When we last left my summer camp series, I gave you all an over-view of the Empire State Speech and Hearing Clinic (ESSHC) experience. Now I'll get down into the weeds of my experiences over the seven summers I attended the camp.
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The ESSHC was an interesting place to go to camp. The cabins there had no bathrooms. Depending on the cabin they assigned you, it could be quite a walk to the bathroom. Boys were luckier than the girls because we didn’t necessarily have to hike there late at night. In the cabin area, toilet stalls also lacked doors. Personally I could never figure out how that was allowed but it’s true.
There was only one place to shower (girls and boys had separate facilities) and it was quite a hike away from the cabins. The younger kids showered first followed by the older campers. Still there were a number of people including counselors in the same area at the same time and things were very crowded. Luckily the showers had curtains.
Food at camp was typical for camp, at least from my experience and others I know, namely bad. Breakfast was usually the most passable meal but they could even manage to screw that up. You always looked forward to Friday at camp because Friday was grilled cheese and tomato soup for lunch. Something no one could screw up. My love for this combo began here. (I chose a catering hall for a birthday party due to a grilled cheese and tomato soup shooter they had for an hors d'oeuvre) I once ate so much; it ended being the first time I threw up from over-eating. Not eating much the rest of the week will do that to you.
A couple of really odd things happened at this camp over the years I was there. One Sunday, during the one season when Fox ran new episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210 during the summer, one of the older girls got the staff to show an episode her mother had sent her before the movie. Up until this point I had never seen the show because what 9 year old boy really wants to watch trash like that? Unfortunately I got hooked. I ended up watching it religiously for the next few seasons finally stopping somewhere around the time Tiffani-Amber Thiessen joined the cast. Another interesting event was the time when couple of people went to a Dirty Dancing contest. They brought a tape of the contest back with them and we spent part of a Saturday night watching. Very strange. Chalk it up to the fact that it was the 80’s if you’d like.
As this was a camp devoted to schooling, I, of course, had to go to class every day. Somehow, I got pegged as having some sort of emotional issue around not being able to make friends. Couldn’t have been because of my rare disease, could it? Anyway because of that I was always stuck attending classes with 1st graders. This wasn’t much of an issue when I was 6 and 7, but by then I was already able to do high school level work. This became a real problem my second to last year attending the camp when I was ten. I was with kids learning the months of the year, learning how to tell time, identify words and pictures off flash cards and doing basic arithmetic. It was awful. It got so bad that they decided as long as I went to class for half the school day, I could use the computers for the rest of the school day. I spent many hours perfecting my Oregon Trail skills. Not that they ever came in handy. I was also spending a lot of time with the camp psychologist. (Gee, I wonder why). If I was already supposedly having trouble making friends, it didn’t help that I spent good portion of my time away from people my own age.
As I wrote last time, each week was much like a typical week at school. M-F you had classes during the day and afternoons were for electives. Each elective ran for two weeks. Once the two weeks were up, you got pick a new elective. There were two elective periods each day but swimming was set aside for one of the periods. Thus half the camp went swimming during each period at the lake near the entrance to the camp. Evenings were set aside for camp-wide activities. Saturdays were for clean up and dances while Sunday nights were movie nights.
What I didn’t mention was Sunday was also church day. Yes, you read that correctly. The school was paying to send me to camp where religion was a part of the experience. And not just any religion but Christianity, of course. I don’t remember which particular sects were involved. You had two choices on Sunday. You could travel off camp to a church, or you could stay at camp and watch one of those wonderful Sunday morning religious shows. My first summer I chose to go on the trips because what 5 year old doesn’t want to go on an adventure. I remember the church being big and ornate. Based on my experiences visiting Catholic churches, my memory would lead me to believe it might have been a Catholic church, but I cannot be sure. After that, I just stayed at camp and snuck books into the room.
Being Jewish, this was a very confusing thing for me. I had already started Hebrew School and now I was being forced to listen to people who were telling me that my religion was wrong. Don’t misunderstand, there was no anti-Semitism; it was just required attendance.
As a young kid being required to sit in on religious teachings that went contrary to everything I was being taught at home, I became very angry. It wasn’t long before I came to see Christianity as something very negative. Luckily for me, I live in a place where what religion you were was irrelevant to anything. I probably would have many more problems in school had I lived somewhere where religion is the end all be all. I don’t want this to turn into a diary on religion, so I leave it here.
My last year at the camp only lasted half the summer. I was finally put with kids my own age during classes. It was better. But by then with everything that had gone on, I wanted out. During cabin clean up one Saturday, I got tasked with beating rugs. That meant being out in the heat dragging heavy, dusty rugs and then beating them. At this time, I was still under the impression I was allergic to dust and mold. I’m not, but that was the only reason doctors could up with for why I always had cold symptoms before I was diagnosed with the illness I have. I finally stopped putting that down on medical forms when I was in high school. But when I was at that camp, it was listed on there. Thus I should not have been beating rugs. In a purely coincidental twist, I ended up getting a bad cold a couple of days later. Luckily for me Parent’s Day was coming up soon. When my parent’s came, I used the two completely unrelated events to convince my parents that this camp was truly the nightmare I had been claiming it was for a couple of years. This despite the fact they went out of their way the last year to do right by me. I was finally out and hoping there would never be another sleep-away camp in my future. Summers were finally mine.
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I hope you all enjoyed the first part in this mutli-part series. I am sure you are all interested in where I am going to take next. Now on to the real fun!
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October 4, 2014
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From Tara the Anti-Social Social Worker:
The crazy is strong this week in kos's Nutpick-a-looza, where the latest wingnut trope is that the Obama children were secretly adopted from Morocco (no, I don't know why Morocco):
FredNietzsche notes one of the problems with that theory:
From a2nite:
I think thus is an excellent comment about pre-civil war thinking by the majority race:http://www.dailykos.com/... (Comment written by CatKinNY.)
From Puddytat:
Many in the Night Owls Open Thread were reminiscing about the bad old times in the 80s. NBBrooks offered an interesting comment on what SHOULD have happened.
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October 3, 2014
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