When Winter Equals Summer

It’s winter in Northern California; though we don’t have the bitter cold and snow that seems to be attacking the rest of the country like an alien horde, we do have buckets of rain, intermittent hail, and the worst weather-related torture of all: meteorologists who summarize every Five Day Forecast by saying, “Of course, all that rain is probably still not enough to save the state from drought.” With all these signs of a prolonged winter around me, it’s obvious what’s on my mind:

Summer Camp. 

The bane of the working parent in the 21^st century, Summer Camp is where you send your kid when schools close their doors for two point five months. The brochures start arriving in the mail around the time that I’m taking the holiday wreath off the door. Sarah’s Science Camp! Roughing It Day Camp! Junior Center for Arts and Sciences Camp! Touch the Earth Day Camp (referred to by mothers of sons as Touch the Dirt)!

Each colorful handout offers compelling reasons to enroll your child, designed to make the youngsters in the house do the selling. “Pllleeeeeeease, Mom, please let me go to Ice Cream Camp in July! I get to make ice cream every day!” Well, that is something that has been sorely missing from your life. You’re right, you should go there.

But the truth is, they do have to go somewhere during the day so that you can continue to do your job, which stubbornly refuses to give you two point five months off, even when you’re self-employed. So it may as well be ice cream camp, and then a three week drama camp that starts the week after which the kid is actually not that excited about but it fills the schedule, plus you have a neighbor who will carpool with you.

Ah yes, the all important carpool. It's all well and good when your child has a friend attending the same camp, but as a wise parent you see the real benefit – the more friends who attend the same camp, the higher the likelihood that you can split the drop offs and pickups and even manage an occasional “is it okay if your daughter comes home with us after camp to hang out with Junior for awhile?” The emails start flying – which camps is your child attending, and when? Parents study complicated shared spreadsheets like runes. How can I minimize my driving and maximize the after-camp playdate potential?

Because the camps don’t believe in keeping your child one minute longer than they have to. It’s summer! They should be outside exploring and doing summery things! At least, I assume that’s the justification for having day camps that close at 11:30 a.m. That is not a day camp, by the way, that is a pre-brunch camp. I have barely scratched the surface of work email by 11:15, and now the kid needs to be picked up and fed lunch. What is this, 1956?

If you have more than one kid, good luck finding a camp that appeals to both children at the same time. You either force the issue and deal with the complaints of the kid who hates the water but has to attend swim camp with his older brother, or try to make everyone happy and go through more gas than a Hummer limo.  I have a friend whose family is taking a six week sabbatical in Europe this summer, and I think she's more excited about getting out of planning camp than she is about traveling abroad.

By March 1 the months of July and August on my family calendar look like a Mondrian painting: blue blocks for the oldest daughter’s camps, yellow for the youngest, and the rare and wonderful green blocks when they are in the same place at the same time. The checkbook coughs out its last deposit and collapses, empty. I enter Reese's Peanut Butter Egg season (some call it Easter) feeling like perhaps I have it all sorted out, and I relax for a few weeks.

Then in early June, someone mentions that ice cream camp only meets four days a week, plus since it's 4th of July that week they don't have camp on Tuesday, or that the ballet intensive camp that the kids must attend to progress to the next level has finally been announced, and conflicts with another camp you've already paid for. 

It's about that time when I start researching policy makers who are leading the charge for 12 months of school so I can contribute to their campaigns. Sure, it'll make Jack a dull boy. But isn't that preferable to sparing Jack the sight of his mother curled into the fetal position?

Haste Makes Redfaced

The English language is rife with aphorisms that warn against the dangers of rushing. Slow and steady wins the race, look before you leap, measure twice and cut once. Hurrying is how you neglect to see that red t-shirt sneak into the laundry with the load of whites, or get two thirds of the way through a recipe before realizing you are missing four key ingredients needed to finish it, or speed to the school pickup before remembering that your kid is going home with a friend that day. Unfortunately, "rushing" is also the default speed at which I seem to live my life.

We had a busy fall. The girls moved up a level and are taking ballet twice a week, and the older daughter embarked on a nine-month long confirmation program at church. The husband is working long hours, and I bit the bullet and took a 12 week writing class that involved a bunch of homework, on top of my regular work. For about three months there I was living my life in 15 minute increments, happy if we were all where we needed to be at the appointed time and fighting off a little bit of panic every day. Reasoned consideration was in short supply.

In December I was in London and saw a poster that resonated with me. It was produced by the British government during the Blitz and hung all over the city of London during the war, an admonition and comfort to the British people. On a bright pinky-red background topped with a crown, white block letters spell out “Keep Calm and Carry On.”  

That’s it, I thought. I need that poster across from my desk so I can remember to slow down, not give in to the false allure of doing things faster. More important to do things well than to do them quickly. When I got home, I ordered it from the Imperial War Museum web site, paying three times as much for shipping as I did for the actual poster and resigning myself to wait for the month it would take to arrive. It’s worth it to have something so unique, I thought.

My new philosophy in mind, I felt smug when I decided to take all the VHS cassettes that hold our family movies and drop them off to the photo store, to be converted to DvD. Our VHS player died years ago and now exists only to hold up a sheen of dust, and I’ve been meaning to get these converted forever. I was finally going to do it right and cross it off my list.

I scooped up the whole pile of tapes from the cabinet where we’d always kept the family movies, back in the Pleistocene Era when the VHS player worked. At $25 per tape it wasn’t going to be cheap, but how else would we ever watch them? After I dropped them off I even had enough time to get a cup of coffee and do some writing. Carrying on!

Fast forward to me picking up a big bag of tapes, each one fastened with a rubber band to its new DvD twin, and the labels from the VHS tapes carefully reproduced on the covers of the DvDs. The girls and I laid them out on the table: 1999/Camp Gorham; Christmas 2000, San Diego.

But what’s this? Cool Runnings? Isn’t that the Disney movie about the Jamaican bobsled team? Holy Mother Mary, did I record that on a VHS tape and leave it with the family movies, and then pay $25 to have my non-HD, hoopty version of the movie, complete with commercials, converted to DVD? In case you’re interested, yes I did. Also, you can buy a Cool Runnings DVD new from Amazon for $11.49.

There was one other video that was mysterious, labeled “Dr. Video.” Hmmm. Did I maybe take the camera with me to one of the girls’ checkups? Maybe it’s a sonogram? The VHS cassette was no help, completely barren of labels. After we got through watching an excruciatingly plotless movie which consisted entirely of scenes of our older daughter opening every gift she was given that year, we slipped Dr. Video in the DvD player.

A grey circle appears on screen. Looks a little like an artery. A man’s voice starts narrating. “Ok, we are standing at the front curb filming towards the house,“ he says. "The line proceeds in a northerly direction."

That circular grey shape is no artery. It’s the sewer line at our old house, the time we hired someone to do a fiber optic inspection to determine if it needed work. Yes. Because I didn't take the time to actually figure out what was on all the videos I was dropping off, I paid another $25 to convert an inspection of the poop pipe of a house in which we no longer live to DvD. Would you like to borrow it? I’m charging $1 per day, until I earn $25 back.

Right after sent in my order for my Keep Calm poster, we got a sales circular from Cost Plus. On the cover it featured the exact poster, mounted on canvas and framed, for about half of what I paid. A day later I saw it again, different store, different frame, same low price. A friend of mine said, “Yeah, you were so excited about your poster I didn’t have the heart to tell you that you can pretty much find them anywhere if you take the time to look.”

Keeping Calm. Carrying On.

Teens in Transition

Our oldest daughter turns thirteen in a few days. But enough about her. I am turning into the MOTHER of a teenager in a few days. 

Of course, I may have some leeway before achieving official Mom of a Teen status, because turning into a teenager isn’t an overnight process. We’ve seen signs of encroachment since she turned ten, flashes of attitude and outgrown clothes and a sudden eagerness to take showers without anyone asking her too. But they’re right there inside the girl who is still willing to hold my hand sometimes when we’re out in public, who asks me to comb out her hair at night, and who is in the middle of a determined quest to read every single Trixie Belden book in the series in chronological order.

So I presume that for at least a little while I can continue my non-teen-mothering ways, sleeping secure at night knowing that my children are under the roof with me, confident that her parents or other trusted adults are the only people driving her in a car, and withdrawing television privileges in the case of rampant sassback.

But it’s a temporary comfort. I remember a call from my sister; she had been disciplining her middle son over something, and realized that she was tilting her head up to look into his eyes. “Now what do I do?” she lamented.  Since he’s passed safely out of the teenager years and into adulthood, whatever she came up with – I believe it involved threats of withholding automobile access, and keeping her sense of humor  -  must have worked. 

I suppose the timing of my official transition to Mother of a Teen depends mostly on our daughter; the first night she doesn’t come home at the appointed time, or the afternoon she says “Don’t worry, Rachel’s driving me home!” Maybe it'll be the strains of the Smiths' music from behind closed doors, the first notes of "How Soon Is Now" confirming that no one knows misery like Morrissey.

Or maybe there will be one pivotal moment that moves her - and me - across our respective thresholds.That's how it was for me.

I was fourteen in 1980, about to enter high school, and spending my last summer as a camper at Camp Gorham; the next year I'd be on staff. My parents were willing to send me for two weeks and I saved up my babysitting money so I could pay for another two. That year there was a counselor named Doug who was four years older than me and a certifiable Stone Cold Fox. For those readers not alive during the Johnson administration, Stone Cold Fox was a '70s phrase denoting a person of the opposite sex whose features are so arresting, I suppose, that they freeze the viewer like a statue.

I still spent about half my time in the horse barn, whispering my admiration into the ear of a horse named Bulldog and dreaming of becoming a cowgirl. But I spent the rest of it being pulled to Doug like metal shavings to a magnet. I took his sailing class six times, and elbowed other kids in the solar plexus when they tried to take the empty seat next to him at mealtimes. 

I wasn't even cowed when he said to me at lunch one day, in a speech full of awkward silences, that the Camp Director had suggested that Doug needed to sit with some other campers sometimes and that maybe I should go back and sit with my cabin mates at another table. I had the temerity to say, "I only came over to ask if I could get another apple for Bulldog."

One night there was a dance and like all the oldest girl campers, I primped and preened and prepped for hours beforehand. Walking to the dance by myself, past  a darkened staircase in the ranch bunkhouse, I was startled when Doug jumped down off a railing and landed beside me. In the purple twilight he leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. "Hey, fox," he said, before turning and running away.

My poor parents dropped off a horse-loving bookworm at the camp gates; the girl they picked up was an insufferable know-it-all, swimming laps in the pool of her own lovesick misery.  

In short: I was a stone cold teenager.

Friday's Music Moment: Lives Well Lived

If you've spent any amount of time on this blog, you'll have read about Family Camp, the annual vacation to the Adirondack Mountains that my family has been taking every August since the 1960s. We're not that unusual; there are probably 15 other families who have also been coming since gas cost $0.36 a gallon. Family camp friendships are so deeply ingrained that when someone of our tribe gets married, there is the bride's side of the aisle, the groom's side, and the Family Camp section (usually in the back.)

So it's been a melancholy week, because we've lost another of the old guard - Bill Deyle. Taken together with Al Hooke in December and Bob Izard last year, we've lost three of the dads who infused the place with humor and integrity over the decades. They were the men in the terrycloth bucket hats and plaid shorts and worn-out tennis shoes who showed us how it was done - hard working career men who knew how to relax and enjoy the gift of their families and their Adirondack sojourn. It wasn't until Mr. Deyle hung the hammock across the porch of Pine cabin and called me by my sister's name three times on purpose that it felt like vacation really started.

Perhaps it was post-pregnancy hormones that made me delusional, but in the first year of our oldest daughter's life I was still confident that I could balance a demanding full time job with international travel and the work of being a new mom. So even though my August vacation had been approved months in advance, when a new supervisor suggested that my career depended on me flying back mid-week to join an all-hands international division meeting, I believed him and booked a flight from the nearest regional airport to Camp - a two hour drive away.

Still confident I was making a good decision, I mentioned it to Mr. Izard, himself a businessman when he wasn't spending the week sitting on an Adirondack chair at Double Decker cottage. "Gotta do what you gotta do," I said casually. 

He groaned and looked at me with a combination of empathy and concern. "Oh, Nance. You don't have to do this. Take it from me. You'll never remember that meeting, but you'll regret leaving your family mid-vacation."

Oh, hahahaha. What could you possibly teach me, Bob Izard?

The next night, as I sat crying in the ladies room at Dulles Airport trying to express milk that my nursing daughter wouldn't be awake to drink, the vast wasteland of the meeting behind me and a delayed flight and two hour drive ahead of me, I understood. The meeting had nothing to do with my career and everything to do with a new boss cracking the whip at someone over whom he wanted to demonstrate his power. I left the company within the year, and though I still sometimes struggle to reconcile ambition and family, I now have a rubric with which to evaluate any given choice. Which alternative leaves me without regrets?

To these men who put their families first, who contributed to their communities, worked hard, but weren't too proud to don a feather boa for a cameo in their grandkids' sketch on Skit Night, I say thank you. Sometimes when you're young and full of ideas of your own self-importance, you need a bank president who has volunteered to handle horseback riding sign-up to put things in perspective. 

I looked high and low for today's music moment and ended up with this one from folk singer Jeffrey Foucault, One for Sorrow. "One for sorrow, two for joy they say, I’ve had my fill of sorrow anyway." I've had my fill of sorrow this week.  But I'm sending in the Family Camp deposit today, so there's my joy. Hope you have a joyous weekend, friends -