Old Friends, Camp and Kisses

An old song I used to sing at camp goes: "Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other's gold." How true. I had a call from an old school friend tonight; bearing tidings of another classmate who has had a rough time of it physically and has lost down to 124 lbs., probably less than she weighed while in school. I suspect we all want to lose weight - but NOT that way. Get well, D.

Speaking of camp, as a child I attended summer camps that were built and maintained by Union Carbide (you had to be the child of an employee). After a posting a comment recently on another web-log (wherein I mentioned the camp), I received an email informing me that there is a web-site devoted to the camps, with photos, maps, song sheets and reminiscences. How unimaginable to me that there is someone who remembers so fondly his days at summer camp that he would devote an entire site to them. But - I am glad he did - as it may be able to put me in touch with fourth grade chums. My family moved around quite a bit when I was small, so I knew these people for 3-4 years and then we moved and I had to go to another school. The camps have been having reunions in July, and I may attend just so I can see my old friends again. I remember countless hours spent with them, cutting out paper dolls and sitting in a dark closet telling ghost stories.

I also remember my first kiss. It was from an older guy of 12 and a "man of the world" to us girls, who lined up and kissed him one after another, time after time. The trouble (which we didn't know then) was that he really didn't know how to kiss any more than we did! I still remember the feeling of his teeth smashing into my bruised lips, which were cut on the inside by my braces. His idea of a kiss was to bang mouths together like you might hit a nail with a hammer. At the time we thought this must be how it is done; most of us did not have TV then, and we were not taken to see movies in which people kissed. My movie fare at the time was westerns, with Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry being the favorites, and they only kissed their horses. At 15, I met someone who did know how to kiss and that was the end of westerns for me.