A Season of Summer

I was formerly under the misconception that the notion of summer fostered throughout childhood slowly dissipates until it is abruptly halted upon reaching adulthood. A real, full-time job always loomed on the horizon, daunting, threatening to render the summer months no different from those dreary winter ones on the opposite side of the calendar. This summer I learned this does not have to be the case. At least not right now.

I returned to Boiling Springs late Saturday night after two months away, working at Camp Weequahic in the mountains of Pennsylvania for seven weeks and then visiting my good buddy (and fellow brogger) Matt Leonard in Nassau, Bahamas for a week and a half. It was like stepping back into the many summers of my youth, this time with a bit of responsibility and influence, but the essence remained somehow the same. Those two months encompassed so much more than I could possibly talk about adequately in the space and time provided, so I will boil it down simply and hopefully unpack some of the stories later.

This summer, I mentored a bunk of awesome campers, coached in one of America's most intense and impassioned basketball leagues (seriously, try telling those kids the Weequahic Basketball League isn't the NBA - I dare you), broke my left middle finger climbing a rope (from floor to ceiling starting seated, succeeding just before the aforementioned fracture), helped write and lead half the camp in performing a rap parody of Kanye West's "Jesus Walks" for a song competition ("one of the coolest things I've ever seen" said our camp director, just sayin'), watched Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises all in a span of twenty-four hours, ran into Justin Beiber in New York City, nailed a roundoff into a backflip, watched David Letterman live (Alec Baldwin was the guest and both he and Letterman dropped their pants during the show - classic stuff), swam in Lake Wallenpaupack (and learned how to spell "Wallenpaupack"), saw Scranton (The Electric City!), read great books like Pride and Prejudice, Eli the Good, Shoeless Joe, Oh! the Clear Moment, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and Letters to a Young Poet, played guitar on my bunk's front porch, wrote a good bit, took three practice GREs (funny little thing: I consistently scored higher on math than verbal - and by funny I mean really annoying), went to Hershey Park for free, made some amazing friends, rocked "Call Me Maybe" on the guitar for the whole camp (a girl named Shanice sang and she was unbelievable), helped a camper shave for the first time, taught guitar classes, played pretend baseball at sunset on Pennsylvania's own Field of Dreams, had a deep conversation with a complete stranger in the Newark Airport, slept in the Miami International Airport during a thirteen-hour overnight layover, was lectured by a baggage agent in Nassau after her airline lost my luggage (it was apparently my fault because I let my bag out of my sight - yes mom, I was nice to her), swam with sting rays and jellyfish and eels in Nassau coral reefs, held my breath underwater for three minutes and five seconds, journeyed to Atlantis, walked on a rope bridge over a hammerhead shark, bought a signed copy of I Can't Sleep by one of the coolest women I have ever meet, ate lunch and dinner at the Nassau Yacht Club, coached a group of Bahamian kiddos at Swift Swimming, taught a high school girl how to swim all four strokes so she could take a swimming fitness class in school, grew an increasingly less pathetic (if not all the while devilishly handsome) goatee, wrote a song with Matt, played my favorite song after sunset on the beach with waves crashing in the background, ate ridiculous amounts of conch and caneps, listened to a brilliant speech by a banking expert about how to fix the banking crisis (you should check out John Tomlinson's book Honest Money - very simple solutions which are slated to be proposed, in a bill he helped draft, to Parliament this fall), ate dinner with some incredible young and young-at-heart families who make starting a family at some point seem less scary, recorded songs with Matt in the upstairs of his massive apartment, gathered driftwood for a beach campfire (where we played great music, watched an offshore thunderstorm, and witnessed the glory of bioluminescence), played frisbee on Montagu Beach in a raging thunderstorm, and flew back into Charlotte amid the glowing rays of a stunning sunset. 

Just before I left for Pennsylvania, I learned to play a song called "Keep Your Eyes Open" by a band called NEEDTOBREATHE (fun fact: I can also play the Taylor Swift one). I played it regularly on the front porch of Bunk 1 at camp, my kids patiently listening as I tried my best to hit the notes. Two nights before leaving the Bahamas, Matt and I played it with waves crashing at our feet. The lyrics encompass our lives at the present, as we look toward the future and make the moves necessary to align ourselves with our larger life goals, realizing that the decisions we make in these next years, months, even weeks, will irreversibly dictate the trajectory of our lives. One of the choruses says:

"If you never leave home, never let go, you'll never make it to the great unknown till you keep your eyes open my love. Show me your fire. Show me your heart. You know I'll never let you fall apart if you keep your eyes open my love."

For we who are living in some kind of in-between, unsure of what, exactly sandwiches us with the past, it is a mantra of sorts, a call to living. Setting down roots deep enough to hold to and yet shallow enough to be uprooted at the first call of adventure or opportunity. It is a difficult art, but a beautiful life.