When my friend Erika tagged a picture of me on Facebook, who would have known it would have been this?!

This is from summer camp back in…’90? ‘91? . I can’t remember which camp this was, but it was either
a) Girl Scout Camp
or
b) Camp Optimist

…neither of which are racking up the cool points. I can’t believe there is a camp called Camp Optimist. No wonder I turned out so neurotic.  Regardless, that’s me in the Michigan Tech shirt — my dad is an alumni.

Looking back on the summers of my childhood, I think my mom sought every excuse to get me out of the house.  I distictly remember a string of years where, in one summer, I went to girl scout camp, camp optimist, dance camp, and cheerleading camp.  I don’t blame her. While out at a restaurant last week, I looked to the boisterous, fussy kid at the table next to us and thought, “Can’t you send that kid to a day camp, or something?”  (I’ve made quite the habit of hating other people’s kids. Sometimes I worry that my own biological clock never really got to ticking. Or I just drowned the sound out by drinking.) My mom was smart to keep me occupied elsewhere, however.  You leave an overly-dramatic only-child at home and she finds ways to entertain herself.  Like tap dancing on your hardwood floors and singing showtunes at the top of her lungs all day.  All the camps I went to were day camps, not the kind where you stay overnight for a week or more.  This was fine by me, but after watching “Bug Juice” later in life, I kind of wish I had a true camp experience and a sweet, pre-pubescent summer romance to call my own.

I have but three distinct memories from my summer camp experiences, and they are:
1) Walking through a creek my jelly shoes.
2) Making and grilling our own hamburgers — to this day,  in the top five best burgers of my life.   One camper made a second burger for herself, but didn’t eat it and was about to throw it away.  The counselor chastised the girl, saying that there were starving kids in [insert improverished country here]. She was so mad about it.  I told her I would eat it, and she was so grateful. I didn’t give two shits about the starving kids, I just wanted another burger.
3) This one time, at Camp Optimist, we were all horseback riding on one of the trails, when we realized that one of the girls was missing.  We heard this shrieking back in the woods.  Her horse was apparently an English horse and knew this other trail and she couldn’t control it, so the girl was freaking out, and so was the horse.  This was really scary at the time, but to this day I can’t tell this story straight through without laughing.