Something that makes my heart just plain glad : ~ Camp Glen Arden.
We believe girls need a place to be mischievous, but reverent; to be sloppy, but clean; to be tired, but happy; to sing at the table, but to use a knife and fork for eating chicken; to be sophisticated young women, but to love to puddle stomp; to frolic in the moonlight, but to spend quiet times in the Green Cathedral.
Straightening up my Internet favorites, I clicked and found my heart floating back to the summers of my dreams, and I just feel really good having had the experience that is summer camp. That quote is everything that my childhood actually was, and it's also everything that I sincerely wish for every young girl.
The funny thing about camp is that I didn't go as a kid. Of course, having grown up just 40 some-odd miles away, it wouldn't make a lot of sense for me to pay to go to what is essentially my backyard. But I remember the day Laura called out of the blue and said something like, "I was thinking of you, I worked at this place last summer and you'd just be, well, I think you'd really love it, they're going to love you, and it's going to be great. Come to camp."
I had no idea what to expect. To be honest, my only knowledge of camps were sports camps, many of which I'd attended. There was Bible camp, too, but uh, well, nevermind that. Still I remember being so nervous when I got there and not being particularly sure why I was nervous - the woods weren't the exact same ones I'd traipsed through, but they were still what I knew. But I was in college and I remember at the time, at school, I was being confronted in my "so-called blackness" ... I had been called out by fellow acquaintances who questioned whether I knew my identity, whether I knew that the black people who lived in Preston were, you know, the ones who really weren't black, whether I had given any thought to skee-weeing my way around the choice fraternity parties, and I was tired. And annoyed. Mainly because these confrontations, both subtle and overt, weren't new things to me, and I felt all over again the confusion of having people that didn't really know me tell me what I should be and where I did and didn't fit in. (As if it wasn't enough that I myself grappled with always being the "dot in the crowd.") I was torn between wanting to prove myself to them, but also knowing full well that it was probably impossible and certainly not necessary, but still I was grappling and the thought of going to spend my summer in a place where there were a lot of white people sort of felt like a cop-out, like a free pass from the self-reflection tank I was submerging myself in ...
And everyone kept warning that there were going to be spoiled kids ... like you can't even imagine how spoiled. I remember Laura going, "Yeah, you thought you knew spoiled, but these kids are paying two and three grand to come here ...." This was just shocking in the sense that of course it'd be shocking to someone who'd taken those hills for granted, and who had parents that could not readily pay a grand for anything - I mean, hello, my college choices had been slashed to "You will go wherever it is that is free." But I was also nervous because I realized that I had come quite a ways from the kid who was completely at home in the woods - fearless of snakes or ticks, or pitch dark; knowledgeable about poisons ivy and oak, mosquito smackin' and calamine lotion, letting the raindrops fall on my head without freaking about the impending state of my hair ...
Yet it was meant to be - me meeting CGA and CGA meeting me. At the risk of sounding terrifically corny, I'll say that it was just organic, our union, because what seems so carefree - that carefree feeling that camp provides - has actually been given the greatest care and thought and nourishment. It's something that if you're a kid, you don't think about, but being older and in a position to work with kids and see what makes camp camp allowed me to realize what made 50-year-old women return to the dining hall to sing the songs that out of context seem so silly. It really is a place where magic just happens.
(It also helped me to gain perspective - nature has long had its way of enlightening many - and I learned that perhaps the most fantastic thing about camp is that it allows you to escape, and yet the really amazing thing that happens is that you retreat from the world with all its distractions, but you don't escape from yourself. In fact, it's like you meet yourself and for some it's like the first time, but then for people like me, it's like you return to the person the world had somehow hidden from you. You recover your soul.)
Immediately upon my arrival, I felt as though I'd entered into a sanctuary. The setting of camp, gently parted from a winding country road, rustic, crisp in all seasons and purely observing God's creation relaxed me in such a way that I hadn't even bothered to realize that I needed to be relaxed.
There are too many things to list about camp (I could really go on about it forever), too many reasons why I think it's seriously one of the greatest things I've done: I wish for everyone to know Casey and Liz because words don't do them justice. Sometimes I feel like just taking someone there to lie in the middle of the lower athletic field and just look at that nighttime sky. I feel everyone needs to wake up in a pothole, be humbled by butt rot, have Christmas in June and July, catch peanuts falling from the sky; to hear the sound of Taps carry across a lake and through the trees, to sleep in cabins with screened windows so you can really feel that breeze; but most of all, I hope that everyone has found or will find that special place that takes them away and that reminds them to just believe.
If I'm all about camp, it's just because I want that for you - in all our daily grumbles and grown-up pursuits, in a world where Disney World has become a not-so-magic commercial kingdom, I think it's important to remember and revisit those times when you just felt real good, like the feeling you got when you coasted hands-free on your bike for the very first time ...
I'm moving on because I'm getting annoyed with myself for not being able to remember key camp songs ...
Something that puzzles me :
~ Sean Paul.
Catchy stuff this Sean Paul's puttin' out. There are 2 things actually that I most love about listening to Sean Paul.
The first is how me trying to sing along makes me feel like Tourette's Syndrome is something that one can cultivate. I find myself picking up on vowel sounds mostly, and I chime in, seriously, like every other 12th beat ... and the thing is that the beats have me so hooked that I'm just lost in it, you know doin' my little head bop like Eminem gettin' into it in 8 Mile ... and the sounds that result ... well, the only thing I can think of that you'll get is that episode from The Cosby Show where Denise's boyfriend shouts out "Ay mon," plum out of nowhere.
The second thing I love about listening to Sean Paul is how the trying - the physical, conscious trying - to string the vowel sounds together reminds me that I suck at double dutch. I've never succeeded at it, and whenever I listen to Sean Paul - whether he's telling me to give him the light or thumpin' sumpin' about the temperature - I feel the same anxiety that comes from really wanting to get in there, from really trying to get in there, but really not getting in there at all. Ever.
Something that surprises me :
~ How furiously I've been writing in the last week.
In the middle of two recent nights I've jumped up, somehow turned on the light and took to the journal in a fervent rattling of various things. During the day, I've found myself just carrying notebooks and journals around just in my hand, flipping them open whenever and wherever, jotting down lines, ideas, pieces of dialogue. I wrote on a napkin the other day and the entire time I kept telling myself, "Danita. You seriously have way too much paper to be using up your mama's napkins."
I'm not going to try to make anything out of what this means because I have a bad habit of heaping expectations on myself, sabotaging whatever was on its way out of this ol' head of mine, but it's been the most pleasant of surprises.
Something that always makes me laugh :
~ The video selection on VH1Classic.
Hall & Oates in trench coats in the Private Eyes video? Hall or Oates (I don't tell them apart) with that mustache that you think is fake, but since its the Tuesday Two Play and the next video is new, you realize that it's not.
Mick Jagger is still wearing the skinniest pant ever made and I still want to feed him a sandwich.
The fact that if you watch this channel long enough you will see the We Are the World video, and that is always great.
Dancing on the Ceiling. I'm going to preface this with the fact that I was like four, but why do I remember trying to walk up the walls? I also look at this video and think that Lionel danced around like, kinda aware that he was making a video, but it also seemed like he kinda didn't really know what that really was, or how it worked, like where the cameras were ... he just moved and looked like someone told him that this was cool and he was very happy to do it.
Steve Winwood's Higher Love. I loved this song! Chaka Khan is in it, plus I remember my mom sayin' how much she loved her some Stevie Winwood and that he was cute back in the day. My mom, everyone was cute, but it was always back in the day. I do not know what is up with this video though. People just didn't think these things through ...
Michael Jackson in the Rock With You video. Man. Videos have come a long. Long. Way from smoke machines, neon lights flashin' like pickup stix.
Annie Lennox. Seriously, what is with the Annie Lennox these past, like, two days? Walking On Broken Glass. Man the first time I saw this video I thought: she. is. so. weird.
Coke Escuvedo playin the timbales in Santana's Black Magic Woman video. Seriously? His name was actually Coke?
And here I was just thinking I could use a Mt. Dew, knowing it's one thing to do the Dew, but to be it ...?