I am thrilled the debt ceiling fight is finally over. Now the country can move on to bigger issues. Like summer camp for all adults.
Congress, you want to get behind something every American can support? Then make it a requirement — shoot, maybe even a law! — that all of us big kids get to go to summer camp again.
Talk about non-partisan. Something that will bring the country together.
I’m on the summer camp kick because every day I’m regaled by my daughter’s stories of craft-making, story times, playground hijinks and general camp fun.
Ah, who am I fooling? She won’t tell me diddly-squat! What little information I get must be gathered surreptitiously or pried from her with threats like, “If you don’t tell me what you did at camp, I’ll spend your college fund on cheese!”
Somehow — inexplicably — that one seems to work.
But short stories are little substitute for being there. And as I listen — as I hear these tales — I sure wish I was.
Summer camp. Oh, I loved summer camp as a kid.
My brother and I would go to the YMCA for a field trip camp each summer. It was in Tampa, always during the hot, humid months that steamed the wrinkles out of your shirts. As I recall, the camp journeyed about the region taking us fortunate children to all manner of fascinating places. So fascinating and memorable that I can’t recall a single one. They were a smorgasbord of B-list tourist attractions that were usually kept afloat by government fraud, and of course, visiting camps like ours.
If I don’t remember the stops, I do the yellow school bus — which looked like it had been used in the shooting of “Mad Max.” On it we found time to tell dirty jokes, to insult each others’ lack of manhood and to expand the game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors.” We added hundreds of new instruments. “Plutonium definitely beats dead rat with dynamite because it melts your face!”
We don’t often think about camps as being educational — mainly as a good way to get stung by bees or ruin good clothes with permanent ink. But camp always taught me quite a bit about the world. Like a lesson I have never forgotten: Never, ever, order a microwaved hamburger from a snack bar at a local spring. The flavor — if you can call it that — is something akin to sponge-ified onion patty made from kitty litter and rancid pepper. Of all the awful things I have ever eaten, it is still that hamburger which rules them all.
Rancid was a theme of summer camps. My brother and I also used to go to camp at Busch Gardens. It took us behind the scenes of the zoo, allowing us to see how the keepers fed and cared for their exotic critters. It was there that I learned the word “exotic” is actually Latin for “stinks like moldy feet.”
I learned that, as a rule, animals eat foul things. (Although, not as bad as a microwaved snack bar burger.) There were buckets of squirming mealworms. Monkey biscuits that could flare a nostril like a trombone. Bits of animal that would turn you vegetarian. Bits of vegetable that would turn you carnivore.
The smell and sights in that kitchen were overpowering and awful and gag-inducing, and it was easily one of the coolest places I have ever been.
Every camp was wonderful. Every day an adventure. You got to wear clothes that the homeless would turn down, and shoes with holes in the heel. Nobody cared. It was summer! And school was still a long ways away.
Boy, those were fun times. And I long for them every day that my daughter comes home with paper elephant hats or her hair dripping wet from swimming lessons.
Why is summer camp just for kids? How come we reach a point in life when they go away? Maybe it’s time to phase them back in. Maybe it’s time our representatives in Washington start listening to we, the people. So I call on you to make summer camps mandatory for all adults. And while you’re at it, make sure that no unfortunate soul ever has to scarf down another microwaved snack bar hamburger.