The Rock in the Pavilion

Lee S. Kessler

Description

Fragments collected from a previous place, this book recalls a kind of boyhood that once left muddy footprints, but no longer walks the earth.
Youth is not wasted on the young so long as we have warm-hearted memoirs like this one. You may or may not have ridden horses, run free on unsupervised summers, or sang inappropriate campfire songs, but the universality of these tales of freedom on the cusp between childhood and teenhood will resonate and recall your own joyful tales. This book is a really nice place to go, and you’re invited.

Sujets

• Horses
• Humor
• Boy
• Memoir
• Horse
• Shenanigans
• Adolescence

Informations

• Publié par: iUniverse
• Date de parution: 19 mars 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781663251671
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE ROCK IN THE PAVILION
Summer Camp Stories





Lee S. Kessler








THE ROCKIN THEPAVILION
SUMMER CAMP STORIES

Copyright © 2023 Lee S. Kessler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.






iUniverse
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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-5166-4 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-6632-5167-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023905030



iUniverse rev. date: 03/16/2023



For Trigger and Bob



Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgment

1. The Rock in the Pavilion
2. The Place and the People
3. Saddling Trigger
4. The Campfire Songs
5. The Girls
6. Riding Trigger
7. The Dorm
8. The Pool
9. The Bit Flip
10. Pizarro
11. The Snack Bar
12. The Music
13. The Peanut Imbroglio
14. The French Kiss
15. The Appalachian Trail
16. The Trojan Horse
17. The Rodeo
18. The Horse Thief









My friend, judge not me
Thou seest I judge not thee.
Betwixt the stirrup and the ground
Mercy I asked, and mercy found.
- William Camden



Foreword
I should have seen this coming.
For years it was clear that Lee and I were going to be a pathetic pair of old men with grown-up kids who would roll their eyes as we insist on making sure that they appreciate the brilliance of the plan that we… well I… devised in order to capture the flag from under the nose of the opposing team’s counsellor. And did we tell you that instead of watching Armstrong and Aldrin hop around on the moon, we chose to stay in the Sandymount dining room and dance to Marvin Gaye?
Now both of us have actually done a few things with our lives over the past fifty some years, so what keeps us coming back to these stories?
Leave it to Lee to take this question seriously, write a book about it, and explain to me what keeps these memories alive. I should have known that he’d find the plots that could make anyone who experienced childhood stop and listen.
And even if no one else is listening, how cool to see these moments of my life documented so beautifully without being asked to do more than write this thank you note.
Thank you, Lee, for writing this and for so much more.
- Bob Mark



Acknowledgment
Thanks in abundance to my brother Doug who provided galactically great editing right here on earth, and to him and other brother Jason for being the first recipients of these tales when they were fresh baked by the elder one who went away in the summer and came back home again. The dog, I recall, gave me a hero’s welcome. The brothers were somewhat less demonstrative.
Thanks to Gabby and Joe for raising us right and for subtly engendering our competition over who gets to sit in the “black back seat,” the area inside a Volkswagen Beetle never intended to carry a person.
Thanks to Bob, his brother Rick, and parents Jerry and Trudy for providing a loving and enriching second home just a few doors down from the first one.
Thanks to William M. Gaines and the usual gang of idiots for a profoundly influential study of the nature, causes, and principles of reality, knowledge, and values, based on illogical, vacuous, and dim-witted reasoning.



1
The Rock in the Pavilion
Two fourteen-year-old boys sat in conversation at a picnic table under the roof of an airy pavilion by a swimming pool. It was August 1970. They might have been talking about the latest issue of Mad magazine, or the game Thurman Munson had for the Yankees, or the incomprehensible breakup of the Beatles. But instead, they were discussing the nature of memory.
They were attending a horseback riding summer camp in eastern Pennsylvania. Pool water dried in their hair. The tang of chlorine blended with the aroma of hay stacked in the barn. The sun seemed indecisive about its descent through the sky as if unwilling to hurry the deliberations of the boys or hasten the end of their summer. Bob used his pinky attempting to dislodge water from his ear. My saddle-sore posterior in damp swim trunks found no comfort on the hard bench.
I don’t know why we were discussing the nature of memory. The reason is lost in a past that is starkly contrasted with the past as we perceive it today, as I write fifty-two years later in August 2022. Today the past leaves ubiquitous breadcrumbs in the ubiquitous internet and nothing ever goes away. But Camp Sandymount, like Atlantis, flourished and faded in the pre-web world. It seems to have vanished without a digital trace.
I moved from the bench to sit on the tabletop. My trunks left a wet print that instantly began to evaporate.
We theorized that the most mundane, random, and meaningless things could be intentionally preserved in the museum of memory alongside their more meaningful cousins. In proclamation, Bob picked up a stone from the pebbled bed that had been poured as flooring for the pavilion. There was nothing distinctive about the rock he chose. He declared that, for the rest of our lives, we would remember The Rock in the Pavilion. The formal statement and our mutual consent would suffice to make it so.
And it worked. We did remember. The two of us grew old and proved our theory in an empirical lifelong test. We can imagine hearing the dry click made by the stone when Bob casually tossed it back on the ground.
Returning to our dormitory to change before dinner, we extended the game. I plucked up a stick from the path through the woods and declared we would also remember The Stick in the Path. Ever the contrarian, Bob picked up a different stick and declared that he would remember his alternate stick. I scoffed, “Well, I’m not gonna remember that.”
And indeed, I forgot it. It wasn’t until sometime in our late thirties that Bob reminded me of the second stick. “I don’t remember that,” I said.
“That’s right. You said you wouldn’t.”
But now I do. And now The Rock in the Pavilion and The Stick in the Path have become preserved in amber. Though we lived far apart, our friendship continued as we grew. We had many new experiences, both apart and together. There were always new things to discuss so why talk about old things? “ Yesterday don’t matter, if it’s gone. ” We never made any particular effort to preserve the memory of The Rock in the Pavilion and The Stick in the Path. We went decades without ever mentioning it to one another, and we rarely spoke about our camp experience.
We live on different sides of the Atlantic Ocean now. But Bob’s children and mine know about The Rock in the Pavilion. They are linked across the water and across the generations by the knowledge of this relic, odd and ossified, but somehow no longer mundane or meaningless. They are also linked in the comforting knowledge that there is someone else’s father out there who is as weird as their own.
This and other fossilized bones suggest a skeleton of shared shenanigans for Bob and me. Fragments collected from a previous place, this book recalls a kind of boyhood that once left muddy footprints, but no longer walks the earth.



Mr. Ed, the talking horse of television, speaking his first lines, derisively delivered at the end of the pilot episode:
“People! Yak, yak, yak.”



2
The Place and the People
The camp was situated about twenty miles outside the town in eastern Pennsylvania where my family lived for a short time and where I met Bob. The camp had originally been a farm, judging by the turn-of-the-century farmhouse that lay in the center of the site. On one side of the house was the old barn, stout and still useful. On the other side of the house was the swimming pool flanked by the pavilion and the snack bar.
Walking away from the house and past the barn, one reached the stables: a long cinderblock structure flanked on both sides with stalls and with a tack room situated near the door. Attached to the stables was the riding ring where we had our instruction and most of our practice. Above the ring was the east pasture, a vast expanse fenced in whitewashed boards, which traced the edge of the long road into the camp.
Beside the pavilion was a great open field flanked on the far side by the girls’ dormitories. To the south were some woodlands where the boys’ dormitories we’re situated. I could not estimate the total acreage of the grounds but to me, as a boy, it felt about as big as Texas.
The Stanley family, who ran the place, lived in the old farmhouse. Grandpa was the founder of the camp, but we never saw much of him. Grandma ran the mess hall with her daughter-in-law Veon.