i am a bone fide city girl. i grew up in baltimore city. it is true that my neighborhood at the time was considered suburban (to city folk) but it was surely city compared to the experience that many people i knew had when they went to the country, particularly for camp.
i don’t ever recall wanting to go away to summer camp. it’s foggy as to how many of my friends and neighbors actually took a trip away in the summer for that purpose. for me, it was fun being at home. because my father really liked being at home he had set up our home to be a haven for staying. my mother loved the beach. my dad hated the feel of sand between his toes. his compromise? he built a pool in our backyard so that we could swim there. no more need to go to the beach, right? hmmm.
the pool was pretty great. it was smallish and shaped like a kidney bean. it was a stylized in ground concrete pool that had just enough length to do a few laps back and forth. my dad had our pool built when my younger sister stephanie was born. i vaguely remember the men who dug the earth and laid the concrete. but i was four so the images are like moving clouds, most not clear. once the pool was built, my dad hired a swimming teacher who came every Saturday to teach us how to move through the water.
my father was serious about safety. he was a judge, after all. he had seen so much crime and sadness that he was overly protective about many things, including anything having to do with safety. he posted the “pool rules” and absolutely required us to follow them. if anyone disobeyed–any child or any guest–the person was immediately evicted from the pool. and that was that. no arguing. no pleading. no time out with reentry later. that day would be the day that your pool privileges were orevoked if you did something like run on the pool deck, urinate in the pool, rough house in the water (like jumping on somebody and pulling the person under). basic practical things. we followed his rules without fail.
rules and all, my sisters and i learned how to swim. stephanie, who was crawling when the pool was built, learned to walk herself around the pool hand over hand over the pool wall, including the deep end, so that she would have no fear of the water. we learned to swim, excelled at it even. and had tons of fun. we had parties and flirted with boys. i used to race the boys and almost always win. back then i was super-tall, much like now, and super-thin. my lean muscles were perfect for the long lines loved by the water. my competitive nature propelled me to figure out how to race and use my body to competitive edge.
i loved summer, still do. most of my early summer memories are of moments with my family or friends in my neighborhood. my memories are attached to home.
one year, when i was probably in junior high school or maybe sixth grade, my mother enrolled me in sleepaway summer camp. it was affiliated with church, maybe my church, i don’t remember. but somehow she got it in her head that i would like to go to this camp. maybe because it was affiliated with the church, she thought it would be safe.
all i know is i didn’t want to go. at all. as i recall it i devolved from the fun-loving, happy competitor i often was in the bright light of the summer sun and wilted into an afraid kid who didn’t want to leave home. wasn’t working for me to stay at my house (i was going to camp, according to my mother). somehow i convinced my mother to go with me to the camp.
bad decision. (kinda like the bad decision parents make today when they send kids to sleepaway camp with cell phones. ET, DON’T PHONE HOME.)
the city girl in me coupled with the scaredy-cat who had claimed her rightful space in my heart didn’t make for a great camper. having mommie there meant i could stay in that helpless space and milk it for all it was worth–although of course i didn’t understand that back then.
i was terrified. like my dad, i never really liked to get dirty. i’m not a gardener. i swim, but i’m not interested in walking through woods. (well, at least i wasn’t until i met my husband, but that’s another story.) the more terrified i became the closer i clung to my mother. i’m sure she was freaked out, because fear was not a passion that ruled me when i was a child. so here she was, also a city girl, having to act like she was down with spiders and mosquitoes and bees and nature basically, to help me to be brave.
i remember going into the showers. there were communal showers at this space. i believe the showers were outside–sort of. they were fully enclosed, but nature was within and around them. wooden floor boards, and bugs. i freaked and wouldn’t go into the shower by myself. so, my mother ended up being drafted to shower with me in order for me to brave the water. (i have long been violently allergic to bees, and i think i overdramatized my fear of them to keep her so close to me.)
did i survive? let’s say i won a battle that i actually had lost. we left the camp early (thank God!). my wide-eyed wimpering prompted my mother to give up.
with only a few war wounds, a.k.a. bug bites, i was back home at 4801 forest park avenue sleeping in my bed, hanging out with my sisters and taking regular dips in the pool.
i don’t think i ever really thought about camp again until nearly 40 years later when my daughter started doing the camp thing. to be fair, her style of camp as a young child, does not involve sleeping over. but simply the concept of camp is something that hadn’t crossed my mind for decades. and then it was time for her to go. from age 2 to age 4 she went to school-like day camps that featured swimming, gymnastics, art, museum visits, and such. translation: great for her, peace of mind for me.
camps with all these amenities are expensive and exclusive in a particular kind of way. so last year i thought i would do two things. i would save money (very important in this crazy economy) and give some love to the neighborhood.
carrie has been having swimming lessons since she was 11 months old. we knew that since we love to go to the beach, and my husband is an avid swimmer (a skill he developed as an adult, about a dozen years ago, after surviving a major back injury), that our child needed to be able to swim in order to be safe.
for the past three years, she has been getting one-on-one swimming lessons from a wonderful teacher at a pool in our neighborhood. one day last year i went to see her swim, a rarity for me because at that time i was traveling nearly every week. as i watched her i noticed a man in my peripheral vision who had on a SUMMER CAMP shirt. BING. i immediately inquired and learned about the camp at her pool. it sounded too good to be true. [SIGN NUMBER ONE] it was crazy affordable for the entire summer. and, after i took the tour and learned every detail of the program, i believed that it would be perfect for my child. she would get a chance to go to an art camp that featured daily swimming in our neighborhood and therefore in the company of other children who look like her, something that hardly happens now in her private school world.
we enrolled. and sadly the best thing about the camp was “the brochure”. a few days in and she hadn’t yet gone swimming. one accustomed to a specific schedule, she was spending a lot of time sitting around with kids and doing nothing. at least nothing constructive. there were excuses about everything. no swimming because the camp counselors hired under the famed government stimulus package couldn’t swim, yet they hadn’t been screened for ability or willingness to swim when they were hired. huh?
but it wasn’t until week two. i was just back in town from my weekly trip to the midwest for work. we where out in the hamptons visiting with friends when carrie climbed up in my lap ready to go to bed. looking up at me with her big brown doe eyes, she said “mommie, i know the F word.” okay, so she was five years old at that time and my husband and i had worked overtime to keep profanity out of her life. i figured she was bluffing. how could she know? so i ask, “what is it?”
“Fuck”.
My mouth falls open. I take a deep breath and say, ‘We don’t say that word, Carrie.” To which she immediately said, “I don’t say FUCK, Mommie.” to which I say, “you don’t even say it to say you don’t say it. that is a bad word and we do not say it. for any reason. period. understand?”
“yes, mommie, i understand,” she soberly acknowledges.
but she doesn’t follow my wisdom. instead a couple of days later, she sidled up to my husband and told him about this word that she had just discovered. and my 6 foot 1 1/2 inch usually even-tempered husband began to bark at her. “we did not send you to this camp to come back home with bad words. is that all that you’re learning? we are sending you there to learn something. that’s why i expect you to bring home and share with us.”
i followed up reminding her that she must not repeat this word because it is rude and bad manners. as she was looking at me somewhat saddened, more perhaps perplexed, i say to her, “if you continue to speak this word i will take you out of camp.”
her answer: “good. i don’t like this camp anyway, mommie.”
took me right back to that shower in the country with my mom.
only this time instead of pulling her out–it was, after all, too late to put her in the camp she desired, and my husband and i work all day unlike my mom who could receive me back home–i worked with her to develop tools to be in that space without being of that space.
though the bugs in the woods are what scared me when i was young, i discovered that the barbs of the streets bothered me now. big difference, though, is that my fearless child didn’t need any handholding. she did not wither. she has a menu of confidence skills that shielded her from the foulness that i feared and helped her to navigate a kind of woods that will be important for her throughout her life.
she learned hand claps and jump rope at this camp–cultural skills she may not have learned anywhere else. she became an expert in hip hop and r&b radio hits. she enjoyed looking at and interacting with kids who look like her and whose hair curls like hers when it gets wet. she performed in a huge presentation at the end of the summer where parents and loved ones cheered them all on with love. she got to immerse herself in blackness, something that may ultimately have been worth the expletive after all.
this summer she’s back at her private school’s camp swimming nearly everyday and following an educational schedule that we all appreciate. but in retrospect i have to admit that i’m glad she got a taste of the urban woods. and i bet she will be ready to go to sleepaway camp when the time is right–without her mama!!!
nighttime essays by harriette cole 