In 1952 I went to Surprise Lake Camp for two weeks. It was in Cold Springs, New York. It would prove a memorable moment in my life. No clocks were allowed, and the time was never given to the campers, for some camp wizard knew the wisdom of durational time. You rose and went to mess for breakfast – I had the best tasting hot chocolate served in metal carafes I have ever had before or since. It was brewed to perfection. One event after another kept us busy but not in a mechanical way. The sunset and the sky gradually darkened and this was the sweet part of the day, dusk – my favorite time when our earth calls for silence, pause and reflection for the day granted to us and for our living it well. This is all earth asks of us – and to pick up the wrappers from McDonald’s.
I lived a rich life in those endless two weeks. Time was duration. The 14 days seemed so expansive in living and so crammed with incident that I have always felt that they went on for months. I handled first separation from home well, for I had apparently mastered unwittingly separation at home. To be away at camp, I surmise, was no different than being away inwardly from my parents at home. However, my parents gave me a wonderful gift and I owe them a large measure of gratitude. They did their best. I give them that. I wonder what my children will say about me when the time comes, a daughter who is estranged from me and I have not seen her for 12 years and a son who plays Cheshire cat with me, fades in, fades out.
Two sharp recollections are indicative of who I was. We lived in summer bungalows with screens and cots, primitive things. During a free moment, I sat down with a piece of onionskin paper and a pencil and I drew the bungalow. In a rare moment of awareness I knew I wanted to have tangible evidence of what I was experiencing, a new memory. T sketched in the soggy magazine perched on the shingled roof, its pages exposed. I still have the drawing, now 62 years old. Is this my “Rosebud”?
I always liked to draw. I liked art. But I was not good at it. I was a copier (so apt), not original. I was obsessive so I was neat, but I copied well. As I see the 12-year-old boy I was then, I ache for him – oh, not from pity! I ache, rather, I mourn the lost potential. You see I was – even then, the recorder, not yet the observer and least of all the actor. I wanted to keep that bungalow in memory for the rest of my life – and I have. Here, 62 years later, I honor my intent. I do justice to who I was, dimly aware and sentimental boy. Again I took in and swallowed, in a happier moment for me, a joy I lived. I like that boy. You see I was a good boy. I have to explain that. Good in that I was without malice; good in that I meant well, oh how I innocently meant well; good in that I just wanted to be shown, to learn, to be taught; good in that I could act with encouragement, rarely given; good in that I could do remarkable things if I was held, and ennobled. I am still good, but a prickly personality, a consequence, I imagine, for not having had my goodness recognized.
The second recollection involved Carl Yuni, my counselor. He was 25 then, long since gone by now. I have never written down his name. I don’t have to. It is a hidden tattoo in my good memory bank.
Surprise Lake is not unlike Kane’s sled. Did I ever really go there and walk its woodsy paths and go down lakeside and look for crayfish? Did I ever love Carl Yuni who represented what a brother or a loving adult might be like? Did I ever have a fight and make my own bed so tight that I could bounce a quarter off it, and hear my very first dirty joke and learn about sex, which to my ears was an abomination? I feel, as I write about Surprise Lake, that it never happened (but it did, I tell myself). So long ago and I was so unknowing. I was not alive, but living. Cognizance lay ahead. Much pain and agony lay ahead as well. My mother would die 8 years later in 1960, the day the earth stood still.
One day Carl and the group went down the paths leading to the lake, the umbilicus of camp activity. I could not swim but Carl, sensing my fears, encouraged me. Not exactly. He removed the pressure that I had to swim with the others. He let me be. I liked him for that – the stallion taking an apple from a gentle, stroking hand. As we almost reached the shoreline, Carl said something to me which I can only approximate here — I wasn’t sure if he was serious or not (trust, again!). I now believe he was. In effect, as we all scrambled over the pine needles and logs embedded in the dank earth to serve as steps, he said: “You’re really a great kid, Matty.”
I had never heard that in my life. In twelve years I had heard compliments, mostly about my hazel eyes and long eyelashes – narcissistic trash and not good for a young child to hear. Carl’s offhand, unsolicited comment, as I look back, made me feel good – that word again. I cannot recall ever hearing anything like that at home, Carl gave me his blessing, and I am indebted. It would be many, many years before I would be rewarded like this with words. And it would be Rochelle, who also gave me her blessing. In between, I nursed on barbed wire.
Maybe I write because it is in the word that we find our worth, we become. And with his few words, Carl Yuni gave me a lifelong truth that only now I can take in whole without fear of spitting up. I was a good person. I only needed time, love and trust and my hand would have reached out and touched the face of God.
When I allow myself to feel it, to bunk next to it, I sense an unremitting sadness, a pining. For the boy who couldn’t ask and who didn’t know, that all he needed was to be seeded and his fallowness would come to an end. I was a good boy then, and I wouldn’t mind hearing that today.
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