Camp

The night before Elijah went to camp, I crawled into bed with him and asked if he was nervous about anything. Pooping your pants on a hike? Homesickness? What to do in a Jason Voorhees situation?

After a beat, Eli said, “I’m worried that when you die there is no heaven and there is just nothing.”

That was a lot harder to answer than “ball your underwear up and stick it under a bush.”

Existential crisis solved, we woke up early the next morning only to realize we didn’t wake up remotely early enough. While Eli and Diana argued and jammed last minute provisions into his overstuffed bag, I rocked back and forth by the back door, muttering, “So late…so very very late.”

We raced to drop off and weaved our way through the Evanston parents standing cult like, remembering their own underwear balling memories from thirty years ago. Social anxiety mixed with a fear of busses rendered me useless. Diana handed me Eli’s bags and said, “Stick these somewhere.”

Diana checked Eli in only to be informed that we had not filled out any of the 400 documents needed to attend camp.

Let’s all climb into the Wayback machine to 6 months ago. It was a cold Sunday afternoon. Diana, sick of literally doing everything for our sons, put me in charge of camp. I dutifully signed Eli up and then promptly ignored all future correspondence with subject lines like “Urgent” and “400 Documents needed to go to camp.”

I know it’s a dad cliché to be clueless and dumb. But entire eleven years blogs are built on it. I volunteered to fill out the forms. Diana shoved me out of the way when I biffed Eli’s birth date.

We got Eli on the bus and waved vigorously at his mop top through the tinted window. He slinked down to dodge our love.

Camp went well and we received lots of letters with terrible handwriting. Eli explored and grew and got close to nature and made lots of friends for life.  

And he was the last kid to get picked up from drop off because we missed the email.