With both our children away for seven weeks at sleepaway camp, Visiting Day has an emotional crescendo that cannot be denied. My wife and I joking place bets on which one of us will receive the first wave of running hugs, but the reason why it’s a joke is because it’s always her.
We visited with Elena and Adam—now 14 and 11—on Sunday. Their camp, part of a group of Jewish Reform oriented camps around the country, is in the Berkshires, and the routine is we pick them up at camp about 11am and return them by 5pm. In between, we typically have time for eating lunch, shopping at Target, and wandering around a local town or two.
Here’s the fundamental dynamic: they are ravenous for food, and we are ravenous for details of their summer. And as long as we keep plying them with food, we seem to get more details.
Early on, over the kind of Chinese food they would never see at camp, Adam let slip that he had a date to his end-of-session ball. This is especially juicy info because for years now he’s shown very little interest in anything he deems girly—especially girls themselves.
But from what I gather, at his age, having a date to the ball means literally going there with them, possibly without much actual interaction after arrival. Adam has a tendency to make stuff up, but the story seemed legit because Elena promptly asked about whether it was this one girl in particular.
He sheepishly nodded.
“And who’s that?” I asked.
Adam didn’t know what to say.
Elena did. “Her mom is the hot Rabbi at Camp.”
Adam didn’t agree or disagree. He just stopped talking about it, even after the next course arrived.
Eric Messinger is the editor of New York Family. He can be reached at emessinger@manhattanmedia.com.
