Camp Through the Years

Camp has meant different things to me over the years.

When I first went there in 1967, I could already tell that Camp was something special to the Stoddard family. I had already hung out often enough Orchard Rd. in East Natick, but when I went to camp I had the feeling that this was a special place to the family, a home that was more than just home. It was when I went to Camp that I first sensed that maybe I was actually going to become a part of that family. I guess Camp was (and still is) the place where everyone was family.

Some years later, when little Zoë and I were living in Lexington, along with going to be with family, going to Camp also meant making a foray into The Country: Route 125 was pretty undeveloped, route 16 was without a number of its later bypasses, and the Camp road itself was a narrow 2-track cart road where you were liable to scratch up your car on the encroaching branches. All around was nothing but woods, and when you came out at the end of that little road there was Camp, just Camp: no year-round house across the road, no Association Beach Club over at “the green camp”, no McMansions on a paved road that didn’t exist yet. During this period Camp was a safe and welcoming place where Zoë could spend summer vacations in the loving care of her Gram, while I took some extended downtime from the single parent gig (beyond the regular weekend time kid spent at Cindy & Wayne’s), knowing that my kid was happy and having a great time. I really loved that parenting role better than anything else in my life, but I have to wonder whether I’d have loved it so wholeheartedly without that occasional long stretch of time off. And of course I was up to Camp every weekend during those summers – for the kid, for the family time, and to be in The Country.

Nowadays the place where I live is more in the country than Camp is, and my kid and her kids and husband live just up the road. So when I go to Camp it isn’t to get out of the city and into the boonies, as it was years ago. These days the family is much bigger and more spread around, and Camp is the central gathering place, not too far from where any of us live, where all of us can be together and still be at home. That part has never changed. There’s no other gathering, not even the Christmas celebration, that’s quite like Old Home Weekend, where the whole family, including an ever-growing constellation of friends, lives in close proximity to each other for a period of days, and where we all BELONG. What Camp means to me now is that convergence, that coming together. You just don’t get that anywhere else, not really.

Oh, and the lake is nice, too.

David
May 6, 2009