North State Parent magazine

For a period of time in the mid 70's, my parents signed me and my brother Paul up for summer camp in our hometown of Smithtown, New York. I don't remember how many years we attended, or even what years they were. The whole experience has been reduced to a shoebox's worth of mental snapshots that overlap in my head with scenes from "Meatballs" and "Friday the 13th."

One of the things I do remember is the name: Ivy League Day Camp. A quick Internet search pulled it right up, though the place was completely unrecognizable. For one thing, my childhood memories of summer are faded and washed-out, like a Super-8 movie. The Ivy League website makes the place look like it's an art camp for aspiring air-brushers.

Ivy League, a phrase that meant nothing to me at the time, took its namesake seriously. Age groups at camp were named after Ivy League Schools: Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, etc. My group was Dartmouth. My brother claims he was in the University of Michigan, but I've told him that's impossible. More likely Brown, or the University of Pennsylvania.

I think the whole Ivy League naming thing appealed to my parents, who couldn't resist teasing themselves with vicarious academic fantasies. They weren't about to send us to Camp Community College, Camp Drop-Out, or Camp Stay-at-Home.

Paul and I were the last kids to float unassisted, the last to tread water and blow bubbles, and the last to dive off a diving board, while other kids cannon-balled carelessly all around us. While other kids counted down the minutes until swim time, I couldn't wait for it to end. To this day, I feel self-conscious in a pool unless I'm surrounded by my own kids, flopping and flailing about in the shallow end.

My dad, a schoolteacher, was the camp's basketball coach. "Howie Basketball," they called him, and he kept en eye on us, for better and for worse. I felt calmed by his presence, but I could never use the excuse that I left my bathing suit at home to get out of swim times.

At the camp carnival, "Howie Basketball" sat under a delicately-positioned water bucket connected by string to a wooden bullseye. Many tickets were spent trying to hit the bullseye with a softball, but my dad stayed dry for most of the afternoon. When it was my turn, the counselors gave me about 16 free tries to douse him, each time moving me progressively closer to the target. Given my skill, I'm lucky I didn't put his eye out.

I don't remember when or why we stopped going to camp. At some point, the collective experience -- bug juice, plaster of Paris, disco music, lanyards, all of it -- just froze in time. I never got into Yale.

Today, whenever I hear the 1975 one-hit wonder "Magic", by a band called Pilot (Thank you, Google), I'm delivered right back to that faded, fuzzy place and to the youthful mindset I had back then: "this may never end." In camp, as in parenting, yesterday goes by too fast, and tomorrow never comes.

My own kids are now old enough to start their own camp adventures, and I'll treasure the moments even if they don't. Those care-free, summer days never return to you the same way, not even in memory. 

Joel Schwartzberg has been published in The New York Times Magazine, New Jersey Monthly, The Star Ledger, and the New York Daily News-- and has two children.