Misty Morning Memories

-->

Sunday, May 19, 2013 – Misty Morning Memories

Proust had the aroma of his madeleines to trigger memories of childhood.  I have the scent of misty mornings to transport me back to my adolescence and summers in the mountains of North Carolina.  This morning, a light fog hangs in the early morning air.  It tangles with the green that swamps the trees.  I draw the muggy scent of the woods into my lungs, and once again I’m the awkward 14 year old whose life is a series of miserable episodes. 

Of course, in a more just world, I wouldn’t have been stuck in rural North Carolina for two months of the summer.  No, not when I belonged in Paris, sitting at a café on the Left Bank, discussing the philosophy of Sartre and Camus.  I’d have French boyfriend, of course.  We’d sip absinthe, smoke cigarettes, and then we’d slip away to….  Well, enough said.  At that stage, I was still too naïve about the opposite sex to have any idea what we’d do next.  Anyway, it was just a fantasy, and I wouldn’t cross the Atlantic for several more years.  In the meantime, I was a self-consciously intellectual New Yorker out of place in a distinctly non-intellectual Southern locale.   

To say I didn’t fit in was a major understatement.  But my parents had chosen this particular camp because it was owned and operated by close friends of theirs from Georgia.  (Yes, my mother is from Atlanta and my father grew up in Augusta.)  So for several summers, my brother and I had been making the pilgrimage from Long Island to this outpost of Southern Jewry in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  And every summer, I immediately became my cabin’s make-over project.  I can hardly blame my fashionable cabinmates who had hauled trunks full of Madras shirts, hair dryers with domes, and palettes of eye shadow from their homes in Miami, Atlanta, and other hometowns south of the Mason-Dixon Line.  With the artless cruelty of the young, these self-assured young women were convinced they were doing me a favor.  Unlike my daughter, who sailed through adolescence with incredible beauty and grace, I was in a prolonged awkward and unattractive phase – and I knew it.  Despite their best efforts, however, I remained hopelessly unstylish as well as socially inept.  The weekly dances were agony.  I did my best to ignore the boys my age, and the boys, even the gangly and pudgy ones, did their best to ignore me.

Aside from enduring the social aspects of summer camp, I didn’t enjoy being stranded in the great outdoors.  I couldn’t fathom why anyone would choose to be in an environment full of bugs and insects and dirt.  Fortunately, the camp had a library and I spent as much time there as possible.  When the library was closed, I’d wander by myself in the woods.  I chose not to participate in most of the activities, such as swimming, boating, water-skiing, softball, volleyball, tennis, camp craft.  I made an exception, however, for arts and crafts.  Although the projects were strange – popsicle stick constructions, lanyards with plastic gimp, etc. – at least I felt more comfortable there than I did with sports. 

I suppose I learned things at camp.  I may have learned to tie knots and start a fire, but those are skills I forgot immediately. On the other hand, some of the things I learned at camp have remained with me to this day.  For example, I can still chant the grace after meals in perfect Hebrew.  I didn’t even look forward to mealtimes, when we all crowded into the dining hall.  The food wasn’t particularly memorable, except for my first taste of grits.  I do recall supplementing the meals with three or four ice cream sandwiches a day, which I purchased from the camp store. 

This morning’s musty forest aroma has unleashed a flood of details: how we all dressed in blue and white for Shabbat and attended services in the open-air chapel; how we painted our faces for the dreaded Color War; how the warm water tasted from my dented metal canteen when we went on hikes. 

It certainly was not a happy period in my life, but I savor the memories, perhaps because it reminds me of how far I’ve come since those days.  With the summery weather here to stay for a while, I look forward to stepping out each morning, taking a deep breath, and waiting for more hidden memories to come swirling to the surface.