"Are you a Dad?" and other Stories from Summer Camp

image credit: remarkk

    While working at a summer camp in Louisiana when I was a Benedictine Brother, I got stuck with the task of dealing with children who suffered from homesickness. We called them the homesick kids; it was easy to spot them right away: either they feigned a fall on the first day to get a ticket back home or they showed up at the cabin with a look in their eye of sheer sadness. These were the kids who figured out they were duped. Mom and dad were not coming back. It was not too hard to find these kids for they usually found you! It didn't matter to any of the forlorn boys who made it out to the homesick bay, if I said, "it's only one week." A week could be a month or a million years. They wanted to go home. One night I was in the infirmary and the youngest cabins were about to finish their night swim and I was helping the nurse administer the last rounds of Paxil, Sudofed, insulin shots, band aids and Calamine lotion.

Poem: Evolutionary Biology

Stefan clung, like a primate, to his mother

when he was a kid, a little thing;

I would sometimes take him in my arms, pat

his bulbous head, shake his infant thighs — 

And he would cry — for his mother — 

offer his tiny fingers, sweet princely monuments,

Releasing and squeezing my fat adult digits,

all the while yelping for her feminine beauty.

As a dutiful father, I would

place him back in her petulant arms — 

sated his bloated body content between

her breasts — 

And she would extoll my fatherliness,

my manly concern,

all the while shielding and protecting 

some arcane ritual of evolutionary

biology

image credit: "father with baby" by marjanhols
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