The 250 Square Foot View

At age 30, my life is busier than I ever thought it could be and even the arrival of summer offers little respite compared to when I was a kid. For those of us with office jobs and a few weeks vacation a year, it’s tough to get away for too long and even when we do, it’s nearly impossible to capture the carefree feeling that came with the last day of school and a summer spent outdoors.

My younger brother and I were fortunate enough to maximize our fun for three or four summers when we attended day camp on Long Island. For a single-mother, two-child home, the tuition for camp was way out of our lower middle class summer fun budget. But we got a free ride because my mom, who had the summers off from teaching, took a job at the camp as a head counselor. She also drove a mini-bus to and from the camp every day. In exchange for her service, the fee for my brother and I to attend the camp was waived.

Ah, to be young…

In retrospect I have no idea how nice the camp actually was relative to the average health club or college campus, but for two scrappy kids from Queens, it was state of the art. Basketball courts with nets and glass backboards. Manicured soccer fields with lines. Indoor and outdoor pools so we could swim every day, even if it rained. And annual trips to places like King’s Dominion and Medieval Times. Despite the stereotype that only coddled rich kids got to go to camp, most of them were down to earth and it didn’t really matter how their parents made money. Of course there were a few spoiled brats would would bring an entire treasure chest of candy on an overnight trip (plus eight cans of Silly String), and others who would dangle the threat of a smaller end-of-summer tip to a counselor who tried to discipline them. But generally speaking it was a decent group of kids.

For the last two years I went, at ages 13 and 14, I found myself in the oldest age group they had, the Seniors, with about 60 other male campers. We were divided into four smaller groups, each with our own counselor plus one head counselor overseeing the entire Seniors group. In the Seniors, the entire summer was one huge fantasy sports league. Whether we were playing basketball or just eating lunch, points were added and subtracted based on our performance and our behavior during the activity. If someone on our team would pull a prank on another kid and get caught, we all gave him a hard time for setting us back a few hundred points in the standings.

About halfway through one summer, my group traded one of our campers to another group. We swapped out one of our most athletic but troublesome guys for a smaller and less athletic but much better behaved kid. Thinking this would be just the thing we needed to “win the summer,” I was ecstatic the trade had gone through. I ran across the grass to hug and high five my group counselor, Keith, like I’d just won the Superbowl. My mom happened to be watching this scene from across the camp. She’d tell me years later that seeing me so happy in that moment was just the reminder she needed as to why she was giving up her summers off to work at the camp.

I became good friends with Keith,  who was a college student and from Queens like me. We bonded over baseball–he was around the same age as my uncle, who also played baseball and who I idolized–but also over other non-sports interests such as live theater. (My mom had always taken us to shows growing up whenever she could find discounted tickets.) So when he invited me to join him and some of the other counselors to see his favorite show, Miss Saigon, on Broadway, I jumped at the chance. It was a great feeling being invited to hang out with some of the older guys outside the camp setting.

The next summer after I “graduated” from the Seniors, I was 15. I was too old to come back for another year as a camper. I had the option of returning as a C.I.T.–counselor-in-training–but it just wasn’t the same. Instead I spent that summer mostly hanging around the apartment, walking to the movie theater across the street for matinees, and watering the landlords’ front lawn when they were out of town. By the following summer I had my working papers in hand and entered the workforce as a part-timer at McDonald’s for the then-minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. After that, it wasn’t too often that I didn’t have some kind of part- or full-time job.

These days most of us will settle for three-day weekends or Summer Fridays or maybe just lunch hours spent reading on a park bench, trying to recapture the carefree feeling of the summers of our respective childhoods. And if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll stop what we’re doing to remember a particular summer moment that makes us smile.

What’s your favorite childhood summer memory?