Camps Just For Boys
WE held out the word computer. It was meant as consolation. My son had just been told he was going to day boy's summer camp and he was showing signs of rebellion. It was the first and last attempt at independence we allowed this summer.
"You get to work on a computer," I said. "They have a video period, and you can learn how to play badminton." Next we'll make him learn croquet, and the Japanese tea ceremony and how to do the waltz. "Look," I said, going for his weak spot, "the camps just around the corner from Sam the Record Man. Maybe I can get off work early and we can look for some good tapes." This is why my wife and I settled on a downtown day camp and not the backwoods canoe camp I went to at his age. The tape bribe wouldn't work in mosquito country.
It didn't work too well here. "I don't want to go to computer camp," he said. "I'm going to rap camp." Rap camp? I'd heard of baseball camp, music camp, diet camp, Russian hockey camp, etiquette camp and investment camp, but this was the first time I'd met someone who was going to rap camp.
"I don't think so," I said. "We've already paid for your day camp." Every now and then you have to imitate one of those TV fathers who knew best, just to see if you can still do them. But something inside me, the part that used to wonder why I had to string gimp and eat dehydrated soup and chant "Land of the silver birch, home of the beaver" at the age of 10, and now wonders why I spend my summer fingering a computer keyboard in downtown Toronto, thought that rap camp wasn't such a bad idea.
My parents tried to send me to this camp all day I looked them in the eye and I said "No way!" Their parents may have made them do this kind of crap, But who needs Word Perfect when your camp has rap?
Day camp has started. My son disappears at 8 a.m. before he's awake enough to protest. It's not so bad. They gave out camp T-shirts with neon letters and you can buy junk food from the camp cafeteria at snack time. Maybe the happy campers will get to do their rap number in the video period or generate a virus in computer class or brain each other with shuttlecocks.
But I don't think so. Something about summer camp seems to have, can I say it, a civilizing effect on the young. It also seems to be very tiring, which makes me wonder if the two go together. The children swim, work their way through an exercise circuit and play soccer, badminton, baseball and squash. The computers and videos are there to lure in the progressive parent and the reluctant child, but the humanizing comes from muscles and sweat.
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