Page 136 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
occupied by a group of children who were unknown to me, (2) attending and successfully completing the course of study at both kindergarten and first grade at P.S. 193, and (3) boarding a bus during what I presume what was the previous summer, to be taken with other (at first, strange) campers each weekday to play and swim at Brooklyn Day Camp, some- place in Far Rockaway, New York, of which I have only two memories: namely, that the bay that was adjacent to the camp facility reeked and was subject to what I later learned, after questioning my dad, were the very visible tidal effects of the moon and the sun (and which I much later learned had to do with the curvature of the space-time continuum caused by them, but that is another story), and that there were older boys who for some reason derived pleasure and giggled when they got down on their hands and knees in the boys’ locker room to peer rela- tively surreptitiously through holes in the wooden wall into the adjacent girls’ locker room, apparently not taking into account the fact that the same activity could, with a bit of work and imagination, occur in reverse.
Irwin, who must have been all of nine, was sitting next to me on yet another bus, this one with a picture of Peter Pan on it, comforting me as I was leaving my parents to go to a strange place, peering out the win- dow, struggling to get a last look at them, and knowing that for the first time I would not be returning to them the same night. In fact, I would not be seeing them at all, two teary visiting days aside, for eight weeks. I was on my way to Camp Anawana, where, as you will recall, my par- ents first met, a summer camp—for, I would guess, about two hundred boys and girls—that sat on, no surprise here, Lake Anawana, near Mon- ticello, New York.
Irwin must have been right, because not only did I survive the sum- mer at Anawana, but I spent four more summers there; was also a camper at Camp Starlight, in Starlight, Pennsylvania, for three sum- mers; was a “co-op” (camper waiter) for one summer, a canteen boy for one summer, and a counselor for two summers at Camp Kee-Wah, in Wingdale, New York; and was a counselor who rose to the lofty position of Group Leader during four summers at Camp Brookwood, in Glen Spey, New York. A quick piece of arithmetic would show you that I
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