In Which my Head Explodes at Summer Camp

I didn't read the Sunday paper yesterday. I was back at camp instead.

It was alumni day up in Malibu, the occasion for which I set foot in a place I haven't seen since 1994, and which felt somehow the same, and also totally different.

The dirt and the heat and dehydration were all the same: check. The wooden plaques we engraved with in-jokes when we thought we were so cool, and that our in-jokes were the best ones ever, and when engraving C.I.T. plaques was the most important thing one could do on the planet—those were all still there. The one over the amphitheater that says, "You are entering this magic place: Forget what you have learned," on the entry side, and "You are leaving this magic place: Remember what you have taken," on the exit side, that was still there, still penned in the letters that seem to be the universal hand belonging to Southern California Jewish girls of a certain era with hippie tendencies and unfettered creative aspirations and mind-blowing, eye-bulging optimism.

Among the differences: Today's campers are whiners who tell their parents things that they should know to keep to themselves, and their parents are litigious, and their parents are the types who send threatening emails. So—we're told by the camp director who once was a camper when we were campers, and who had a mullet back then, but it was totally cool—you cannot punish a kid anymore by making him hug a tree and say the Hamotzee backwards or whatever it was. You must punish a kid by making him sign a contract of some sort, which threatens explusion if the behavior continues. There are real consequences.

These kids get Otter Pops instead of candy on some days. This is not an insignificant change, because I connect Abba Zabbas with only one reference on earth, and that is eating them on a bottom bunk with feet up on the plank under the top bunk, where many words and names were scribbled alongside swirls in indelible markers. “G-8 is great.” “AD slept here, summer ’89.”

Also, these kids have Ipods in their cabins and tents. We had our best-ever counselor DK singing "Crazy for You" over a karaoke tape to help us fall asleep. And these girls? They have doors on their cabins. Doors! We used to have only two walls in those same wooden structures, and we also walked uphill both ways in the snow to get to the bathroom cabin...

...which still looks the same, but it has been painted. No longer do the words "MA is a bitch, but I love him," penned by JH circa 1988, remain in one of the stalls. And no longer does that whole structure reek of Aussie Sprunch Spray, which had been pulled from Caboodles and applied liberally to curly manes on Friday nights, when we were supposed to be clean, and were for a moment, before we got our feet instantly muddy on the walk to Mercaz.

And there's more. These 21st-century kids sing in Hebrew a lot. I mean, we sang in Hebrew a lot too, but these kids seem to be asked to take their Judiasm more seriously, to treat it almost as if it were a bona fide religion as much as the pure enjoyment of our shared culture and our community. And, one of the rare English songs in these kids' song books is "Hey There Delilah," which is wrong for so many reasons.

And then there's the fact that our camp now has many areas, including a new organic garden laid out in the shape of the state of Israel, dedicated to the memory of fellow camper MB, who was killed by a suicide bomber while studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2002. In some senses, camp is a more serious place now.

But before all this, there were the 1980s, when girls wore high-cut bikinis and odd-shaped, new-fangled monokinis, and when we all used to shout in unison, sort of inexplicably, "Cowabunga, I'm stoked on those hot, primo tubes. Ow!" when our bus turned off Mulholland Highway onto the Pacific Coast Highway as we headed to Zuma beach. And we relived those memories as we sifted through curled black-and-white photos sprawled out on a tabletop in the dining hall, where kids sang many extra verses at the end of the Birkat Hamazon that I had never even heard before.

At the ropes course, under the fancy new rock climbing wall, we asked a 14-year-old camper if she knew how old we were. It was a trick question, so she didn't want to answer. We made it easy for her: "Do we look more like your counselors, or more like your parents?"

"Like my parents."

And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game