I am simply not ready for it.
In about three weeks, we’re going to drop off our youngest, Oliver, at a sleepaway camp in Vermont. Our son will spend the following four weeks at said camp, presumably engaging in predictable summer camp activities. While he’s spent a few overnights away from home at friends’ places, this will be Oliver’s first time truly away from home for a relatively extended period of time. Once again, … I am not ready for it.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, none of this was my idea. My wife envisioned this summer as a broadening experience for our little boy. I’m all for that, of course, and do genuinely believe it will be a positive experience for him, but I remain trepidatious about the whole thing. Beyond the fact that he’s never been away from home for that long, at the risk of sounding coy, Oliver is on a strict regimen of meds for a specific condition. Now, the camp in question is a well-established and revered institution, and it’s in their own best interest to make sure that our son stays on that regimen while in their care, but – in my case – having to relinquish that particular level of parental oversight is not going to be easy. Oliver himself is very responsible about his meds, as well, but I’m just going to have to take a leap of faith and let go. I’m not so good at that, generally.
Beyond that concern, though, Oliver should and will, for all intents and purpose, be perfectly fine. Unlike his father, he’s a resilient and open-minded kid, usually very happy to muck in and gamely try his hand at new things. When my wife signed him up for an after-school rugby program, earlier this year, I was – again – incredulous and reluctant. “Have you seen rugby?,” I gasped upon learning that news. “It’s like fuckin’ ‘Braveheart’!” Much to my relief and astonishment, not only did he willingly participate, he actually enjoyed it – and without any incident or injury.
Moreover, I should probably stop referring to him as a “little boy,” here, as Oliver is now 13 years old, which is coincidentally the very same age I was when my parents first sent me away to sleepaway camp at the dawn of the 1980’s. While I was only at that camp – Great Oaks in the wilds of Maine – for a little under a month, my myriad memories of the place are mostly all positive. Mostly.
Beyond taking part in traditional camp activities like swimming, canoeing, hiking, archery and friggin’ riflery (something few camps offer as blithely today, I’d imagine), I made a clutch of new friends, learned a pile of new swear words in different languages (thanks to the camp’s pointedly international flavor) and developed an appreciation for so much great new music. It was at Great Oaks that I first heard It’s Alive by The Ramones, Q: Are We Not Men? by Devo, Give’Em Enough Rope by The Clash and Joe’s Garage by Frank Zappa. That aspect alone was a complete life-changer, for me.
I say “mostly all positive,” however, as there is one memory of my experience there that still bugs me. I invoked it here not too long back, but it involved a water safety/swimming exercise, of a sort. Myself and the other campers were huddled on a dock that extended onto the black, ice cold waters of the otherwise invitingly named Saturday Pond. Our task was to dive into the water, swim to the bottom and grasp a bit of sand or dirt. When we swam back up and broke the surface, we were to extend our hand up and display said dirt, demonstrating that we'd successfully made it to the bottom. When my turn came, I jumped into that dark, forbidding water, but couldn't seem to successfully propel myself downward. I flailed and fought the disorientation, but I couldn't -- or wouldn't -- make it to the floor of that pond. I gave up too soon and broke the surface with a dramatic gasp, my hands uncontaminated by sand or dirt. "That's going to be a problem, Mr. Smith," said our incongruously portly counselor. A perfect cinematic ending to that summer would have found me triumphantly grabbing double-fistfuls of muck from the bottom of Saturday Pond and vaulting them skyward on the last day, but that never happened. I felt ashamed by that failure. 39 years later, I still feel that way.
That all notwithstanding, though, if I’m being honest, while I was invariably not down with the plan to send me to Great Oaks in the first place, I don’t remember really being homesick when I was there. I just kinda got on with it. Being that Oliver has a remarkably better outlook on life than his old man did at that age, I’m imagining that he’ll be just fine.
The real, unavoidable truth of matter, though, is that even though it’s for a comparatively short span of weeks, I’m invariably going to miss him more than I can express with words.
I remain completely unprepared for that.
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