Love Notes from Summer Camp

* * *

Six weeks later, Sarah delivered the twins back to the in-laws. Fuckhead was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen, and the girls were delighted to see me again after 4 weeks with them. After big hugs, they pulled out identical iPhones, and said, "Dad, look what Jason bought us! We each have our own iPhone now!"

I was a bit perturbed. Before the Great Unpleasantness, Sarah and I had gone round and round about the appropriate age for a child to have their first cellphone. We ended up disagreeing on the actual age, but both agreed that it should be no sooner than age 13. I glared at Sarah, who shrugged her shoulders at me, but managed to look a bit guilty.

When the girls ran into the house to greet their grandparents, I turned to Sarah and hissed, "What the fuck, Sarah! I thought we agreed on waiting a few more years for this. Also, the idea of Fuckhead buying my daughters' affection with expensive things that I can't afford pisses me off quite a bit!"

"I'm sorry. Jason wanted so much to make the trip special for the girls. He surprised all of us when he pulled out the iPhones. The girls were so excited that I didn't have the heart to take them away. What are you going to do?"

"Fuck me! You two have pretty well boxed me into a corner on this. If I take them away, Dickface will be the good guy and I will be Shit Dad for the rest of the summer! You know I can't take them away now. Please don't ever pull this shit again, though!"

The girls and I drove home and packed our bags with everything we'd need for camp. They spent the rest of the day and evening regaling me with stories of why New York was the coolest place on earth. For several tiring hours, they showed me hundreds of pictures of tall buildings, statues, dinosaur skeletons, the ballet, Central Park, famous movie stars that they ran across, and just about every food group that they ate there. I was extremely tired of hearing about the Big Apple by the time the girls finally fell asleep.

* * *

Early the next day, I was heading east on I-90 in an 8-person van that Mark had rented. Mark and Lisa and I were crammed into the van with all four of our girls, along with all of our sleeping bags, pillows, clothes and swimsuits. After climbing up to Snoqualmie Summit, we descended down into the flatter ground of Central Washington, and stopped in Ellensburg for some tasty food and milkshakes.

Thus fortified, we rolled on to the Gingko State Park on the banks of the Columbia River. We paused for an hour to take the self-guided tour through an ancient petrified forest, and to visit the nearby Native American petroglyphs. My girls took pictures of every cool thing they saw with their new iPhones.

We sang jolly songs as we crossed the Columbia, and then followed I-90 as it climbed up into the miles of flat cornfields around Quincy. After an hour or so of singing and storytelling, we reached the town of Moses Lake. The outside air temperature was about 95 degrees F, so we stopped in town for a swim at the huge water park in town. More milkshakes and snacks materialized, followed by a return to the warm embrace of I-90. Miles later, we swept through Spokane, and crossed the border into Idaho.

Lisa dropped Mark and me off at the Coeur D'Alene golf resort and then took the kids up to the theme park. Mark and I lost an acceptable amount of golf balls, killed a few worms, replaced a few divots, and finished our round just as Lisa and the kids came back from the theme park. We then pushed on a bit further along I-90 and then headed south along the lake to the family camp along the lake. I pointed out to the girls that the cell coverage at camp was nonexistent, and that they would only be able to use their phones at camp to take pictures.

It wasn't until we got our gear stowed in our cabin and sat down for dinner that I became suspicious. After dinner, I confronted Mark. "Mark, you are a rat bastard! You told me this was a family camp, with lots of camp activities and with SOME music and folk dancing."

"That's absolutely true. What's the problem?"

"What's the problem, my ass! You misled me on purpose! This is primarily a DANCE and MUSIC camp, with just a smidgeon of other activities. You and Lisa been trying to get me to go folk-dancing with you for years, and I've been telling you to fuck off. I am not a granola-eating folktard like you guys. And now, you've got me trapped here for two weeks at a fucking DANCE camp. Asshole!"

"Chill, dude! You don't have to dance at all. You can take off after breakfast and spend the rest of the day hiking, and swimming, and all of those other things I told you about. We'll stay here and watch the girls, and make sure they have fun with arts and crafts, and we'll take them swimming."

"You bet your ass I will. While you're doing that, I'm definitely NOT going to be dancing. Hell, I may even drive back up the lake for another few rounds of golf!"

Mark smiled meekly and said, "No worries."

After supper, the whole camp assembled for a 'family gathering', where silly songs were sung, wild stories were told, and a short family dance was held. I tried hard to stay on the sidelines, but my two daughters would have none of it, and pulled me into a dance. It was a simple Russian folk dance with about 2 moves, called 'Sasha!', danced to a spirited Russian tune. The twins grabbed me around the waist with one arm and put their other hand up in the air. I rolled my eyes but did the same. For the first part of the dance, each couple (or triple) whirled around as fast as they could. Then the music crescendoed and came to a halt, and everyone yelled "Hai!!" as loud as they could. Everyone would change partners, and then the dance would go on with the same short list of moves, with the music getting faster and faster with each repetition. Finally, just as I was getting a bit dizzy, the music stopped, and with a final "Hai!!", the dance was done.

If someone had told me beforehand what I would doing on the dance floor that night, I would have been aghast. However, I had to admit that it was fun. I was able to move to the beat, and stumble through the dance about as well as any of the other parents there. Best of all, my girls came up to me with shining eyes, gave me a huge three-way hug, and said, "Dad, that was awesome! Thanks for dancing with us! And look at this! We gave one of our iPhones to Susie's mom, and she took pictures and a video of us three dancing together!"

I misted up as I watched the images. I tried to talk, but my throat had trouble making noises. All I could do was gulp out, "That's wonderful! Please send me a copy." As far as I was concerned, Fuckhead was still the Great Satan, but with these pictures, the iPhones had become sufficiently consecrated for me to let my daughters keep using them.

After the dance, we learned about another camp tradition, in which the entire camp marched from cabin to cabin, singing "Morningtown Ride" by Malvina Reynolds. As we came to each cabin, kids younger than 10 were dropped off with their parents, and the rest of the camp sang goodnight to them.

Milly and Lily asked their uncle, "Uncle Mark, are they going to sing goodnight to us too?" They were thrilled to learn that 10 and 11 year-olds got to stay up with the "big kids" for another whole hour before their bedtime. They put on their game faces and tried to fill the whole hour hanging with the older kids. However, they only made it about 30 minutes before starting to droop. Mark and Lisa and their girls were also fading a bit after our big day. All seven of us ambled back to our cabin, crashed for the night and slept the sleep of the just — or maybe the just exhausted.

* * *

I woke up the next morning after the best sleep I had had in months. I pulled on a T-shirt, a pair of shorts and my sandals and headed over to the communal bathhouse to pee. I got back to the cabin just as the other denizens began to awaken. One of the twins said, "Dad, I'm hungry!" This was quickly echoed by another one of the girls. I realized that I was pretty hungry myself. Just as I got the twins dressed, we heard a large bell ringing back at the dining hall, announcing that our breakfast was ready to eat.

All seven of us sat at the same table together. The four girls marched through plates of French toast and bowls of oatmeal like a horde of army ants sterilizing a path through the jungle floor. After a short burping contest, Lily asked her cousins, "What happens next?"

Jennie replied, "First period is art class in the next building. We'll take you there. Then we'll come back here for family gathering!"

Lily and Milly were pulled out the door by their cousins, and shouted back to me, "See you at family gathering, Dad!"

I realized that now might be a fine time to make my escape from the dance scene. However, the idea of hiking up a steep hill with a tummy full of French toast was not immediately appealing. As I pondered this dilemma, a rather nice-looking woman about my age came over to introduce herself. "Hi, I'm Amy, from Olympia. I'm Lori and Cindy's mom. You must be Mark's brother."

"Nice to meet you. Yes, I'm Ron, and was dragooned into coming here under false pretenses by my brother." I tried to say this with a pout, but couldn't maintain a straight face.

"Ah, so you're not fond of folk dancing or music?"

"They're OK, I guess. I just never had much interest in doing either one. Mark and Lisa have been really into it for years, though. Mark plays anything with strings, and Lisa plays flute and pennywhistle. How about you, Amy?"

"I've been a folk-dancer since college. I started bringing my daughters to camps like this when they were tiny babies. I also play piano and string bass. Do you play an instrument?"

"Well, I had piano lessons as a kid and played trumpet in our high school marching band. I haven't played in years though."

"Why did you stop?"

"I liked my piano teacher, and I like the sound of the piano, but I hated the lessons. I had to learn a piece of music that I didn't like, and once I learned it, I had to play it in a recital. Whoopee — a chance to screw up something I hated in front of hundreds of people. Why wouldn't I stop? And why do you like it?"

"I'm not a big fan of piano recitals either. However, when my teacher asked me what music I liked. I told her I liked rock and roll, and would love to play that on the piano. Come over here to the piano, and I'll show you what she played for me."

I followed Amy to the piano, where she opened the lid, flexed her fingers, and then started knocking out a simple boogie woogie bass line with her left hand.

"Sound familiar?" she asked.

I nodded.

"You've probably heard this pattern a thousand times before. Now, I'm going to add some chords with my right hand."

She started with a set of simple chords on the beat.

"Now I'm going to add some syncopation, and play some of the chords off the beat."

She played this way for 24 bars, and then said, "Now I'm going to add some 7th chords to give it a jazzier feeling."

After a few bars of 7th chords, she began to interpose a few jazz riffs among the syncopated chords. Her hands flew up and down the keyboard, pounding out an infectious rhythm that had me nodding along with the beat.

With a final flourish, she stopped playing and said, "Oops, times up! Time to dance!" She shut the cover on the piano, stood up, and asked me to do the first dance with her.

I was gobsmacked, both by her playing and by the thought of dancing with her. I tried to tell her that I had no idea how to dance.

"Don't worry, it's easy! Let me give you a 30 second dance workshop. Ready?"

I continued to gape.

"First rule! Look into my eyes and smile! This is supposed to be fun!"

I managed a sickly smile.

"Second rule! This is a contradance. The whole dance is done by walking around in time with the beat." She took my hand and proceeded to march me up and down the floor while counting out the beats. "Great, you've got it! Just keep your feet moving up and down in a walking step, no matter what the caller tells us to do."

"Third rule! Give me some weight!" I was definitely bewildered now. "OK, take my hand in a limp grip, and hold it as it it were a smelly, dead fish." She marched me around with the dead fish grip. "Now, enough of the dead fish. Now pretend that the fish is alive and you're trying to land it on your boat. Pull my hand toward you while I pull your hand toward me at the same time. See how connected we feel? That is called 'weight' in dancing. It makes it easier to dance and also a lot more fun."

"OK, that's the whole lesson! Now, let's see what the caller has in store for us."

A dance caller stepped up to the mike and taught us a repetitive dance with very simple moves. Each time through the dance, the caller asked everyone to swing their partner. Once I realized what it meant to 'swing your partner', I liked it a lot. It meant that every 64 beats of music, the rather voluptuous Amy would step into my arms, stare deeply into my eyes, and spin around with me for 16 beats. She would then step back and we would move on to another couple and repeat the whole series of simple movements.

At first, I was terrified that I would step on her foot, or make some other catastrophic mistake and bring the whole dance floor to a screeching halt. "Don'tfuckup, don'tfuckup, don'tfuckup!" I kept thinking as the dance carried us along.

Fortunately, nothing terrible happened. The caller kept calling out the moves of the dance, just in time for me to do them. Amy kept stepping into my arms, looking deeply in to my eyes, and smiling at me. I slowly began to relax, and by the end of the dance I found that I could easily hear the beat of the music. I realized that everyone on the dance floor was doing the same moves at the same time, in time with the lively tune that the band was playing.

Finally the music stopped, and the caller asked us to find a partner for the next dance. Amy gave me a hug, and said, "That was great! Are you sure you haven't done this before?" I shook my head a bit numbly. "OK, I'm looking forward to dancing with you a lot more this weekend!" I nodded enthusiastically.

Amy turned away to applaud the band, and another man asked her to dance. I felt one brief, terrible moment of abandonment, and then a woman behind me asked, "Would you like to dance with me?"

I managed to say words this time and croaked out, "Yes, I would!"

The caller taught a new series of dance moves, which added a new step that I hadn't seen before. However, it was a pretty simple step, and I soon found myself relaxing in the arms of yet another lovely woman. Every time the music would stop, I had just enough time to thank my current partner for the dance before I was snapped up by yet another woman. Before I knew it, the dance period was over, and people began to set up tables for lunch.

* * *

After the morning dance session, I sat down and chatted with several of the women I had danced with. I realized that this was the first time in ages I had spent time talking to women who weren't Sarah, one of her friends or one of my work colleagues. Before Sarah and I were an item, I had been to college frat parties and the occasional hook-up bar. This was a much different dynamic. None of the women at this dance camp were hitting on me, no one was inebriated, and no one seemed to have an underlying agenda. I was surprised at how easy and natural it was to talk with them about kids, life, and music.

A few minutes later, a tumult of kids came pouring into the dance space, chattering like magpies and heading for the snacks table. Most of the kids were also carrying paintings from their morning art workshop. Milly and Lily immediately latched on to me and showed me what they had just produced.

"We worked on this together, Dad! What do you think?"

I was no fool. The only possible answer to this question from one of your kids is, "It's great, sweetie! Thanks for showing it to me." As I was saying this, my mind was also whirring, trying to figure out what the hell I was looking at. It gradually occurred to me that the blobs on the paper were abstract versions of people, and that some of them were holding equally abstract fiddles and guitars. The rest of the blobs had their hands in the air, and at the bottom of the page, I finally noticed a word balloon that simply said, 'Hai!!'. I turned to the girls and said, "This is the dance we did last night. Are we in this picture?"

The girls nodded and pointed to 3 blobs that were standing close together in the corner of the page. "Wow! This is wonderful! This is going on our fridge back home!" They smiled, and then asked me to sit with them during family gathering.

We sat on the floor, surrounded by other families, which included many of the women I'd danced with in the prior workshop. The gathering featured a rowdy collection of stories, dances and songs. This time, when my daughters asked me to dance, I was less self-conscious about dancing or looking like a dork. I found myself standing in the middle of a circle of kids and other parents, flapping my arms and prancing around like a chicken while my kids convulsed in laughter. At that moment, I realized that I might be willing to do almost any stupid dance move if it would make my daughters smile and giggle like that. The gathering ended with a hilarious song called "I Want to be a Dog". The troubadours leading the gathering were really hamming it up, and quickly had the whole room breathing dog breath on each other and howling at the moon.

Later during lunch, one of the women I had danced with earlier asked me if I was going to the first afternoon dance workshop. I surprised myself by saying, "Sure, sounds like fun." This time I was a bit less stressed at the thought of learning new dance moves, and relaxed more. I did fuck up occasionally, and this initially concerned me. However, I was gratified to see that other, more experienced dancers were spacing out at least as frequently as I was, but were not at all concerned about it. Instead, they reacted by laughing at themselves, and projected an tacit air of "Woops! I profoundly fucked up in front of people I don't even know! I'm human! Isn't it great?" When they did this, I noticed that the people around them laughed too, but were laughing WITH them, and not AT them! I started to emulate this behavior, and thought to myself, "I wish we responded to simple mistakes at work this way!"

The rest of the day was a blur. I did more dancing, and then the whole camp headed for the swimming area at the edge of the lake. By this time of year, the upper couple of feet of chilly Lake Coeur D'Alene had warmed up enough to be perfect for swimming. I noticed that my daughters spent most of the time in a gaggle of other kids, floating in inner tubes, splashing each other with water, and generally having a great time. The twins had learned to swim at an early age but tended to stay in the shallow end of the indoor pools in Seattle, or hug the edge of the deep end. I was therefore somewhat surprised to see them avidly sharing in a diving game with the other kids,. Each kid would try to do increasingly sillier vaults off the diving board and then plunge shrieking with laughter into the lake to the admiration and giggles of the other kids.

When all possible fun was extracted from the lake, folks gradually dried off and headed back to their cabins to dress for dinner. Dinner was another round of simple, kid-friendly cuisine. That night we ate spaghetti and meatballs. Both kids and adults were ravenous after an afternoon at the lake. After dinner, we had another episode of family gathering and the troubadours again led all the campers around from cabin to cabin for the evening bedtime ritual. The girls and their cousins were able to stay up for their full extra hour this evening but were absolutely ready for bed after that.