I slept in a cabin with my girls group and counselor, learned how to tread water for ten minutes to teach me the skill so that I would never drown, was taught how to ride horseback, and shot an occasional arrow at an archery target. All of these camp activities were my own choice. They were options that I had never tried before, but I still enjoyed myself, even when I discovered that I wasn’t very good at shooting arrows.
Back at the school graduation, I spotted an older Mason. Mason had been my school mascot, the little three-year-old that I had loved during my years in the office. I almost didn’t recognize him until I spotted him with his parents, whom I had also loved. Sam, his father, would drop Mason off at preschool in those early years and talk to him in both English and Spanish. “Besos,” he’d say and Mason would turn back to give his dad a hug and kiss before falling out of his Toyota truck into my hand so that I could teach him how to walk into school on his own. Sam and Diana explained to me that Mason would be going to a Spanish Immersion camp this summer. “What about playing outside?” I said. “Well, he gets two hours of Spanish a day and then they go swimming at the Mission Bay pool.” If Mason weren’t fluent in Spanish already, he surely would be by the end of the summer.
For the older kids there were SAT prep camps held at universities around the country. There were also computer camps that taught texture mapping, Linux programming, and robotics. Then there was the camp that a friend’s granddaughter had gone to last summer, which allowed her to make her first demo music CD. She had played me the CD in their car and I couldn’t believe that it had been the voice of a teenager. While her voice was spectacular, and it was brilliant to get this kid turned onto the arts, I wondered about all of this talent. If found in the first half of their lives, what would be left to conquer come mid-life when you needed to reinvent yourself all over again?
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