Archive
12/07/09
Again
Yesterday afternoon, An otherwise uneventful Sunday, I spent two out-of-time hours Being fifty-five years younger, closer to sixty, At the reunion of the boys' camp my youth attended For two months, summers on summers upon summers, In what seemed, then, to be a procession of eternities.
The slide show, narrated by the new camp director, Worked its magic, and the twenty-minute video, Highlighting the 2009 season, From the arrival of the buses from Minneapolis, in mid-June, Through the nonstop frenzy of the eventful agenda, To their departure, that final day in mid-August, Transported my aging memory to my little-boy/young-man days.
And for those inestimably precious 120 minutes, I was away from home, for the first time, again, A high schooler, a cabin counselor, again, An English-lit/creative-writing master's-degree graduate, Back at camp, for the last time, in 1968, again, Before embarking on my precarious search For the geography my dreams might claim, in their name.
Then, after all of us in the room had introduced ourselves — The oldest resurrected from anonymity, for seconds, The youngest well ensconced in the next ten years' progress — I gathered up my fleece jacket and blue-jean coat, Said my good-byes, to the three or four men I vaguely knew, And stepped out of that cherished time warp, Back into the thirty-degree afternoon of my sixty-ninth year,
Not so much sad, sorrowful, melancholy, wistful As empty, bereft, irrelevant, homesick, as I was at ten, When my parents put me on the GM&O's Abraham Lincoln, At St. Louis's Union Station, in June of 1951, For Chicago and Soo Line points north, toward Wisconsin, To experience the beginning of my "grown-up" years, In the land of Paul Bunyan, Babe the Blue Ox, Johnny Inkslinger,
In a shabby little Swamper Village cabin sixty years ancient, With no insulation, a single light bulb dangling from the rafters' cord, Mesh screens for windows, thin mattresses in double bunks, All my possessions stuffed into a duffel bag and a footlocker — Clothes, flashlight, tennis racket, comics, Cardinals cap... The slow, inexorable, circuitous maturation process, Until I evolved into an independent being, a self-reliant soul,
A passionate, artistic spirit, a prolific free-verse poet, A confessional scribe, sofer, capable of telling the past as it was, Prophesying the future, aligning the present with reality, Connecting those little-boy/young-man days with Sunday, When, for two hours, I materialized out of nowhere, Just in time to bring my spirit back from now, To begin, again, my ten-year-old's initiation into who I'd be.
12/07/09
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