Archives for November 2004

This weekend at camp was great. It was really refreshing and just a pleasure to to be in a special place with people who understood my experience, who understood what camp means because they experienced it too.

As I mentioned in the previous post I really wasn’t gone that long, but it felt like it. Camp time is different, it feels longer and more intense. And it always has. I walked the hills and witnessed a million different stories and memories.

I love to read, biographies, fantasy, science-fiction, history and so much more. In one of my favorite series the author has created a separate world. In one particular place in this world you walk through hills that are supposed to be breathtakingly gorgeous, and at night your dead walk with you.

Yes, the dead walk the hills, but you only encounter those people who have some kind of connection with you. It is not necessarily a scary thing, but there is the usual disconnect between the dead and the living. No matter how much they tell you there are things that you do not understand completely.

At camp it felt a little bit like that. Saturday night in the twilight I walked for a brief time by myself and I could feel my dead walking with me. I have had the misfortune of having buried friends and some of them were at camp, I swear that I could feel them.

But it was really more like the memories of the past poked a hole in the present and I revisited things that I had forgotten. As I sat on the hill and watched the sun disappear behind the mountains I couldn’t help but just let the memories rush across me. And at the same time I wondered what experiences my children will have.

Will it be a place of awe and majesty for them too? Will it be something that they treasure or will it be a burden that they endure to satisfy a parent.

I have trouble davening, it is hard for me to really get into it, to give the kavanah that I want, to have the energy and passion that I know exist within me. But camp is one of those places that I allow myself to open up and there are multiple places of beauty there. When I speak of awe and majesty, it is not hyperbole.

Camp is a place that has an energy that makes it simple to create moments in time. Moments when I step away from the challenges of everyday life and just allow myself to be without worrying about life.

I am a happy person, I have a very good life. But I spend hours feeling like I walk along a path by myself. It has always been this way, I am very comfortable with myself. These moments are the oasis on the path.

OOps, just noticed the time, way too late. Perhaps I’ll return to this later, but probably not. Lailah tov and see you in the A.M.

I survived another weekend at my home away from home. It was pretty cool to be wandering through Ojai again. It was even better to walk through camp and visit my favorite places there.

It was interesting to see what had changed and what was still the same. I went to the spot where I fell in love and the place where I had my heart broken.

I stared at the place where I had my first real kiss, lingered at the bench where I learned a dear friend was going to die and just absorbed the day.

And I played Shabbos basketball. Shabbos ball at camp is an age old tradition. I felt like I was 16 again as I couldn’t wait to stop davening so that I could begin davening on the court. It was awesome.

It was surreal, and special and entertaining. And it was bittersweet. I missed people who should have been there and I missed knowing that I only had to wait for Summer to roll around again and I would be back. Camp is over for me and I am trying to figure out what my role with it should be.

Indian Summer never ends, does it.

My last post made me think. How did I get to be the person I am today? It is not the first time I have thought about it, but it is a question that I like to mull over.

Who am I? Do I like who I am? Am I the person that I want to be? It is like the classic quote from Pirkei Avot, paraphrased here:

“A man receives three names:

The name his parents give him at birth,

The name his friends call him by,

And the name he calls himself.”

To me it is one of the most important and profound things I have ever heard. Character, integrity, are you a mentsch. Who are you and is your image of yourself in line with reality. That is, do people see you as you see yourself and how important is that.

To me it is a balance. You shouldn’t listen to what everyone says about you. But at the same time you should have some people in your life who you can trust to be honest in their opinions about you. People who can tell you when you are acting like an ass.

So if I have to try and give an honest description of myself I would include these thoughts:

Determined, fiercely loyal, stubborn, very sensitive- perhaps too sensitive. I carry past hurts with me for longer than I should, at times I am a dreamer, I am cautious and guarded, I have a wild streak in me and am capable of doing things that just make your jaw drop. Some are good and some are not so good.

I push the envelope, test limits everywhere in people and places. It is not always a good things, sometimes I have trouble knowing when to stop. I love to laugh, just love humor.

When I feel things, I feel them with intensity and passion. I like to think of myself as being cerebral and thoughtful. I am always interested in learning more about life, people and myself.

I compose on the computer and rarely edit anything I write. I don’t like going backwards and posts like this can make me very uncomfortable as I can be very self-conscious.

So if you are wondering why I engage in this kind of thought, it is for two reasons. I am always interested in growing as a person and I happen to think that introspection is good for that.

Beyond that I hope that I can find something in my experience that I can offer to my children, some kind of life lesson that helps them avoid some of my stupid mistakes.

Yes, it is true, I am a little nervous about the big weekend reunion. I’d be lying if I said that my ego wasn’t involved. I don’t look like I did, not really close. I don’t look bad, but I am a little softer in the middle and the hair on my head has been shifting to other places on my body.

Does any of it really matter? Not that much, but enough that it bothers me a little, at least enough to notice.

My introduction to camp was back in the ’70s as part of a Hebrew school weekend when I was around 10 or 11. I was supposed to attend in ’81, but I was “waitlisted” and didn’t actually start going for a full session until 1982. I was 13.

I remember much of that Summer. I wore a cowboy hat on the bus. It wasn’t a hat that I normally wore and I can’t say now why I did it, but I did. It was one of the first things that the other guys noticed about me. Someone asked if I was from Oklahoma.

Since I was the last guy to walk into the tent I got the last available bed, it was a single bed in the middle of the tent. As opposed to the others who had either a top or bottom bunk bed. Just one more thing that made me stand out from the others. Some of the guys took this and the hat as a sign that I might be worth teasing, and they did.

For a while I reacted to it and it continued, things escalated a little. They took my bed and stuck it in the rafters, poked at me with all sorts of remarks and did the junior high things that many of you remember. It was hard, I tried to ignore it, tried to block it out but at 13 I wasn’t very good at it.

It was a four week session and I had been there for about a week and had mixed feelings. I was enjoying much of it, but the teasing was getting to me. It finally culminated in a night in which I woke up because I felt something rubbing against my face. One of the other boys was rubbing his penis against my face.

I jumped out of bed in a rage. He took one look at my face and ran out of the tent, naked. I was right behind him screaming obscenities and a promise that the broom I carried with me would not be used for sweeping.

He was saved by a couple of counselors who grabbed me and prevented me from beating him silly. But, I made it clear that night that the teasing would end. When we were taken back to the tent it wasn’t more than 10 minutes before the giggling began. I jumped out of bed and pulled him out of his top bunk and dragged his face through the dirt.

A friend of his from home jumped on my back, but I was so angry that it didn’t matter. I threw him off of me and resumed pummelling the jerk who had been the instigator. As you can imagine it wasn’t long before “adult” intervention tried to insert itself. A 17 year-old counselor came and tried to restrain me, I smacked him in the mouth and nose before he got help from someone else.

Had it not been for the honesty of some of the other guys in that tent I might have been kicked out, but when they explained what had happened I was given a pass. And from that night on no one in that tent did anything to press my buttons.

It was a hard lesson, but that is when I really started to learn how to develop a thick skin. It wasn’t liked I hadn’t been picked on before that, I had. But I had never had an experience like that. I learned a lot from it.

“TOKYO (AFP) – Fuji, a mother dolphin that lost 75 percent of her tail due to a mysterious disease, is jumping once again with the help of what is believed to be the world’s first artificial fin.”

Wow.

It is another Thursday and I just feel like I am baked. Not baked as in high, drunk, stoned or any sort of altered state of reality caused by any substance other than life. And that my friends is exactly what has my head pounding right now, life.

It is not particularly bad or good. It is not any one thing, it is just a lot of little things weighing upon me. It is the normal concerns any father has about his children, the normal worry about paying bills, the doubt about career and life path, the drain of spreadsheets and the drudgery of routine.

I am ready for the vacation I mentioned below. It is going to be exciting to be away, to be in a place that means so much to me. And it will be interesting to see what people look like and are doing now. One of the things I have noticed is that often when you run into people from the past they almost assume that whomever you were dating when they knew you is still with you.

It is not necessarily such a silly thing, but I do get a chuckle out of it. The people who look at me and say that they are so surprised to hear that things with the girlfriend I had during the Summer of 88, 89, 90, 91 and so on did not work out.

I am not that 19 year-old anymore, that dude has moved on. If I had to pick a time of life to relive the Summers of ’85 and ’88 are definitely high on my list. For that matter 24-26 was a damn fine time of life too. The question that this poses is what did those times have that I miss.What was it that made them special.

Here is the overly simplistic answer. I was a single man, albeit poor, who had a lot of independence, great friends and plenty of female companionship. There were some rough spots and hiccups, but all told it was a blast.

But I don’t want to spend all my life looking back to say those were the best days of my life. I want to look forward to the best days of my life. And I have no reason not to think that this is happening. As I have said many times, I have done no finer thing than bring two beautiful children into this world.

My son and daughter are sweet, beautiful children and there are no real words for the love I feel for them. This love is why I am willing to bang my head against the wall so that I can provide for them. And it is why in just a moment I will resume working on a major project that was poorly conceived and constructed.

But we all have our challenges to deal with.

Live in the present, that is one of the most important things that you can do. Look too far ahead or behind and you miss out on life.