This will be the longest break Alex has had at this camp, in fact the longest sleep-away he's had except for summer camp, and this is in cold weather. He is to go on a morning when the forecast – which will turn out to be accurate – calls for dark, cold, cloudy, misty. This will be more like the winter camps of the Civil War, minus the dysentery.
I pack him the day before like I have dozens of days before, plucking out the Ts and the socks and the khakis and scrawling STIMPSON on them in some hidden place with the seriously black marker. Later, on the night before, Alex picks his stuff out the suitcase sort of like the way a reporter I worked with once put stuff back into stories that editors had removed. (I say what the editor did: “Cut that out!”
We assemble for the camp bus at a community center on the dark, cloudy and misty West Side. There’s a long wait for the bus to board. “My daughter started crying on the subway,” one mom tells me. Alex doesn’t cry – he’s a vet of this camp now – but he does keep saying “Take a shower! Take a shower!” I’m guessing they have showers and not baths at this camp. I have to guess, of course, because he can’t tell me. I do imagine what he does there, though: Run around, turn light switches on and off in every cabin.
I write the camp people a note. “He takes his 2 morning and evening Topomax tablets crushed into powder in the metal cup and dissolved in water. Alex is very picky eater. I’m sending some pretzels and cookies. He likes chocolate milk and some strawberry or cherry yogurt, and sliced hot dogs (I am sending hot dogs, too). He has eaten some berries, watermelon, and corn on the cob. ANYthing you can get him to eat, using a lot of praise and especially if others around him are eating the same thing, would be great.”
When I get home I open the freezer and see that forgot to send his Hebrew Nationals. I always forget something. Last summer, despite Alex's own warning over the suitcase, I forgot to send the pajama bottoms he sleeps in.
When it’s time to board the bus, he bounds up the stairs. He bounded up these same bus steps when he was eight, too, saying, when Jill asked for a kiss goodbye, “Kiss goodbye!” But it didn’t work out back then – bolting, crying – so we held off for a few years and sent him anew, and he’s asked for it since. “Camp, camp?” he’ll say in the days before boarding the bus. “Take a shower.” Who doesn't want to get away from his parents when he's 14?
Posted by Jeff Stimpson
at 6:06 PM EST
Updated: Monday, 31 December 2012 6:07 PM EST
