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March 07, 2006
25 IS old, I don't care what you say
It's funny how easy it is to forget that I'm aging. I've accepted that kids I babysat when they were FIVE are on facebook, but other than that, I'm not confronted on a daily basis with reminders that time is passing.
Today I got an email newsletter for my childhood summer camp. It was a lot of the same, "sign up and have a great time!" kind of stuff, but there was a section thrown in that is either new or that I've never noticed before. It was a list of engagements, marriages, and new children of former staff members. Out of the 32 people on that list, I personally know/knew 26 of them. Four of my former counselors were on that list, but most of them are people who were my age or a few years older.
The biggie for me was seeing that my very first OZO (junior counselor) from 1991 has a new baby girl. I guess that if she was 17 that summer, she would be 32 now, so it only makes sense that she could have a child, but it still blows me away. She's eternally 17 in my mind.
There were other notable things in this newsletter. They've added a low ropes course, which cracks me up. Ropes courses are for fancy camps, with air conditioning and swimming pools. Of course, the new dining hall DOES have a/c now, too... And there's also now a family week at the end of the summer. I still maintain that it would be great for a big group of us who used to go to rent a cabin and go to that, but no one but me is interested.
Still, no matter how weirded out I am by the changes to the camp and by seeing my peers grow up, every time I get a newsletter or see pictures from camp, I want to go back so badly that my bones ache. That place was torture, but it was a really wonderful kind of torture. As great as Camp JRF sounds, I can't help but hope that my kids end up going to Herzl. I can't help but hope that someday, I can work with them again.
Even if the kids I'm working with are my peers' children.
Posted to Jew-mania at March 7, 2006 05:37 PM