Jay's Head
The Warm, Impossible, Wall-less Summer World, p. 2



For many of us, to really remember the summertime is an exercise of memory that must stretch back years, not weeks, back to when the summer meant a different form of life from the rest of the year, a break from school or work, a different context of schedules and friends. Often, the idea of a summer is one reserved for childhood, or postponed to a hoped-for (or impossible) time of wealth - both conditions in which making a living is not important. Summer is about play, rather than work, for those able to forget about the bills.

But even if you had a "summer schedule" this year, even if you really did lose the layers of clothing and pretense and formality - how quickly it fades. After Labor Day, people get serious again. The office is fuller, as everyone comes back from vacation, and is expected to stay until five on Friday. School's back in session. You sit behind a desk. Humanity is about production, money, career, improvement - in short, making something of ourselves and our world. Laziness becomes a scoldable offense. The "I" becomes a focus. We work.

But in the summer? In summertime, people like that are a bore. Come on, we want to say, get out of the office. Live a little. We pity the kids stuck in summer school (the ultimate fear, for me, as a child). We give money to charities to help inner city kids get out of town and into the country for a while. We set aside our books, produce less, picnic more.

Or go to camp. Camp, really, is just one form of summer consciousness, albeit a particularly potent one. Like the rich frolicking in the Hamptons, it is about simple, but fundamental, pleasures: fun things to do, being outside, being with friends. In my own life, camp is also about several other particular things - teaching Judaism, which I do well, and living in a community with shared history, conventions, and time. But really, my attachment to camp is not so idiosyncratic. Just severe.

Camp, for me, is the place where I forged (and to some degree maintain) the bonds that other people gain in family. My family was and remains a relatively small unit. There are cousins and distant relations, but I rarely see them. I have only one sister with whom I shared a home (and zero past the age of ten). My camp 'family,' on the other hand, goes back over twenty years, through so many iterations of what I thought 'Jay' was supposed to be, that it's closer to me than my real family ever has been. It's not that I love them all so much - do you love everyone in your extended family? - it's that I know them, I remember when the twenty year olds were twelve, when that building over there didn't exist. More than the pop culture barrage of 'family' nonsense (which usually means sanitization and stereotype, if not the outright bigotry the term used to signify in the 1990s), this to me is what familial bonds are about. Shared experience and love; deep memory.

Despite all of the idiotic social posing that takes place at my camp (and probably most others), there is a deep sense of connection among camp 'veterans' that is, in my experience, virtually unique. Part of it comes from spending all of one's waking hours with the same people, every day, for eight weeks. But part also comes from the shared absurdity that camp presents: the backed-up toilets, the pranks, the needlessly authoritarian rules and rulers. And part comes from the lack of 'civilization.' We stop dressing to impress, and we're more honest. The walls are lowered, and connections form more readily.

Having said that, I don't want the whole world to be like camp. Certainly I don't want to live in an unacknowledged dictatorship, where a sub-intelligent ruler, chosen behind closed doors, sets arbitrary rules and spies on me. Um, yeah, luckily that could never happen...

But more than that, I don't harbor any illusions: living a summer camp life, and only a summer camp life, is pathetic. It ignores our potential to be more than pleasure-seekers. The play of life goes on, and contributing a verse takes work.

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