There’s a question on my profile page over at LiveJournal that asks: “How did you spend summers when you were a kid?”
I decided that question deserved a longer-ass answer than I was prepared to post on LiveJournal. It’s started to get hot here, and my summer isn’t off to a very good start, so it’s kind of refreshing to think back on a time when I actually enjoyed this part of the year.
New Yorkers like to get their kids out of the city in the summer if possible, which is very sensible. When I was a little kid, that wasn’t possible, but we used to visit friends who had a house on a lake in Putnam County, about an hour outside the city, on weekends. Then for a couple of summers we rented our own house up there and spent pretty much every summer weekend there.
The summer I turned 8, I joined the ancient Jewish tradition of going to summer camp. The camps I went to for the next four summers were in the Berkshires, which is undoutedly why I still want to retire there–probably my favorite place in the US.
During my last summer at camp, my dad wrote a series of articles about the life and history of East Hampton, which “required” him to go out there every weekend in August. The next summer, he managed to parlay that into a longer series, and got to stay in a motel suite with its own private stretch of beach in Amagansett for six weeks. I joined him (my mom and brother came out on weekends), and during the day, I took riding lessons and cleaned out stalls and just generally hung out at the barn. That was one of the best summers of my life. The next summer, I stayed in a house near the stable in East Hampton with a bunch of other barn rats, riding and doing barn stuff every day and competing in horse shows. That was the summer of Watergate, which will forever be linked in my memory to my last days as a member of the horsey set.
I turned 14 the next summer, and got to do so in Sibford Ferris, a Cotswolds town so small that addresses there include the name of the nearest big town. That was a life-changing summer, boy howdy. I fell in love with England and everything English, not the usual touristy/stereotype stuff but the actual people—that was my first prolonged exposure to British humor, which went well with my own sense of humor—as well as minutiae like how much better their chocolate bars are than ours and the typeface that they use on signs (Gill Sans, I learned years later) and stuff like that. Ever since then, whenever I’ve had enough money to travel, I’ve gone straight to England. If I hadn’t had a job that allowed me to travel to Italy and Germany on business, I probably still wouldn’t have been anywhere else outside the US.
And I wound up there almost by accident. I’d wanted to go to France on the Experiment in International Living, but it turned out to be too expensive. To make it up to me, my parents found a summer camp in England called, er, Summer Camps in England. “Camps” because it was actually four camps in one: a travel camp, a boys’ soccer camp, a drama camp, and an archaeology camp. I was in the drama camp—not that I was really all that interested in drama, but I’d been in plays at previous summer camps and enjoyed it, and that was as good an excuse as any.
It was my first time out of the country (unless you count a dimly remembered trip to Puerto Rico when I was four), and it was also pretty much my first exposure to people who weren’t from the East Coast; the soccer players were mainly Midwestern and Southern, and I didn’t know quite how to react to them. That was good for me, learning that there was a world not too far away that was so different from my own. I preferred hanging out with the locals, though—mostly a group of older teenage boys who would descend a few nights a week on the school that housed the camp. They were small-town, working-class, slightly yobbish I suppose, but I felt more at home with them than the nice suburban soccer players somehow. And Sibford itself was so beautiful—I’d never seen countryside quite that green and lush and rolling, and it was impossible to imagine anyplace better at the time. But then late in the summer we made a four-day trip to London, and even in the sticky heat and our nasty cheap hotel, I knew I had found my favorite place in the world. I wanted to stay there forever, and I hated leaving and going back to plain old NYC.
That was my last summer away from the city, pretty much. I was a teenager by then, and capable of finding fun without leaving town. Which was just as well, and I had some great city summers during high school and college. Besides, it would have been hard to top a summer in Sibford, anyway.