Disappointment: When the sleepaway camp you’ve sent your child to sends out its weekly wrap-up cache of literally six-hundred-&-seventy-nine (679) photographs, and your boy shows up … kinda … in only one (1) of them.
As recently mentioned, we’d fielded a first note from Oliver -– sequestered up in Vermont for four weeks of summer camp -– that had evidently been penned three days after we’d dropped him off. The tone of that note suggested that our son was grappling with a dash of homesickness, which was not unexpected given that this experience marks his first-ever substantial amount of time away from home. Some fleeting images, however, of our boy mixing and mingling with his fellow campers from their first full week buoyed our confidence that he probably wasn’t entirely miserable. This was supported by a note from his group leader that suggested Oliver had been branching out, making new friends outside of his cabin and making the best of it. That's what we wanted to hear. But, not to be too cynical, of course he was going to say that.
Back here at home, the entire family has kept firing off postcards to our youngest, hopefully providing him some love and support from afar. But we’ve all been quietly hoping that he’s just been getting on with things and is now too engaged with proceedings to be in any dire need of any cheering up.
After four days out at my mom’s place in Quogue, we came home hoping to have received a second letter from the boy -- ideally one rife with contentment -- but the mailbox was bare. Similarly, when the camp updated its photo page (as they allegedly do every Monday), we were greeted with an unwieldy avalanche of images of grinning, beatific boys in the throes of a host of summertime activities -– but only spotted our Oliver once, … and, really, only sorta kinda.
Zooming into a photo of five kids, Oliver appears as below, his face obscured. We have no clue if he’s smiling, having fun or any real context of the picture whatsoever. Now, it’s not like I’m calling in a forensics expert to pore over the graphic minutia of this image like a snippet of the Zapruder film, but I’m not going to lie. It was kind of a bummer.
Again, when my surly, reluctant butt was sent off to summer camp in 1980, there was no e-mail. No websites. No easily shared photographic evidence of my experience, let alone documentation of my survival. I was dropped off, sent a few postcards and then picked up several weeks later. Everyone survived more or less without incident. End of story.
Tomorrow marks the official midpoint of Oliver’s time away. In the grand scheme of things, these four weeks are but a tiny blip, but -- as you can probably surmise – I’m quite looking forward to having him back.
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