Dawn Reader

Dawn Reader
from Open Door Coffee Co.; Hudson, OH; Oct. 26, 2016

Monday, May 21, 2012

"What-If?"

A week ago, Writer's Almanac offered this poem for the day (13 May):

Wherever You Are
...
by Jeffrey Harrison

When I kissed you in the hall
of the youth hostel we fell
into the linen closet laughing
twenty years ago and I still
remember though not very often
the taste of cheap wine in your mouth
like raspberries the freckle
between your breasts and the next day
when we went to Versailles I hardly
saw anything because I was looking
at you the whole time your face I can't
quite remember then I kissed you
good-bye and you got on a train
and I never saw you again just
one day and one letter long gone
explaining never mind but sometimes
I wonder where you are probably
married with children like me happy
with a new last name a whole life
having nothing to do with that day
but everybody has something like it
a small thing they can't help
going back to and it's not even about
choices and where your life might
have gone but just that it's there
far enough away so it can be seen
as just something that happened almost
to someone else an episode from
a movie we walk out of blinded
back into our lives

"Wherever You Are" by Jeffrey Harrison, from Feeding the Fire. © Sarabande Books, 2001.



It's a poem about a "what-if" moment--a meeting between a young man and woman, a meeting with intimacy, of poignancy, a meeting that led, ultimately, to nothing but, years later, a sweet memory.

I posted that day on FB about this poem--thinking what a good idea it would be for a literary collection of some sort (stories, poems, essays?) about what-if? moments.

I have one.

Schroon Lake
In the summer of 1963--the summer after my freshman year at Hiram College--I had taken a job as a tennis counselor at a boys' camp in the Adirondacks.  Camp Idylwold, near Schroon Lake, NY.  (The mailing address, as I recall, was "South Schroon, NY.")

I sucked at tennis--this I quickly discovered at the camp, where Michael Fishbach, the nine-year-old son of the camp's tennis pro, Joe Fishbach, could have easily beaten me.  All the other tennis instructors were better than I, as well.  Before the campers arrived, Joe played all of us, beating everyone 6-0 very quickly.  Just to show us.  But he didn't beat me 6-0.  He beat me 6-1.  I hit the four best shots of my life--before, afterwards, in my dreams and fantasies--and took that game to wild cheering from the other instructors.  Joe was not cheering.  I barely touched another ball he hit.  It was over in minutes.

Anyway, I was still eighteen years old (would not be nineteen until November), and I did not have my own car.  So my parents bought me a Greyhound ticket--Cleveland to S. Schroon--and off I went with too much stuff to a world I knew nothing about.

The ride was long, hot, boring (though I did have a book--wish I could remember what it was), and crowded.  I changed buses in Albany for a post-midnight ride to S. Schroon.  The bus was actually going to Montreal, and when I boarded late that night, there was only a single seat remaining.  It was next to a young African American woman.  I slumped into it gratefully (I'd feared being next to a screaming child, a talkative someone in sales), pulled out my book to read.

The young woman was reading, too, our overhead lights sending golden cones into our laps.  Much of the rest of the bus was dark.

A moment of intimate background ...

I was romantically unattached at the time.  My long-time high school girlfriend (who'd gone to a different college) had dismissed me over spring break a few months before my bus ride.  I was fragile.  Heartbroken.  I was everything every Country singer ever sang about ...

A few minutes after we got underway, I thought the silence between the young woman and me was getting a little uncomfortable, so I lowered my book, asked her where she was headed.

"Montreal.  To visit my sister and her family."

"I have two brothers."  (See how well I listen?  How well I can connect?)

But soon we were chatting amiably about families and books and friends.  And the miles were unspooling from some colorful ribbon I hoped would not end. 

She was about my age, attended a college whose name I can't recall.  We were a lot alike.

And I started to have ... thoughts.  What if I just stayed on the bus?  Went to Montreal with her?  What if I got a hotel room in the city?  What if she took me to her sister's?  What if ... ?

But, of course, none of that happened.  I got off the bus at S. Schroon, early--early--in the morning.  She wished me good luck.  I, the same.  I saw her face in the window as the bus groaned back out onto the highway.  She was smiling.  Waving.  And I realized I didn't have her address.  And so that was the end.  I sat at the little country store there, waiting for it to open so I could call the camp to pick me up.  I was sadder than I'd been in a long, long time.  As I sit here, typing, I cannot remember her name and have only the vaguest memory of how she looked.  (Glasses?  I think so.)

Six more years would pass before I found myself in a Kent State summer school classroom, found myself noticing an attractive, very bright young woman.  I listened hard when Professor Pringle called the roll.  Heard her name.  Joyce.

20 July 2008.

Joyce and I have driven up into the Adirondacks for her research on John Brown.  His final home and his grave are near Lake Placid.  I tell her I'd like to look at Camp Idylwold.  It's right on the way.


But, of course, it's no longer there.  The camp is gone.  Some private homes now overlook Schroon Lake instead.  I can barely see where things once were.  The docks.  Tennis courts.  Cabins.  Dining hall.  Basketball court.  Baseball diamond.  (In a counselor pick-up game that long-ago summer I hit a triple.  Someone said, "Dynamite comes in small packages!"  A big guy next to him countered--very quickly: "It comes in big ones, too.")

In South Schroon, a stop sign.  We wait for traffic to clear out on the main road.  I look over at the old store.  And remember the young man sitting there, forty-five years ago--the young man wondering What if?  The young man whom I could comfort now. Whom I could tell: Just wait ... it won't be long ... a summer class at KSU ... and then, young man, you'll never again--never again--wonder.  Or have to ask, "What if?"

7 comments:

  1. I Googled Camp Idylwold a few minutes ago after reminiscing with someone about my experience as a tennis counselor at the camp back in the summer of 1966. I have always wondered whether the camp was still there and, even though I live in Upstate New York, have never gone back to see if it still exists. That was a wonderful summer and my first visit to the United States during my undergraduate years in England where I grew up. By the way, Michael Fishbach was even better by the time I arrived three years after you.

    Thanks for sharing your memories!

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    1. The camp just popped into my head, and I googled it . I was there in summer '66; i think I was in bunk 9, with Jay Safcheck (spelling?) and maybe Tony the golf coach?or 7A with jhon o Krantz (again, spelling?) Fish was a distant bud; real nice guy. funny 2 hander, and later funny stringing of racquet as a pro, as i recall

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  2. I love what's been posted here. I went to Camp Idylwold from 1951-1956, when it was a traditional camp, before it became a tennis camp (though, coincidentally, it taught me tennis well enough and badly enough to be 3rd singles on my high-school tennis team). The highlights were summer dances with 10-12 year old girls from girls' camps on Schroon Lake, Tuesday movies in the town of Schoon Lake, lots of choices among "activities," and taking outboards the length of the lake. I detoured to drive past it seven years ago, and, indeed, it was a private residential development, but the dirt road down from 9-W looked the same, the ice-cream/sandwich place nearby was, astonishingly, the same, and the feel of the space brought back a lot.

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  3. Wow! Such a small world! My parents, Bea and George Edelman, owned Camp Idylwold from 1961 through 1987. In the early sixties my sister and I were campers at Camp Red Wing. But when I was old enough I worked at Idylwold every summer and made many wonderful, close friends with whom I remain in touch. If any of you find yourself around Schroon Lake on a summer weekend, stop by our house -- the driveway is the former entrance to camp and the Camp Idylwold sign is still there. I will give you a tour of the "museum" containing the photographs, trophies, and plaques from the dining room and the lodge. You might also want to check out the Camp Idylwold group on Facebook. Members have posted lots of good stories and photos. Hail to the White and Blue!

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  4. I has a great time as a councillor in 1972. Teaching soccer as an English Rugby player made me better at the game and inspired me to go on to a career in teaching. I retire in about 6 weeks after 40 years. Thanks to the Edelmann.

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  5. I was a camp counselor during the summer of 1964. I had just completed my junior year at The Pennsylvania State University. I had Cabin 2 which was home to eight eight-year-old children. As a group, the nine of us got along very, very well, probably because some of the campers knew each other from a previous summer together. I remember my "boss" was an older man named Isadore Halpern. He and his wife lived in the main building and never "bunked" with campers overnight, but I remember Mr. Halpern being a really wonderful and kind man in charge of several of the cabins of the smaller campers. I don't remember how I got or was assigned this Cabin 2, but the assignment, with Mr. Halpern as my "boss", suited me just fine.

    I was hired as the camp's entertainment counselor, and during that summer I was asked to organize two evening programs featuring entertainment given by any of the campers who wanted to perform. The year 1964 marked the "British Invasion" and a good half of each show was comprised of Beatle impersonators. These two shows were the very first programs I organized in my life. Over the years, I organized and conducted many, many hundreds more , but Idylwold's were the absolute first. These Idylwold shows were so important to me that to this day I still have a printed copy of each program! They were a success.

    It was the practice at that time to make a wall plaque to hang on the wall of the assembly hall with a unique theme mentioning the names of the individual campers. I made a plaque to hang and titled it "The Bunk Two Rackets". I cut out little wooden-shaped tennis rackets, eight of them, painted them, and wrote each camper's name on one of the eight. Then I painted a tennis net down the center and put four on each side. The finished product turned out surprisingly good for my meager artistic talent. It want on the wall. I wonder what happened to these plaques over the years. I would really like to see the one I made.

    I was asked to return for the season of 1965 by the Edelmans. I was paid $300.00 for my summer's work in 1964, and there was a modest increase for the following year. I turned it down to play summer stock theater, and I never returned to Camp Idylwold or Schroon Lake. I often wonder what the area looks like today. I have very happy memories of the people and experience at Camp Idylwold from that summer.

    Dave Fluck

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