Peace On Earth Was All It Said

I still remember the woody, musky smell they would have inside, when you first cracked them open. Picking the right color was always the hardest part, but it was okay if you chose wrong, because the stickers you had been saving up all year to adorn it would always make it look better. After packing everything inside it, being sure to check each item off the list provided as you carefully laid it in your trunk, you would write your name on the masking tape you had stuck across the top, as that was the rule.

You had been waiting all year for this. So had your sister and, for the first couple years at least, your brother had as well. The taunting at school, never being part of the "popular" crowd, being the ugly duckling, and the weird girl...those things mattered a lot less after you started going to camp every summer. And not just any camp, Wilshire Blvd. Temple Camps; Gindling Hilltop and Camp Hess Kramer to be exact.
There, you always made all the girls in your cabin laugh hysterically late into the night, until one of the counselors on patrol would poke her head in and hiss at everyone to be quiet, before stomping away into the wooded darkness to make-out with her boyfriend, or get high.

You never had a lack of ears to whisper secrets into, or someone to ditch Israeli dance class with to sneak through the woods to the tunnel that lead to the Pacific Ocean. They were the people you had been writing letters to throughout the year. The ones who had their own unhappy or boring lives September through June, who knew that the minute they turned into the parking lot of Wilshire Blvd. Temple and saw the yellow buses idling, waiting to cart a rash of giddy Jewish kids up PCH, they would fit right in, and the year they had been away from their "camp friends" would quickly fade away, as if no time had passed at all.

There were crushes, and first kisses, and your entire cabin plotting with you so that, during the evening song, you'd "accidentally" end up standing next to the boy that you've loved every summer for the past three years...the song where everyone joined hands before singing the Hebrew words that you had memorized when you were five years old.

It felt like the most important thing in the world. All the little dramas and scandals and tears for what felt like the longest two weeks of the year. For these two weeks you weren't the self conscience person that you were the rest of the year. You were cast in plays about biblical characters and had arms slung around you while songs were sung around campfires. You could be whoever you wanted to be, but you didn't think twice about being yourself.

You had your first real boyfriend there...the first of your ex's that would later die in a car accident. Some of your closest friendships were formed there, most of which have become a faded memory, but whose faces you can still picture perfectly.

Coming home was the hardest part. You needed a week to recover, to make your own home seem like it was permanent, and to not feel like that state between between being asleep and waking up. There wasn't praying before meals, and folk songs sung loudly afterward. You weren't surrounded by girls in bunk beds late at night, loudly whispering about the day's events, and life outside of camp. You weren't surrounded by a canopy of trees when you went to temple on Friday nights. Instead, you were bored to tears and stuck in an uncomfortable folding chair. The kids at school didn't understand your heritage, and kids are prone to mocking that which they don't understand.

You didn't walk from your cabin to the dining hall, or to archery class, or up the steep hill to the giant menorah that was on top, giving you a view all the way to the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier with a group of people who learned more about you in that two week period than anyone else in your life ever had. Those were the things you looked forward to all year...the things that made it easier to brush off the bullshit of everyday life.