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Imagine that you are a writer. You probably are. You would not be reading this if you were not.
I am writing this, therefore I am a writer. Whenever I intend to right fiction it is usually short stories. I do not have what it takes to write a novel, or even a novelette. Most, if not all, my writings regardless of subject, always slip into my experiences and very often memories of experiences. Up to now I have not written pure fiction. I will now write a true fiction story.
The subject is Summer Camp. I’ve never been to summer camp. One reliable source to my stories, myself, cannot help me
My fiction story.
Summer is on its way out and the fall is gently moving in. Without any notice it follows summer’s beloved warmth. Along the way it is giving relief to all those trees that got tired and bored with monotonous green.
I am ten years old. I am in a state of continuous confusion. My parents told me that it I time I socialize with other kids.
“You are not a child anymore. You are soon going to enter puberty.”
“Daddy, where is puberty?”
My dad turns to my mom and says: “Goodness gracious, didn’t you talk to this child about things.”
“No, I thought you did. You two spend a lot of time together. And, you always read her stories at bedtime.”
“Regardless, it is mother’s task to explain things to the girls. If we had a son, I would tell him everything.”
I am sitting on the floor in the living room and sorting out my dolls according to their size and type of outfits they were. I have m or4e dolls with casual outfits and only twelve in a formal dress.
“Mommy, will you get me more dolls in a formal outfit?”
“When you stop playing with dolls that is when you enter puberty. Your mother will tell you all about it.”
Door bell rings. I run to answer it. There stands a young man in boy-scout uniform. He is very handsome. More handsome than my favorite actor.
Hello, young lady, are you ready to get on the bus with us and go to the summer camp?”
“Oh, yes, yes, I am ready.”
I go, quickly, to hug mommy and daddy. Glancing on my dolls spread on the floor, I tell them: “You can give those dolls away, I am not playing with them any more.”
“That is grown up thing to do!” said the most handsome man. I did not know that he came in, but I am glad he did. Now he could see how I entered puberty. I am also so glad that my dad told me how it is going to happen.
I am going to my first summer camp not as a girl playing with dolls but as puberty who can talk to my very handsome counselor as almost grown up.
My first summer camp was just like “Midsummer’s Night Dream”.
All the games we played, swimming, doing arts and crafts, sleeping with eight more girls in one room and doing everything in a group, all of that was wonderful. I certainly learned how to socialize. My parents wish came through.
At the end of day we sometime had camp fire and my one and only handsome counselor would tell us stories and, sometimes, sing with a guitar. I sat as close to him as I could. It was wonderful to be in puberty Summer camp was just heavenly.
My memories of summer camp are fuzzy. I grew up a city born bug-wus in Philadelphia. To this day, my idea of “roughing it” is no cable. Yet I found myself in the Poconos with a bunch of other 8 to 12 year olds. It was the same camp my parents had sent my sister to a few years before. When she returned, she hugged the refrigerator. When I came home, I was covered in mosquito bites. I hated bugs and the “great outdoors”. The notable irony of this seems to be that the environment that made me so jumpy as a kid is now what I look for as an adult.( I am still working on the whole bug-wus thing though.) I look for opportunities to find peace and appreciate the beauty around me.
I was shy and bookish and had no experience with inner city kids. I barely dodged being bullied. Mercifully, I made one friend for those two weeks. We tried to catch frogs and promised we’d keep in touch. We never did (on either count). I found it nerve wracking to be away from home by myself. Weird to think that I was so nervous at home, you’d think that getting away would have been a relief. Maybe if I had gotten out of the city a little before, it wouldn’t have been such a shock to the system. It’s also a reminder of how little social skills I had at the time.
There were no indelible lessons or exceptional experiences so much as missed opportunities. If I had it to do over again, I would have made more of an effort to relax and build some confidence. I had only been to summer camp once (possibly an indication of how much I enjoyed it?).
When I was going to camp, there was no question of what kind of camp, there was just camp. It reminds me of college and how cable, the internet, and refurbished dorms came after I graduated. There was a campfire, singing badly, and bad food. I also remember small pup tents, 3 or 4 bodies piled in a tent. There was a yell of “Daddy long legs!”, followed by squealing, a vacated collapsed tent, and yelling counselors. I remember looking for mail and how two weeks can seem like forever when you’re ten. Back then, singing “Amsterdamn!” at the top of your lungs was the closest we came to cursing. Oooooh, we were so bad!
How things have changed. Now that we are parents, I hope can avoid transferring my fears to our daughter. My bad nerves made it very difficult to focus on some amazing scenery over the years. It’s amazing to me that how the presence of someone so small can make such a huge change in how you think. Like any parent, I hope she learns my lessons earlier. I spent more of my time than I would have liked trying to figure things out. If she goes to camp, I would like it give her the experience of what camp should be, a fun way to learn how to really see the world around you. ( I would still send her with a bottle of “Off” though!)
It’s so weird to be writing about this now – about this weird-o-guy who I don’t really know, but who, sometimes now is the only adult I talk to in a whole day.
I look out my window of my newly built house and see a short man with a light colored crew cut cutting the lawn at the Holtzman’s house next door. I know they are not due to come back to their house for the season until the end of June, but here it is, June 5th and there is this guy not only cutting their grass but walking around the property like he owns it. Cutting, clipping, shoveling mulch, weeding, sawing off dead branches from trees, and taking hours to arrange rocks. Yes, rocks – small rocks.
His shirt if off and his body is very muscular, not an once of fat. He lights a cigarette and takes a break before this job, as if to mentally prepare for this odd little task. He drags deeply on his cigarettes, staring at the end of them after he inhales and then flicks the ashes to the ground. He smokes them down to the filter. So, yes: The Arranging of the Rocks. He has made a semi-large pile of all the stray rocks in the front and back yard and now he takes one at a time and puts it in his hand for a second longer than normal, massaging it, testing it’s weight, and then gingerly lays it down on the edge of a flower bed. He starts with a large one and then finds another one who’s smooth or either jagged edges fit snuggly against the previous one on the ground. Almost like the ‘balancing rock art’, but this one is horizontal, not vertical – on the ground and no one will probably ever notice how perfectly each rock touches it’s partners on either side.
But Tommy does. I learn his name after Lee across the street tells me. This is after I start hearing noises on a daily basis outside the house and I look out the window to see him working on the Lucas’s lawn and Betty’s lawn and Peter’s lawn – all around me. Who is this guy?
Our house is only one of a handful at the end of a dead-end, dirt road. Brush Pond Road. On the edge of the Lagoon Pond. All the houses are hodge-podges, thrown together old beach houses….not beautiful, weather beaten, shingled beach houses, but old, crusty, moldy – campy houses. ‘In fact,’ Lee tells me, “this whole area used to be a camp. Tommy’s grandfather owned all of the land at one time and then built little campy-houses that he rented out and then, eventually, sold off – one at a time. Tom grew up in this neighborhood, on the pond and the ocean beyond it. His mother owned your house and his aunt owned Betty’s house and his grandfather owned my house, etc, etc. Tommy had the best years of his life here….then…” Lee stopped then with the story-telling and looked at the ground as he rubbed his chin. I waited for him to tell the rest of the story, but he changed the subject and I knew he was done telling me all he had to tell.
It was Ginny, next door, who eventually told me that it was the usual or unusually sad story of alcohol and an abusive, evasive father who eventually leaves the family and a wounded teenage boy who is left to take care of his flawed mother and sisters. The mother moves to a less desirable area of the island, the sisters all leave the island, but he stays and tries and tries and tries to make it all stick together. But he becomes unglued somewhere along that road and is now left with whispered labels attached to his aura; drunk, druggy, mental, loser. I ask Ginny if he is someone to stay away from and she says, “No, not Tommy, he’s harmless.” There is some hesitation in her answer.
I hire a highly recommended professional lawnscaping firm to mow my grass every other week. They come in their big trucks and push fancy, high powered machinery all around my lawn – dark, glistening bodies. Pushing it hard. Working hard for the white woman. They come in a gang and make lots of noise for an hour or so and then are gone. The large bill comes and my husband and I stare at it in disbelief. What has happened here? Can’t we mow our own lawn? It’s too big here, I say. The lawn mower broke, remember? Do you really have the time to do it? Nah, we both say with exasperated sighs. Life has gotten kinda complicated and busy.
For some reason the men and their machines stop coming on schedule and only show up once in a great while. I bemoan to my husband. I threaten to buy a mower and do it myself. Then one day, Tommy, bangs on my door. Hard! He’s a loud, hard door-banger. It jars and freightens me all at once. I am a woman, alone in a house in the middle of the day and I know no other neighbors are home. I have to answer the door though. I pull it open as aggressively as possible and say; “Yeah?”. He turns his head to the side, never looking me in the eye when he talks and asks if I need my lawn cut? We negotiate the details; I feel his anger the whole while.
That was two years ago and now it is the end of the summer, again. Something inside of me has softened towards him. Maybe because he reminds me of my own brother named Tom, who, also has had a tortured life of mental anguish and self-doubt. “Keep him away from the girls”, is what Jim has to say to this. Ok, I agree. I feel guilty doing it, but I ask the girls not to talk to him and never, ever be alone with him. For some reason, I want them to be afraid.
I watch him sitting out on one of the old Adirondack chairs I have at the end of the lawn. He sits and smokes on his break as he stares out over the water, one leg draped up over the edge of the arm of the chair. Watching and watching and waiting. Waiting and remembering. I too stop and watch him when he is out there. I watch him as he takes a drag on his cigarette and cocks his head to the side as if he hears something. He’s listening so intensely. Does he hear the calls of the osprey as it searches desperately for it’s food in the water? Or is he hearing old voices; remembering a better, more carefree time when he and his friends and sisters ran over these grasses and marshes and played and dreamed. Dreamed of their big lives coming down the road. I can almost see their ghosts chasing each other on my back lawn as my own kids do now. Is Tommy seeing ghosts or merely remembering better days?
The sunsets here have a way of hinting at false promises. Bands of pastels shriek across the sky that ‘life is good’, ‘life is getting better, life is gold’
….gold sunsets and summer camps. Aaaahhh, Tommy, when will you be home?
It’s hard to write about summer camp when it feels like the country is going to hell in a handbasket. Besides I didn’t go to summer camp. And, well, there is the little problem that I can’t really think about anything but the fact that I might have to start food shopping like my Depression era parents did (we had tuna fish in the basement for my entire adolescence and adult life because of one sale down at the First National and a father who had been preparing for the second Depression since the first one), stop my Starbucks latte addiction, and begin an honest to goodness adult budget (which I have avoided for, honest to goodness, my entire adult life). I am worried. I am worrying a groove right into my foreheard (for which I will not be able to afford botox to remedy). The “What if’s” have taken up residence in my head. What if wrinkly old white guy and unqualified hockey mom (who cannot seem to make a grammatical sentence and who insults my intelligence and makes me want to have a hysterectomy so that I will not have anything in common with her) get the white house jobs. What if the war goes on for the next 100 years? What if the stock market goes subterranean?
What if my husband loses his job?
What if they come and take my house?
And my kids?
And worst of all, my new puppy?
Summer camp? Who can write about summer camp?
The world, as my mother would say if she weren’t dead, “is in a shit mess.” My mother was eloquent like that. But she would be right. I remember a family story about my sister being upset about something and my mother telling her to get out the world atlas and find Connecticut on the page and see how teeny tiny it was, then find Bethel (our town) on the page and see that it was even teeny tinier, and that if it was that teeny tiny, her problem couldn’t be very big. Well, I don’t know what she would say about the vast list of issues our country is facing today, but I’m pretty sure the whole world atlas thing wouldn’t work.
I am not really a glass half empty kind of gal and I’m not a glass half full kind of gal either. I roll somewhere in the middle of the two, basically preferring to drink straight out of the bottle and not look at whether said bottle is empty or full. There’s liquid in there. This means there is the possiblity. Of course, the other part of that bottle is empty, which means there is possibility of imminent disaster. This, to me, means, that everything could work out just fine, or everything could end up in the toilet.
Watching the news makes me want to go online and shop for really expensive handbags. If they’re selling really expensive handbags, things can’t be that bad. In some bizarre way, it soothes me to live in the world of supple leather grain and alligator and ostrich with handles, while the economy tanks and people are losing their retirement, their homes and their slice of the American dream. It makes me feel like things are still ok if you can still buy a bag to carry around your crap for the absurd amount of $2,500.
Sometimes I just focus on my small life to quell my fears. My daughter’s inability to stop talking in class, her superstar soccer skills that’s catapulted her to playing with our town’s most elite girls, her messy room, her perfect nose, my son just being cast as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls, his ability to act like an eight year old, or an eighteen year old on any given day, his amazing personality, his addiction to facebook. The hope that maybe my husband’s see saw ride start-up company might actually find the cure for Parkinson’s disease. When I’m particularly anxious I busy my mind with who will win Dancing with the Stars, how cute the psycho meaney head creative director on Mad Men is, how I can re-decorate my office for under $3.00, what I will make for dinner that all four of us will like, how my puppy is my favorite person in the house. These are the things I can sometimes hyper focus on to alleviate my terror on days when the news is just too real and I’d prefer to view it as a sitcom.
I believe in Barack Obama. His calm and commanding demeanor makes me feel like I’m eating macaroni and cheese and sitting by a warm fire–safe and secure. At this point, I think to myself that I like him so much I can’t imagine why he’d even want to be president.
I suppose I could be accused of doing exactly what Governor Palin did during the debate, by ignoring the prompt, in the same way that the winking beauty queen contestant ignored Gwen Ifil’s questions and droned on in her terribly broken english about whatever talking points she and her debate preppers deemed important. But I am not doing that. I’m not.
I’m simply writing about the only thing I can write about at this moment in time. The thing that’s on my mind when I go to bed and when I wake up. Our country is on the cusp, the precipice, the very edge. It feels like it could tumble into the sea, or redefine itself as something new and different, something better. I’m praying to all my Gods that we’ll be ok, that my kids will inherit a place to live that’s smarter, more peaceful, healthier, a place that’s paying attention, whose screaming wake up call was answered. I pray. And I hope. And I shop. For really expensive handbags.
I never went to summer camp. When I was a kid, our “enrichment” program included running around, riding bikes, playing baseball, getting filthy, dancing through a sprinkler, and waiting for the Good Humor man. Every summer, my best friend spent two weeks at 4-H Camp. That was a big deal and considered quite adventurous. She loved it, and shared stories of canoeing, hiking and all sorts of mischievous deeds. And boys.
My son went to day camp. We tried for several summers to give him an outlet for fun and adventure. He didn’t quite fit in with the Eddie Bauer crowd. When he was about six, we sent him to an insect program at the local Audubon society. I pictured him traipsing through the forest, collecting all sorts of interesting creatures. They made bugs out of paper plates, and went on a guided hike where he was reprimanded for veering off to catch a dragonfly or butterfly or some such thing. I hope that one day he will find his summer niche, with friends that appreciate him.
What I crave is a summer camp for slightly over-the-hill, down-to-earth mothers who need some adult conversation and a dollop of peace and quiet. A little sleep wouldn’t hurt either. A couple of good books and some uninterrupted writing would be nirvana.
At my summer camp, we’d all have private little cabins with baths – I did the dorm room thing at eighteen and wasn’t particularly fond of it then; a little fridge and a microwave for those late night snacks. I picture the cabins as Spartan and sunny, but sparkling clean, with soothing whitewashed walls, and a rhythmic ceiling fan twirling our cares away. With a squishy bed, comfy chair, and an ottoman, what else does one woman need?
I dream of lake or ocean views, or perhaps a babbling mountain stream; a little screened porch to enjoy the crisp night air, and a gathering room for girl talk and unabashed laughter, with long conversations that do not revolve around child rearing, crafts, or cooking. Speaking of food, nothing fancy, just home cooked by someone other than me, served with a smile, and cleaned up afterward.
And to this summer camp, I invite you, my Writing From the Heart comrades.
Here in North Louisiana when they say they’re going to “the camp,” they mean a place on a lake or a river. It can be a trailer, a hut, a cabin, or a full-grown house, but it is not a camp. I know – it’s peculiar.
Our camp sits on a finger of land on Lake Claiborne, just off of White Lightning Road, in the hill country. “Take the dog leg turn to the right and then hit Harmon Loop,” I heard Catfish and Alton, our easygoing carpenters, tell someone that summer. We were living at the camp while our house was being remodeled.
“Dog leg turn? What is that?”” I wondered. They explained.
“The road turns back on itself, like the back leg of a dog, see?” Patiently, they used hand motions to illustrate. I remember laughing out loud at the country phrase and their earnest explanation. I spent a lot of time with Catfish and Alton that year. They worked on both our house and the camp, while I was home with my two daughters, who were one and two years old at the time.
It was the summer when I would put Manhattan Transfer on the stereo and dance wildly around the room to “Tuxedo Junction,” one baby in my arms, one swaying happily beside me. One day I looked up and saw Catfish and Alton looking in the window, bemused grins on their bearded faces.
It was the summer that we watched The Little Mermaid every single day, sometimes twice, until the guys began to whistle the reggae number sung by the lobster in that movie, and I decided we all needed a change.
It was the summer that we put a small aqua pool on the deck and the girls spent mornings and afternoons splashing in the water, until they were a sun-washed shade of peach-gold, like those gilt-edged cherubs in paintings.
It was the summer that they often awakened before dawn, and we would sit, transfixed, as the inky night sky over the lake was slashed with a vivid red line that swelled and suffused, until the lake was washed in rosy light.
It was the summer that naptime was my only time to write, so I would grab my journal and my pen the moment they were still, desperate and pent-up, and write feverishly until my hand hurt or there was a cry from their bedroom.
It was the summer I often felt overwhelmed.
I tried to decide what my motherhood journey would look like. Would I stay home? The thought made me gulp for air. But how many of the one-time-only moments was I willing to miss? I literally ached with my love for these two tiny people, already astonishing, strong-willed, and smart. It was the most tender and explosive feeling I’d ever had. Could I reach for a blend – time for me, to work, to create, to contribute to the world, and time for them, to nurture and to savor the particular and piercing pleasure of watching them grow?
I did go for the balance, though I didn’t achieve it often. But now, at the other end of the train ride at breakneck speed that motherhood was for me, I think of that summer at the camp as a snapshot, a sundrenched lakeside souvenir of a golden time.
It was like something out of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. I was overweight as a child but not to the point of debilitation or hypertension or diabetes. I was overweight just enough to be singled out for it in school. The inspiration to finally go to one of those special weight loss camps for teenagers and young adults came the first day of school in eight grade (September ’88) when a boy in my junior high school – one who had been more overweight than I – started the school year thirty pounds lighter. For the first time in my life I felt true envy. I also felt insecure that someone in more of a predicament than me was able to get attention for it. Prior to this my parents would try and limit my food intake to three meals a day. It didn’t help that there were seven older siblings all with an incurable case of the munchies sending me down to the ice cream parlor, pizzeria, or Chinese takeout all at the shopping center at the end of our block.
From that day in September through the early spring of ’89 I gave my parents the sales pitch as to why I should go to the overnight weight loss camp: I could go out for football when I got back, I’d be able to do more yard work without tiring out, and the asthma attacks would become more infrequent. The boy in my school gladly talked to me one day in study hall about all the fun and mayhem of going to the overnight weight loss camp, that the number of girls outnumbered the boys, and that my clothes would be practically falling off just in time for the back to school shopping.
The camp’s price tag aside, this meant also not going to the day camp in our town where a lot of my schoolmates would be for the summer. Instead, in late June 1989 my parents drove me to the opposite other end of the state. The camp was situated in the dorms of one of the small liberal arts colleges. The college campus apparently was leased out to three other camp types, too: basketball camp, cheer leading camp, and the vegetarian wing of Elder Hostel.
The Ralph Ellison motif overtook me right away. The basketball players teased us all for being so heavy, the girls at cheer leading camp wouldn’t give myself and the other 14 and 15 year-old boys a second look, and the elderly vegetarians one day in the laundry room started telling us that it was meat, processed food, and cola drinks that had made us all obese. Not taking into consideration that some people have lazy glands or ate to cover their emotions and trauma or ate out of suburban boredom. When not being ridiculed or ostracized by these three fringes I was alienated for being only 30 or so pounds overweight. There were boys in my group that were told not to bother showing up for football or soccer practice if the weight hadn’t come off, girls who had been going to these camps their whole lives but with now signs of progress, and the other set of girls who were their parents convinced them that they had a weight problem. So I went from being one of the token fat kids in junior high school to being not heavy enough to understand the frustrations these other people were experiencing. My mother never had to buy my clothes from a special catalog; I didn’t need insulin, and wasn’t close to giving up on life at 14.
Of everyone I met at camp the only one I could identify with was one of the boy’s counselors Randy. During my junior high and high school years I took both guitar and karate lessons. Thankfully Randy had packed his guitar and Neil Young song book and his Karate uniform. He was also around the age of my older siblings so I was able to identify with his age group. My guitar teacher had leant me a small student’s model which Randy gladly went out and re-strung and tuned for me. I showed him what Beatles songs I knew and he opened me up to the world of Neil Young and all of the different bands and genres he spanned.
The music and sparring kept me distracted for a short while. In the month I was there I did manage to lose ten pounds. I wasn’t that far off from the correct weight for my height so the loss wasn’t that rapid. So, in comparison to that conversation I’d had in study hall, the weight was not magically disappearing. I started to sink. The camp counselors and other campers would ask if something was wrong, if I had been crying, or if I was about to start crying. I told them I was fine, that my eyes were read due to the pollen, or – to get sympathy from the girls – that I was homesick. Despite the fact that we were not allowed to call home – camp director’s rule, he wanted us to be able to call home with this big surprise – I patrolled around the college campus looking for payphones and finally came across a bank of them. After the first week and a half I called home and asked if I could come home a week early. I didn’t want to admit failure or confess to my parents that they were right in being hesitant about my going to this camp. That I just wanted to get home, see my friends, and follow the new dietary guidelines at home for the rest of the summer. Even Randy couldn’t help me out of this rut. The two girls that I “dated” (in the way 14 year-olds date) Jennifer and Stephanie couldn’t get through to me and I didn’t feel like breaking my macho façade to tell them why this had gone so terribly wrong. One of the other campers said to me at some point, “What have you got to worry about? You’re practically a pencil!” Instead of encouraging she somehow exacerbated it.
There was no way to start a pick-up game with the basketball players as they would order pizzas to their dorm rooms and then have the empty boxes and crusts sent up to our floors with nasty notes taped to the outside. The cheerleaders were all one big clique and refused to adjust their upturned noses. Even though I knew kids like them from my own suburb there was not getting through to them.
My parents did finally come for me. Some teenagers get a sense of embarrassment from their parents. That last day of camp it poured rain heavily and I worried that my parents were going to be late or stuck somewhere. Some time that afternoon my father pulled up in his Oldsmobile. My mother was the first to get out in her elegant, educated way to greet me. My father dressed dapper even in an LL Bean polo shirt and Bermuda shorts. I had this new found respect and admiration for them. The month before I left for camp we had gotten two small mixed lab puppies. Since I was away at camp they both had doubled in size. The emotional greeting from two puppies at the end of a grueling month is like no other.
I started high school six weeks after that. For the entire summer I had managed to lose in the neighborhood of fifteen pounds. It was hard to say because my growth spurt began on the second day of high school and that summer’s worth of success had been disposed of as I transitioned from adolescent to full-on, independent minded teenager. The Ralph Ellison sensation didn’t subside either. Even with all the fat coming off due in part to hitting the growth spurt I still wasn’t being invited to join study groups, or feel better about myself, or start getting invited to parties. I spent the remainder of high school in this purgatorial phase being too nerdy for the mainstream kids but didn’t have the grades for the National Honor Society, not withdrawn enough to hang out with the burnouts but too bloodshot and spent for the young party animals, etc. Last, even when I was 18 and for the first time in my life at my goal weight I didn’t fit in with anyone. And had even started coming out to a few friends but was not this legitimate example of Gay America. So, the four weeks at camp were not a waste. In addition to the guitar chords I started the preparation for being a non effeminate homosexual, a husky Irishman but not a candidate for gastric bypass, and too much of one thing but not enough of another.
