From Crying to Crackers; A Drama in four (or five) Loops

Dear Friends and Family:                                                                July, 2017

Most mornings I trek over to the local YMCA to walk circles around its four basketball courts for 45 minutes or so.  This seems to help get the blood going and loosen up seven decade old knees.  But I have to tell you that walking the indoor track is one of the most boring things I do. One could get loopy from making loops around the courts.  You know, round and round you go and after each curve you see the same old stuff; other old guys and gals stretching, walking, and even shooting baskets.  Not today.

For me, the best days on the track are rainy summer mornings.  You see, on rainy mornings the throngs of little kids that attend the Y’s day camp programs take over the four courts for their programs and games.  Wow, there is a lot to see on my loops around on mornings like this.  I guess it is my nature to search out staff when I see such a gathering.  I can’t help but look to see who is watching the kids, how the campers are being led, how attentive the counselors are being.  Hey, I was a camp director.

So my first loops today were filled with those kind of sights, and I have to tell you that all looked good.  But as I rounded a curve and one of the courts came into view this morning, I saw a little girl walk by another camper (a boy, both about five years old) and kick over some kind of plastic structure he was building.  I don’t know if she was being mean or if it was an accident.  In the few moments it took me to pass by I saw the boy’s face crumble into a frown and from there to a full blown cry. That’s all I saw.  I walked on.  But it gets better.

Next loop there’s the boy, still crying but a counselor is sitting with him.  I, of course, couldn’t hear what she was saying to him, but she was on it in just the time it took me to make the loop.  Good sign.  In my day at GUCI we used to call that "Coverage."  A good insurance term (probably got it from my dad).   The counselor was huddled over the boy in what looked to me like a very comforting manner.  By the time I looped again, the cry had somewhat subsided.  On that second or third time around I also noticed that another counselor had joined in and the three of them sat off to the side together.  Good stuff.

Another loop…no more crying.

 Another loop brings me to a scene of the boy, sitting with the counselors, shoveling crackers into his mouth.  So I witnessed some good work on the part of these two counselors.  I imagine they are just high school students.  But the important thing is that they were quickly on it with their camper, showed appropriate compassion, and comforted him as he needed.  Now I’d like to say the drama had a Hollywood ending with our star camper finishing his crackers and smiling as he joined the other kids in activity.  That didn’t happen.  He was happy to hang with the staff and start to rebuild his plastic thing.  Maybe that’s Hollywood enough for five loops around the gym.  I was just happy to see these high school students taking good care of their campers.

Forecast for tomorrow is for sun.  Another boring forty-five minutes of loops.  Oh well..

Ron

Secret Times and the American Pastime

                                                                                                                July, 2017

The coincidence that I would bump into this post on this particular day causes me to run it up the flagpole once again (let's see if anyone salutes).  Tonight the MLB
All-Star game will be played in Miami.  Although my Cubbies were prominent last year in this game...and then went on to win it all, this time around things seem more "normal."  Cubs are struggling to stay at .500, not many if any will be in the game tonight.  Nevertheless, I'll be watching and remembering  those long lost days of yesteryear, when listening to the game huddled on a bottom bunk with ten other twelve-year-olds was so delicious.  

Hope you enjoy it the second time around.

Ron


Dear Family and Friends:

A couple of nights ago I watched the Major League baseball All-Star Game.  What’s so interesting about watching a ball game anyway?  Well for 36 summers I worked at Goldman Union Camp Institute and for 10 or so summers before that I worked at Olin- Sang-Ruby Union Institute.  Both are summer camps and when you work in a summer camp, days blend into one another, the time between one Shabbat and the next is just an instant, and who (at camp) even knows when the All-Star game is even happening?

This game brings together the best players in the American and National leagues.  They are the best baseball players in the world, (I dare say) and most American baseball fans are excited about it.  When I was a kid, I was too.  That was before all of those summers at camp with no TV or time to even think about the sport I loved so as a boy.

So, here I am, retired, at home in the summer and able to once again tune into the game.  You know, I really am not very interested in All-Star games.  Nowadays the game is important because the winning league gets home field advantage for the game of games, The World Series.  I’m a National League person.  But I know that even if the NL pulls off a victory, the World Series will not be played in a “Field”  (as in Wrigley) but most likely in a “Stadium” (as in Busch), or a “Park.”  This troubles me.   Nevertheless I watch, and the American League wins anyway.

So I’m up in my lair, watching the game and I flashback to a time long ago when All-Star games were so important to me.  The year is 1958.  Believe it or not, in those days I’m a Chicago White Sox fan (that would last until the mid 60’s…it probably was a rebellion.  My dad was avid Cubs fan).  So, it’s 1958 and some unbelievable players are in the game.  To start with the Sox’s second baseman, Nellie Fox; and shortstop Louis Aparicio (later to become Nellie’s son-in-law, but I digress) one of the greatest double –play combinations in all of baseball history (or at least the history of baseball in my lifetime).  Joining these heroes of mine was another all-time great, Mickey Mantle.  Mantle played center field for the much hated (because they were such a powerful and winning team) New York Yankees.  I hated the Yankees…but I had a picture of Mickey Mantle in my bedroom.  Some of the best ever played for the National League, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, and Warren Spahn to name a few.

So I’m watching the game here in 2013 flashing back to ’58 but not thinking about these historic names, or even thinking of the game itself at all.  Rather, I’m thinking of the setting in which I heard the game.  That’s right, heard the game on the radio, as did millions in those days.  But when one listened to such games announced by outstanding sports announcers who painted pictures with their words, you really did see the game, in your head, that is.    In 1958 I was twelve years old.  It was my first summer as a camper at Union Institute in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin.  I’d been a camper for four years already at other camps because our Reform Movement camps in those days did not take campers younger than twelve.  Funny, I didn't know that it would be the first of fifty-two summers I would be spending in our Reform Jewish summer camp programs.

I remember the night of that All-Star game.  We must have been listening to a rebroadcast of the game as baseball was pretty much an afternoon sport back then.  I was a camper in one of the small white cabins on the Big House lawn near the lake (we didn't know enough Hebrew then to call it the Bayit, as it is called today).  I can see it in my mind.  It’s late at night, dark in the cabin while ten or twelve of us twelve-year olds huddle around a bottom bunk at the back of the cabin, ears “glued” to a small transistor radio.  We had to listen quietly so we wouldn't attract the attention of the counselors on late night “OD.” I remember nothing of the game.  I remember everything of the excitement of sneaking around, like thieves in the night, outrageously listening to baseball when we were supposed to be fast asleep in our bunks.  How dastardly.  What rebels we were.  How delicious to have such an innocent adventure in the dark with cabin mates.

Such “secret” times still happen in cabins in camps around the world.  Times that kids will think back on when they are retired and something triggers a memory.  In 1958 it was my time, my cabin, my All-Star game.  I loved remembering it the other night.  I watched baseball but thought about kids at camp making memories.  Our granddaughter, Zoe is a camper at this moment.  I know she’s having those secret times.  Good for her.

Ron