What Happened to Capture the Flag?

Emme is in the ninth grade. She came back to her old school as alumni to cheer on her former schoolmates who were just graduating from eighth grade. “Hi, Ms. Amanda,” she said, giving me a hug before we took a seat among the rented white chairs that lined the schoolyard. I barely recognized her, looking all grown up and pretty with eyeliner and a smile. She explained what she liked about her new private high school and then I asked her what she was doing this summer, remembering that she usually spent summers with her grandparents. “I’m going to marine biology camp and dance camp while I stay with my grandparents in Hawaii.” I asked her if she thought marine biology might be something she’d like to do as a career, and she smiled, acknowledging the fact that maybe we all knew what we wanted to be back when we were in high school, but some of us had strayed a bit from the path.

Next to her was Sonja, a fair-skinned blonde that looked more like a woman than an adolescent. Sonja was right on track toward her dream and spent most breaks from school doing some sort of ballet prep. This summer was no different. “I’m taking a ballet camp at City Ballet and then I might take a trip to Thailand with my parents.” I told her how I had lived in Bangkok, thinking this might interest her to ask me a few questions. “Yeah, we went to Bangkok and Chiang Mai last time,” she said as if it were old news. “And this time we’re talking about going to the South, down to the islands.”

I flashed back to my own memories of summer camp. Since my mom had to work everyday, she put me into a day camp run by the parks and recreation department. All of the campers wore orange t-shirts on field trips to zoos and museums so that we stuck out among all the other suburban kid camps. We played Cowboys and Indians, which felt real among the tall pine trees in the park, and after came Capture the Flag in big fields we laughed in while trying to avoid being tagged by our camp counselors. When I got a bit older, I went to sleep-away camp in the woods of Michigan, not far from Lake Michigan and its sand dunes.