DIARY
I’d just recently turned eleven. My parents were looking around for houses in Linden, Grand Blanc, and thereabouts. This would be my last year in Flint as a kid. My social life revolved around three things: the Nintendo, Dungeons and Dragons, and my bicycle. By my bicycle, I mean that I had grown beyond the cluster of kids on my immediate small block: the Lameres and Shanleys and Spencers and Teslars. I’d made friends with Paul and Victor and Bill and Eric. I rode my bike with my dad to Mott, and we played tennis in the courts (not abandoned and grown over) adjacent to the hedges at the Mott Estate. I’d ride my bike alone to the library. I also had acquired a paper route, which was both a source of income and a source of new friends.
I might be off a little, but if I recall correctly, this was the year that for Church Camp the UU’s had set out to Camp Holaka. The focal point of the weekend, from my point of view, was Capture the Flag. We played twice; on the first night, after Gini played songs on her guitar around the campfire, with kids six to twelve, before we all went to bed, we played. Later the next day there was a second game, which Victor and I missed because we’d had to leave for several hours, for some event back in Flint.
This is all long enough ago, and vague enough, that I’m having serious trouble picking the events apart, and as much of what I say is likely to be misappropriated or misplaced as correct. (I select these memories more or less randomly). Part of the problem was that there were such constants to church camp from year to year, it’s easy to mix up years. There was always Capture the Flag; a highlight ni ’89 because the teenagers had passed on the weekend, meaning I was one of the “old kids” and in a position to marshall the younger kids. There was always a sort of still spirituality; an almost paradoxical spiritualality. We’d make sand candles and meditate and talk about reincarnation and the afterlife (this was a Unitarian camp, after all), but these were also my Dungeons and Dragons friends, and my video game friends. Naturally, we spent just as much time contemplating how Tanis may be the central character in the novels, but Caramon can always kick his ass by the numbers, and by the way, Mario II is almost impossible to win. If it rained, the ground spelled like clay and peat down by the water… mosquitoes soon… but pine and moss up in the woods. There were ferns everywhere at Holaka.
I think it was around this time that I started to swear, occasionally, haphazardly, and sparingly, first alone, and then around my friends. By the middle of high school, I’d be swearing around my parents, though I still did so sparingly.
At church camp there was also a tension between the boys in our class and the girls. We were undeniably curious, but our curiosity never quite became transgressive. We were still at the edge of an age where we found each other repugnant, in the sense of being girls/boys, which I think we knew even then was a convenion of childhood and nothing more, but also not having much of a clue about sex and sexuality either. At camp, several kids made that leap (no, not that leap; a leap of recognition), and the rest of us were somewhat startled.
I remember in particular one night at church camp, in 1989. Four of the boys (myself, Chris, Victor, and someone else… probably Charlie Brown or one of the Doyle Ryder kids) and three of the girls (Sam and Melissa and someone else) got together and played Truth-or-Dare. The game was silly and absurd and paranoid, and nobody had truly scandalous secrets or actions that were anything more than embarrassing. I’m pretty sure we were reduced to imitating our chaperones and rolling around in poison ivy. Answering if we’d ever mooned someone. Until, about three hours in, Melissa got a more adventurous dare (from the third girl) as pertained to one of us boys, and we were all confounded and baffled, except for Chris who knew only too well what they meant. He yelled “no way” at which point the game had resolved itself. We went back to our separate cabins, trying to find some comfort in talking about D&D most likely. There was something much more familiar, less frightening, less alien, about rampaging hordes of Lawful Evil goblins armed with short swords.
I think, from that point on, however, when I thought about church camp, it wasn’t Capture the Flag at the forefront of my mind.
Melissa had been dared to give someone a five-minute French kiss.
What were you doing in September, 1989?
END OF POST.