When I Was Your Age

 Remember when your parents or grandparents would start something with “When I was your age” or “Back in my day”? It didn’t matter what followed, you just knew it was out of date, completely irrelevant, and had absolutely nothing to do with whatever it was you were trying to talk your parents into or weasel out of them. 

The funny thing is that I now frequently find myself thinking about “when I was that age” or “back in my day.” The only saving grace is that my sons are grown and don’t have to listen to my memories. You however, dear reader, are stuck with me.

The summer-like days we've had lately have me thinking of summers and things “back in my day.” As I have said before, my hometown of Maysville, Ky. was pretty small back in the mid-70s, and there wasn’t a lot to do. It didn’t matter though. Children made their own fun then. We didn’t spend summer days at the mall, texting on our cellphones, or posting selfies to the Internet. Instead, we played ball with our friends, visited their houses, or rode our bikes until dark when our parents would call us home. Then we would gather in one neighbor or another's backyard for an impromptu cookout. The adults would enjoy a cold beer while playing Jarts, and we kids would down one too many pops while avoiding the small weapons our parents were throwing about.

Mom and Dad kept an extra refrigerator in the garage just for such occasions, and it was always full of Barq's Root Beer, Shasta Ginger Ale or Faygo Red Pop, as well as beer for the adults -- Hudepohl, Schoenling, Burger, Wiedemann and even the occasional Little Kings Cream Ale, all "local" brews from just down the river in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Covington, Ky. That's the way beer was done then, made and sold locally.

Then beers went national, even international, and the small, local brewery almost disappeared, along with many of those brands.  But nothing is small or local anymore. We can't send the kids to Sherman's Store for a quart of milk.  We drive miles to Kroger or Walmart instead.  Families eat at fast food restaurants, the kids text their friends about how lame everything is, and that passes for the family dinner. Teens chug energy drinks instead of red pop, and all I can think is that's not how we did it in my day.  

Maybe we'll round a curve, though. PBR is hip again, and microbreweries and brew pubs are all the rage.  We're seeing a return to smaller and more local.  Maybe we'll even see a return to the family dinner and the backyard cookout, only without the Jarts.  Then I can say this is how we did it in my day.

My Summer Camp Adventure

Or … How I Came to Fear Russian Amazons

The summer of my 10th year was enormous for me. I was allowed to stray from my very over-protective mother’s side and attend camp. Oh the joy! A child’s rite of summer passage was about to be mine, and I couldn’t have been more excited! I didn’t care that it was church camp. I didn’t care that my step-grandmother, as well as most of her family, would be there the entire week. I didn’t care because I was going to camp.

Mom thought I’d be homesick, but I don’t recall feeling it.  I loved sleeping in the “cabin” with the other girls because it was like a big slumber party, although I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why they were called cabins when they looked nothing like a cabin at all and were really just big dorms. 

The cabins were sort of like duplexes, with 10-12 girls in bunks on each side, the counselor’s rooms up front and bathroom facilities between the two sleeping areas.  Well, bathroom facilities as in a toilet and a sink.  The real bathroom facilities were these crude block buildings with everything sort of in semi-open stalls.  I hated the “showers,” as they were called. 

I’m not sure I’d ever taken a shower before that week.  I only recall having a bathtub in the three houses I’d occupied up to this point in my life.  So … combine my first showers with the fact that they took place in a huge room with what seemed like a hundred other girls, you had to stand on cold, rough concrete floors, the door that you closed on the shower stall was only a flimsy half door, it was all within sight of the girls using the sinks, the toilets with no doors were just around the corner, and all of this occurring on my first true trip away from home – alone, and I was mortified and truly over-whelmed. 

Oh, did I mention I was very shy as well?  Yep, I was definitely mortified.  And then some.  

A typical day at church camp meant up and dressed in the morning, breakfast, activities, lunch, activities, dinner, church service and then bed.   Then it was up the next morning and doing it all again.

Meals were your typical camp fare: lots of burgers, hot dogs, spaghetti and things like that.  Activities were either arts & crafts in nature or sports related, and the church service every night wasn’t too bad.  It was held in an open-air tabernacle under some old pine trees, and there was a lot more emphasis on skits and laughs than preaching, although every service ended with a bit of that and an altar call thrown in to boot.

And let me tell you, there’s nothing that will stir the blood like a good, old-fashioned Nazarene altar call.  It came complete with tears and shouts of hallelujah, and that’s a pretty powerful sight to a child away from home for the first time.

In fact, I answered the altar call on Thursday night.  I’m not sure why I did, but it was pretty obvious that I was one of the few who’d yet to go up there and cry, so I gave it a go.  Some folks cheered, some cried along.  Everyone rejoiced over the fact that I’d been saved.  I had no idea what I’d been saved from, but it sure made everyone happy, so I was glad I went.

The arts & crafts activities were your typical church camp sort of things.  We made God’s eyes out of sticks and yarn, glued little offering boxes together out of popsicle sticks and just general stuff like that.  I completed them all and would have been quite happy to do them again except for one little catch.

The Cabin Competition

Ah … the cabin competition -- the sadistic plan set into motion by Satan’s minion disguised as a camp director.

The cabin competition was exactly that: a competition among the camp cabins.  Points would be awarded for various activities, and the winning cabin would be announced at lunch on Friday.  Sounded simple enough, right?

Wrong.

The point system went like this:

·         1 point for your cabin for participating in an arts & crafts activity, limited to one point per each activity.

·         1 point for your cabin for participating in a sports activity, with additional points awarded for coming in first, second or third. 

Obviously, the points were to be made in sports.  And that is just a cruel, evil thing to do to a child who was born with two left feet, no grace or hand/eye coordination, and who was entering that really awkward and clumsy stage of puberty a little early.  Plus, I was small for my age.

I was brave and did what I could for my cabin, though.  I participated in the nature hike, did morning calisthenics and a few other, minor, sort-of-sporty things. 

And then I ran out of options, something my camp counselor just couldn’t grasp.  There wasn’t a single thing left for me to participate in, but my counselor would hear nothing of it.  So we looked around for something I could do.

Tetherball

Hey, tetherball looked fairly harmless.  After all, what was there except for a pole and a rope with a ball on the end of it.  You just had to stand there and smack it a few times.  Surely even I could handle a few moments of that!

In order to keep things on an even playing scale, the demonically-inspired powers that be decided the tether ball competition should be first – third graders compete, fourth – sixth, etc.  Since I was going into the fourth grade that meant I could be pitted against a sixth grader, of course.

I strode up to that tetherball pole about as confident as I could get for someone as puny and non-athletic as they come.  And then I saw my opponent. 

They’d obviously brought in a ringer.

Svetlana, as I have come to call her, must have failed the sixth grade at least a half dozen times because she was all of 6’2” tall and built like a Russian Amazon, complete with a unibrow, a mustache and chest hair.  And … she’d obviously been taking steroids because she had muscles out to THERE.  She had so many muscles that she had no neck.

I swear.  As sure as I’m sitting here writing this, I swear that’s what she looked like.

Or at least that’s what she looked like to me.  It was a long time ago.  Anyway …

What then transpired between Svetlana and me left me scarred and broken.  I still have nightmares all these many years later. 

Svetlana wound up, took a mighty swing and nailed that ball, which proceeded to nail me right in the side of the head and violently throw me up against the pole.  Another swing of Svetlana’s beastly paw, and the ball was wrapping the rope around the pole.  And around my head.  Her beefy mitts continued their assault on that poor ball, and in effect on me, and I was quite quickly trussed to the pole.

There I stood, my head tied to the tetherball pole, my glasses askew, and my poor little face bulging out from between the wrapped rope and metal pole, while Svetlana threw her muscled arms into the air and let out a monstrous roar of victory.

I had been defeated, and in a most ignoble way.

A counselor helped me untangle myself from my web of embarrassing defeat, and I slunk away with my one point for participation.  A point I had earned through my thorough and complete humiliation.

I didn’t participate in anymore sports events that week.  I gave all I could to the Cabin Competition with my close brush with death.  I’m not sure anyone else who tangled with Svetlana that week lived to share their tale, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.

You can guess which cabin won the competition.  It sure wasn’t mine.  And I don’t remember what prize the winning cabin received.  However, I’ve never forgotten church camp, Svetlana and the terror that is tetherball.