Always Bucking the System

an homage to soda cans, matchsticks and summer day camps

My best friend growing up was Tommy Meehan.

Tommy was one of those weird geniuses, a kid who did science experiments in his bedroom and read Shakespeare for fun. We stopped going to the same school in second grade but spent almost every weekend with one another. At the pool, we used to collect popsickle sticks and rubber bands and make tiny crossbows to shoot matchsticks at teenagers.

We had so many sleepovers, playing pong on the TV and then watching Kolchak: The Night Stalker just to make sure we really didn’t sleep. The pillow fights in the dark with the strobe lights were especially fun. Not exactly safe, but fun.

But I don’t think our Moms really knew what to do with us in the summers. So Tommy and I were packed off to day camp for about three summers in a row, each one two weeks long. I remember getting on crowded yellow school busses at NIH, and lots of soda cans, the kind with the old oval type of tabs that you could peel right off and cut your finger on.

The first year’s camp was the best. Our little group spent most of the day on a flat rock next to a bustling stream. We’d throw our empty cans in and try to sink them with rocks. We’d walk from there to other activities like a tire swing over a pond, and shooting BB guns - also at empty cans. I told you, soda cans were everywhere.

The next years’ camps were not so good. Lots of rules, but also just some mean kids. One boy tore into me for my name, calling me, “Christ-bearer” all week long as we waited in various lines. Just mean. Tommy and I got into some kinda conflict with this one gang of kids, no idea why, and one of them flat out judo kicked me in the pool one day. Underwater, but it still really hurt. I’ve always wondered, how do you kick that hard underwater?

That was also the year that all the counselors were gaggled together one day and told us kids to remain quiet. When all the kids started talking among ourselves anyway, one of the counselors, a big guy with a mullet and tiny Adidas shorts, poked his head out of the huddle, and yelled, “WHO’S TALKING?”

Well, we all were, and I thought I should be honest, so I raised my hand, and said, “I was.” He got red in the face, and stomped over to me, grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into the office. He told me to sit on my hands and face the corner until told otherwise.

After an hour or so, the head counselor, a nice woman probably in her early 30s, came and sat with me, and asked me what was wrong and was I ready to get up and rejoin the other children. Well, yes.

The next year was worse. We were at the new camp which had its OK days. I liked it when we made a slip-n-slide out of long plastic tarp and hurled ourselves down a long hill. I liked the crafts, the kind with the egg cartons and pipe cleaners. We were supposed to make caterpillars but I made a battlecruiser.

One day though, we were gathered around the cement basketball court with all the kids standing on the sidelines in a big rectangle, about a hundred of us. The counselors were in a huddle in the middle of the court, trying to figure things out. They did that a lot.

Apparently, the kids were talking too much - again. One of the counselors, a guy with big-gold rimmed glasses and long straight black hair, told us all to be quiet and that he wanted it so quiet he could hear a matchstick hit the court. I guess that was more than a figure of speech because he then took an actual matchstick and raised it up above his head. Then, with a daring, menacing look at all of us, he dropped it.

Again, with the matchsticks. In any case, I knew what we were all going to do. Without a doubt. So, as the matchstick hit the ground, I cupped my hand around my mouth and yelled out in a huge roar, “YAAAAAAAAAAAH!”

I was the only kid who did. Not a peep from anyone else.

So there I was, screaming my heart out while ninety-nine other kids stood there quietly, looking at me, blank faced. What cowards, what sheep. That, or I was an idiot.

Gold-rimmed glasses guy, as you might imagine, was not happy. He rushed over to me, grabbed my arm, and took me to the office, and told me to sit there. Same ol’ song.

I don’t remember a nice counselor coming to talk to me that day. But somehow they must have forgiven me and let me out of the office because here I am fifty years later. And still trying to buck the system from time to time. YAAAAAAAAAAAAH!