Page 145 - WhyAsInY

Chapter Eleven
Wish I May, Wish I Might
SUMMERS OF 1957 – 1959
Wherein our author finds a new type of summer experience, within limits.
Idon’t recall the reason, but in 1957, after five years at Anawana, I found myself going to Camp Starlight during the summer prior to my thirteenth birthday. (1957 was a very big year indeed: my parents had
just purchased the house at 975 East 23rd Street, were taking their first and, it turns out, only trip to Europe during the same summer, and were looking forward to paying for my bar mitzvah in November.) Whatever the reason for the change in camps, I do know that I was sent along with Wayne Stern, who you will remember as the friend who threw a snow- ball through a taxi’s window on Ocean Avenue and just managed to elude death at the hands of a very angry driver. I liked Wayne.
Wayne and I were put in the same bunk, Bunk 12, of a camp that was to Camp Anawana as a country club on Long Island was to a play- ground in Brooklyn. (Of course, I had not then been to a country club—and never have been to one on Long Island—but you get the picture.) Anawana was, as I said, coed, but that meant only that there was a boys camp and a girls camp, and that it thereby accommodated fami- lies in which there was at least one child of each sex. That was about all. All activities, from reveille to taps, were totally separate. There might as
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