In Defense of Travel Teams

Like any instinctive conservative, I wanted to give my children the kind of childhood I had. I had all the rudiments of what is now wistfully called a “free-range childhood.” Well, sometimes I had them by default. My single mother worked hard in her job at IBM, and would be late some nights.  My father was estranged from us, and lived across an ocean. My grandmother, who watched me in the afternoons, gave me the same kinds of instructions she gave her own kids in that very same house: “Come back when the street lights turn on.” In the late 1980s, the neighborhood kids organized games among ourselves. There was a park around which all the homes in my neighborhood were encircled, with trees and shrubs that could serve as the outlines of a baseball diamond.