07.15.2004 - 12:46 p.m.

Summer camp is the perfect place for a first crush on an older man, one of the college-age instructor's assistants, self-assured in his understanding of the world, boldly going barefoot in places where my mother would require shoes. Someone who could grow stubble. Even the word "college" was an aphodisiac to my thirteen-year-old self, meaning as it did both "adult," and "independent." Which is funny in so many ways, but that's not the point.

I went to CTY (Center for Talented Youth)(or Center for Training Yuppies, whatever) for a couple of summers as a kid, and my IA Seth was short, dirty-blonde, and carried a satchel rather than a backpack. He had the most lovely sense of humor, the kind that included everyone present in the joke. I don't know what I wanted from him, or even if it was really a case of wanting; it may just have been that he was a nice guy who saw nice things in me.

He once left a pen behind in the classroom, which I immediately "found," in that finders-keepers, I'm-not-stealing-really kind of way. It was a blue pen with a funny short cap, cheap, but precious enough to me that it became my journaling pen for years until I ran the ink out.

I remember a field trip where Seth drove a van full of us kids, another IA sitting next to him in the front seat, a girl IA whose name I don't know anymore. I remember watching her rest her hand at the nape of his neck to stroke gently, occasionally running a finger beneath the collar of his shirt, both of them talking about something else. It struck me as such a loving gesture that I would find myself copying it well into my own college career.

Today there is a swarm of camp kids out on the patio across from my office, waiting to split back into classes, throwing frisbees, talking in groups of varying maturity, and reading books on isolated benches, ipods protecting them from the social world outside. It is bittersweet to watch.

That stretched-out tape of Pearl Jam's Ten is probably still in my old walkman.

-stonebridge

previous | next