, in the midst of all this, I mentioned that I was from Manchester. After the tour the couple gets off and they look like they could have walked straight off the Manchester Yacht Club launch-- sweater around the neck and all. And the man asks me if I grew up in Manchester and if so, did I know the Littles? When he added that they were "polo people" (which was highly unnecessary because I knew that whether it was polo or yacht club or Essex County club, anyone that this man would claim as a friend was running in one those concurrent circles that in no way intersected with my life, except that I might have washed one of their friend's yachts), I wanted to say, "No, sorry, I don't think I know them. I went to public school."