DAY 17: LETTER TO SOMEONE FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD

Dear Stony Glen Camp,

The first time I set foot on your grounds was the summer between sixth and seventh grade. I only stayed for one week, but I knew I would come back the following summer. I loved everything about you. I had no idea when I signed up to take Riflery as one of my three summer activities that it would turn into something that I loved. Loved and Respected. The cabin I stayed in that summer didn't have electricity; in fact, most of the cabins didn't have electricity, so I became well acquainted with where my flashlight was at all times. I never was all that keen on swimming in the lake, but I loved to slip down there alone at quiet times for contemplation and reflection. This was church camp, and I was doing a lot of thinking about God, Jesus, me, and how that picture all fit together.

One of the things I loved best was all of the singing. We sang after each meal in the dining hall. After breakfast, the counselors who played guitar strapped them on, and we sang songs about God. Some of them were so pretty that they squeezed my heart hard. At lunch and dinner, the high schoolers led the songs. They didn't stand up or anything. They just took control by leading. Those were all fun songs acapella style. At night, we broke apart by division and did an evening activity. Those were always so much fun. That meant that four or five cabins would join up (girls all in the same age range). I don't remember so well now what the fun things were that first year. I know that as time went on one of my all-time favorites was Capture The Flag. After the fun was over, we always made a campfire, sang some more, a counselor gave the message, and then we went to bed. I always slept really well at camp.

My riflery obsession eventually led me to try my hand at archery. I never was quite as good an archer as I would have liked. I also became dissatisfied very quickly with just one week of camp. One week quickly turned into two weeks. Two eventually turned four. I would have stayed five, but I was too old by that time. I was already there for the duration of camp. I liked camp so much that I took the Camper In Leadership Training Program (CILT) when I was in high school. That took two years of overall time and two weeks of camp time for two years.

That second year of camp it hit me like a rocket launcher that at the end of the second week I would no longer be a camper. I would graduate CILT, and they would expect me to be a counselor. That meant that I could no longer hang out with my friends. My days of living at Sam Grey were over. This was devastating. Sam Grey was the best place ever. Sam Grey was this A-Frame house with electricity set far away from the rest of the camp, where the high school kids lived. Sam Grey was the bomb. I never wanted to leave Sam Grey. How did I not see this coming? Ironically enough, the theme song for camp this year couldn't have explained my predicament any better than I could. The chorus started like this: "Mmmmm I want to linger, Mmmm a little longer, Mmmm a little longer here with you." We sang it every day. Check that. Everyone but me sang it every day. I cried through it every day. Two weeks of crying.

Adulthood was coming for me and I wasn't ready. They didn't put it in the manual. I checked. I kept praying for time to stop or slow down and it steadily moved forward until the day of graduation. One day I was a camper and the next I wasn't. Snap. The next three weeks I was a counselor. I was a fairly miserable counselor, but I was a counselor nonetheless. The following summer, after my senior year of high school, I came back as a counselor and it was completely different. I knew I was coming in as a counselor, so this summer was I was perfectly aware that I was a grown up now. Being a counselor this time around was a lot of fun.

Stony Glen Camp, so many of my best memories happened with you. I learned so many things about fire building, riflery, archery, people, and myself, that I wouldn't have learned if not for you. Most people transition into adulthood so seamlessly that they are only vaguely aware that it is happening. One day they wake up and realize that it snuck up on them, passed them by, and they cannot pinpoint the when or the where. That is not my story. I know exactly when and where it happened. It wasn't painless, easy, or desirable. I was dragged through the doors of adulthood kicking, screaming, and crying, because I knew that something beautiful was dying. I would never get it back and there wasn't anything I wanted more. However, you are patient and waited for me to come and appreciate you from my new perspective of adulthood. I did. That next summer I realized it was my privilege to give each girl the wonderful experience that I had every year. If they left with a heart filled with more love, faith, songs, confidence, and joy, then I had done my job.

I haven't been back to see you in almost twenty years, but I can picture you clearly in my mind. The website indicates that you have undergone some changes. I prefer not to think of that. I like to picture you the way I remember you. On those nights when I wake up, and cannot fall back to sleep, I imagine myself in Milner Cabin. It is the only cabin close enough to the waterfalls that you can lie in bed and hear the water as it goes over the falls. When I was in junior high school, I prayed every year that I was placed in Milner Cabin so that I could fall asleep listening to those falls. The sound of those waterfalls is still one of the best sounds I've ever heard.

Love,
Robin


image stolen from Miss Angie at My So-Called Chaos

COULD YOU BE THAT HONEST?

I had a plan for the next few days. I was going to do my one word and fifteen minutes writing exercise so that I could really put the hammer down on my book. I have been reading instead of writing and it actually worked. On my way to the library yesterday, the light bulb came on. I love those moments. REVELATION. Of course, that also meant I figured out how/where I screwed up again and I am going to have to go back and fix that shit. But, it makes it possible for me to motor through it. Sometimes it truly does work to let something sit on the backburner and let your subconscious work on it. It isn't being lazy. It is working by not working. Or working on something else. I don't know, but it worked. That doesn't mean I haven't worked on the novel at all. I have, but it has been frustrating going because I knew something was off. Now, it will be easier.


Several things have jettisoned my plan. One was Misery's comment on my blog from yesterday. She, too, wrote about Eminem's new video. I suppose that is great minds thinking alike. Except that we didn't actually share the same opinion about it...exactly. I am a very new Eminem convert and am not at all familiar with the old stuff. She said I needed to have a listen to his song KIM and that might make me feel differently about him. I went to my music player. I decided video would be too distracting and had a listen. It was a horrible song. Abuse at its worst. Kim was his wife, the baby was crying, and, in the end, there was the distinct implication that he killed her. She was crying and pleading (or some woman was, probably not the actual Kim), and he was vicious. So, then I went to Wikipedia and read all I could. His whole bio. It broke down each of his albums, what songs were on them, and what the general concept was for the album. Amazingly enough, each album did have a concept. Eminem writes his own music and the album reflects his life... whatever it is at that moment in time. It also broke down his personal life so you could compare and contrast the two.

Well, that is something to think about right there. I am not sure that I could be that honest if I was as popular an artist as he was, and my life was what his life was. In other words, if I was abusing the shit out of my spouse, I don't think I could write about it, then put it on my CD. I am pretty sure this song was written in between their marriages. Stop and think about that one. They married two times. He wrote this horrible song about her and then she married him again.


Back to the writing what he's living.... every single important thing that he is living is flowing from his brain onto the paper. Then it goes onto a CD for the whole world to know. Abuse. Drugs. Missing his kids. Fighting with the record label. Political opinions. Opinions about other celebrities. Pretty much everything he thinks, it gets put on the paper and then on the CD. And it isn't just the stuff that makes him look good. In fact, a lot of it makes him look like shit. I think that you really start to see the turning point in his later music, but he still falls down. WHEN I'M GONE is an excellent example of him indicating that he doesn't have a handle on anything. His priorities are all messed up and he knows it. I listened to several. I think that LOSE YOURSELF has a great message, but I think that he was still in "the hole" at that time. I am not sure how AIRPLANES 2 fits in. It doesn't feel like the old Eminem. It feels a lot more like the stuff on this new album. I think maybe he recorded it during his hiatus? I don't know on that one. Maybe someone who knows more about rap can answer that one. Anyway, he released a Greatest Hits album and then took some time off. He needed that time away from that mad business of making album after album. He'd either gone through rehab or knew he needed it... not sure which. All of those were the milestones that led him to where he is now: RECOVERY.


The big question always is can you maintain it? Show business, the music industry, and all of the people that make money off of you want to suck you dry. Can you keep your priorities straight when you're in the middle of the hailstorm? It's easy when you're not in the middle of a tour, making videos, and having your songs topping the charts. It's easy when you're not being nominated for awards. Now is when it gets hard. Everyone is juggling all the time. The reality is that everyone's load is always too heavy to carry all at once, so we juggle. When we are moving at a comfortable pace, we can juggle slow. That way the balls are easy to catch and we don't have to put too many in the air. His pace just picked up and the musical powers that be just threw about ten more balls for him to keep in the air (on top of the ones he already was juggling). No one can do that forever. You have to know your limits. Marshall Mathers is about to find out if he really knows who he is. I hope that he really is Not Afraid To Take A Stand because he might have to (figuratively) kick some ass. That means saying "No," when you're being pressured by, what feels like, the whole world to say "Yes."

I just read that the definition of adulthood is no longer caring what other people think. I plan on writing an entire blog on that at a later date. But it seems a fitting way to end this one today.