Camp postcards summon memories

My granddaughter Hayden leaves for summer camp in a couple of weeks.

I’m sure she’ll enjoy it.

I know I did. At least that’s what I wrote my parents.

Mom sent me to camp with a handful of self-addressed post cards. A few of them turned up recently when I was cleaning out an old chest of drawers that had belonged to my parents.

They brought back a mix of memories.

It was 1960 and I was eight years old, attending Camp Carson, a YMCA camp an hour north of my home in southern Indiana.

Until the old postcards turned up all I could remember about that camp was how homesick I was. I cried the first night in my bunk, muffling my sobs in a pillow, but one of the other kids in my cabin heard crying and laughed about it at breakfast the next morning.

Fortunately, he didn’t know who it was and I played dumb, putting on a brave face.

“Hi,” I wrote my parents, “Having a fine time. I pasted (sic) my swiming (sic) test today.”

The homesickness I endured at camp that summer was compounded by the required daily swimming lessons. I’d forgotten about that. While I already knew how to swim, it had always been under a hot sun in a warm pool or pond. The lake at Camp Carson was deep and cold, and the youngest campers swam first, early in the morning before the sun had warmed the water.

Looking at the July 13, postmark on the card I sent my parents, I realize that it couldn’t have been as cold as I remember. This was southern Indiana in the summertime, after all, but I can still see the goose bumps on my skinny arms.

That was the last time I attended Camp Carson.

There were a couple of other postcards in the mix from a church camp I went to five years later. Apparently, at the age of 13, I was over any homesickness and had other things on my mind.

“Hi,” I wrote. “I’m having a swell time. The guys are real neat and so are the counselors. We just had our third meal. It was real good. So are some of the girls.”

That was the last year I went to summer camp. I had a paper route by then and had started camping by myself. I still don’t like to go swimming early in the morning.

Parker Heinlein is at 

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