And Bach is Better
Good Morning.
For some reason I am thinking about my summer camp experiences on a cold, blustery day with six inches of snow on the ground. I started off down a generally unpleasant path when I was six or seven at a day camp and was picked up and dropped off at a corner near my house by a school bus pressed into service for the summer. I was on the blue bus even though it was yellow, and we sang songs like Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall. No Home on the Range on the blue bus.
The camp was by a small lake where we took daily swimming lessons. I hated them but I learned to swim and dive well enough to not make a complete fool of myself. The campers were assigned to Indian tribes with the boys called Apaches and Blackfeet and the girls Chippewas and Navajos.
I was a Chippewa. Today that stuff would be politically incorrect but who knows what campers should be called now. Maybe lions and bears for the boys and lambs and flamingos for the girls, except the mothers of the girls would probably say their daughters should be lions and bears. You can't win.
When I was ten I was sent to an overnight camp in the Catskill Mountains of New York. The girls were in one location and the boys were down the road in another, and the only time we saw each other was at something that was supposed to be a dance on Saturday night. It wasn't. Most of us just sat on the benches against the walls and stared across the room at a bunch of scary creatures we didn't want anywhere near us.
We lived in tents that slept four comfortably with plenty of room for our foot lockers and duffle bags where we kept our shorts, shirts, pajamas, towels, and swimwear. Everything had to have a name tape. Meals were eaten in an open air pavilion and the food was excellent. It was the only thing I enjoyed about the camp because I was miserably homesick. Mail call was held every afternoon at five o'clock, and if I didn't get a letter I felt as if the world was coming to an end. There were a lot of rich South and Central American girls at the camp, and one of my tent mates
didn't speak much English. I didn't speak any Spanish, of course, but we managed to communicate and she was even more homesick than I was.
The bathrooms were a communal arrangement. Everyone showered together under a long row of showerheads and regularly soaping your head and the rest of yourself was a required activity. It was horrifying and so was getting dressed and undressed in a tent with three other girls. At home I had my own room and could shut and lock the door. I had long since informed my family members that I intended to bathe and change my clothes in private and deal with it.
I took horseback riding that summer and my favorite horse was a palomino. He was gorgeous but I was a lousy equestrian. My best effort happened when I could sit at a picnic table during Arts and Crafts and make bracelets and lanyards out of colored plastic strips. I continued with my swimming lessons and made little progress. I was also not fond of canoeing.
The month ended on a really appalling note when a girl named Gail Danaher from The Bronx told several of us gathered in my tent all about sex. She was the only girl whose name I remember and small wonder. I hadn't had The Talk up to that point and confronted my mother within one minute of walking in the front door at the end of July. She sat me down in a chair and discussed the matter in medical terms that made me shake my head and threaten to throw up on the spot. I didn't go to another camp until after my senior year in high school when I went to a music camp in the Massachusetts Berkshires where there were no tents and no swimming lessons but fabulous music and plenty of privacy. One of my roommates, a cellist, snuck out at night to meet her boyfriend, a pianist, in the woods, and we talked quite a lot about sex that summer. Somehow it wasn't quite as distressing.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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