Summer Programs

I went to sleep-away summer camp a couple of times. For a week.

I went to Girl Scout day camp once. That, too, was for a week.

My husband went to sleep-away camp for years, 6 weeks at a stretch. But he grew up in the Bronx, and I grew up in the middle of no where. I didn’t need summer camp.

When I was in elementary school, the town in which I lived had a pool (converted frog pond). Every Tuesday and Thursday (unless it was raining) in July and early August a school bus picked us up to take us to The Pool. It was a daylong event. There was a concessions stand. There were arts & crafts. There was swimming. Two full weeks were given over to swimming lessons. Looking back at it, I guess The Pool was a summer program.

But The Pool was only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The other days of the week were spent:

trying to write novels on an ancient Remington Rand cast iron manual typewriter
 picking wild whatever-berry-was-in-season
building forts
playing with my cousins (who lived next door) along with a slew of other neighborhood kids

No one drove us anywhere (my mom didn’t drive).

We caught frogs by day and lightning bugs by night. There were boxes of old clothes for dress up. Trees for climbing. We had bicycles without helmets, croquet sets, and badminton rackets (using the hedge dividing my aunt and uncle’s driveway from my parents’ as a net). We did somersaults and tried to do back flips and cartwheels on the soft grass of our yards. There was a mountain behind the houses to explore. Massive games of hide-and-go-seek and Wolf at night, and Annie-Annie-Over in the day. We lay on our backs and stared at the clouds or the stars. We didn’t need summer programs.

We were expected to amuse ourselves. We managed.

I sometimes wonder if we aren’t raising a generation of people who are incapable of amusing themselves. Play dates, summer programs all summer long, with no downtime to curl up with a book or teach yourself to play guitar. Or day dream. Are we annihilating the imaginations of our youth?