Hello Muddah, hello Fadduh,
Here I am at Camp Grenada
Camp is very entertaining
and they say we’ll have some fun if it stops raining. – Allan Sherman and Lou Busch

When I was young, my mom dangled the option of going away to summer camp for a week in front of my eyes.  I responded with a resounding  NO, THANK YOU. She tried sweetening the deal: Beckie would be there. Nope. That didn’t help.

As I have mentioned in the past, I was an unfailing, written-in-permanent-marker Mama’s Girl. When Mom and Dad would go out for dinner and leave me (and my siblings) at my grandmother’s apartment above the bakery (where we received lots of affection and sweet treats), I would sit in the window and watch for their car to drive up on the street down below. Likewise, every summer my parents would put me on a bus to Grand Island – about an hour away from Columbus – to visit my cousin Shari who was my age. I loved the idea of the visit, but after about a day-and-a-half, I was on the telephone asking my mom to come and retrieve me.

But I will tell you the truth about my unwillingness to go to camp. Yes, it’s true that I knew I would be homesick  for my mommy  (just like in the Hello Muddah Hello Faddah song that was popular for a brief period in 1963 and won a Grammy award in 1964, further proving that ANYTHING could be popular in the 60s). But as much as anything else, camp was a no-go for me because I knew they would try to teach me to swim. I didn’t want to learn to swim, as I have noted again and again on this blog. I will die unable to swim, and I am perfectly fine with that. There will be no swimming pools in heaven, at least not for me.

Let me tell you, however, Addie, Alastair, Dagny, and Maggie Faith do love them some summer camp. They attend a church camp located in a spectacular area between Estes Park and Lyons in the mountains of Colorado. They all go for one week each year and miss their parents NOT ONE SINGLE BIT. Dagny, in fact, doesn’t even take the time to read the daily emails all of her loved ones dutifully send her to combat homesickness until she is on the drive home. She apparently pulls them out of her pack at that point and catches up on the news from Denver. Note to self: Should a tragedy occur during the week of summer camp, DON’T NOTIFY DAGNY BY EMAIL.

This year Addie begged her parents to allow her to go to summer camp twice – two full nonconsecutive weeks. They told her they would allow her to go for two weeks, but they would only pay for one of those weeks. If she wanted to go to another week, she would have to pay for it herself. That is exactly what she did. She earned money to pay for camp. But she also took the initiative and applied for a scholarship, which she was awarded. And thus, she completed M.A.D. Camp this past Friday. M.A.D., by the way, stands for music, art, and drama.

Seeings as at age 3 Addie performed a self-composed one-man musical for my sister Jen and me in my backyard splash pool, it is no surprise to anyone that she is a natural-born performer. M.A.D. Camp was made for Addie.

Friday afternoon Bill and I drove to her camp outside Allenspark and watched the final performance of the play the middle-school-aged campers had been working on the entire week. Shockingly, Addie was the outstanding performer. She sang a solo, and her voice was clear as a bell and very pretty. Her acting was appropriately animated. She not only remembered every one of her lines, but I could tell she knew everyone else’s lines as well. It was only with great difficulty that she barely refrained from saying the lines along with them under her breath. Her lips almost didn’t move.

I’m happy that my grandkids aren’t as wimpy as their nana and that they all enjoy camp so much. It pleases me that they don’t get homesick, apparently not one little bit. And as for Dagny, I’m going to stop sending her emails and then just tell her she must have lost mine on the trip home.

This post linked to the GRAND Social