I've gotten an overwhelming response to this blog - to the blog as it is but also to the very idea of it. This morning this awaited me in my inbox:The blog is awesome - I just went back through the whole thing again. I'll say this without shame - I ache for Frost Valley. I spend a lot of time and cerebral metabolism trying to devise a way I can get back up there for a session....And "ache" befits the other responses. Occasionally I stop to think of what else (other than an individual person) is that for which I feel such longing. Once every so often, I want to re-read a book that badly. At the end of the baseball season, maybe Shea: a playoff ticket down in the boxes. But otherwise it's only this. And you?
And if I could transport myself not just back to this place, but to a certain moment in my personal history here, it would perhaps be:
end of lunch on any July day in 1968, and Dave King (our camp director) walks to the center of the dining hall, without microphone, and without introduction of any kind begins to lead one of the 25 or so camp songs we sang in those days. He is the maestro, waving one arm to the rhythm we are to follow and with the other arm, at turns, directing us to sing quietly or loudly or pointing toward some one camper who isn't singing or (rarely) is talking. And it's "Young Folks Old Folks" or "Zum Gali Gali" or "Deep and Wide" and I look down to the end of the table at my counselor and he's singing too, no hesitation, not too old for this, totally entranced and I myself turn my gaze back toward Dave....Okay, I ache for that. Not being young again, not quite. More like being momentarily again part of such harmony.
In response to the above, someone wrote me the following: "Your time was a little before mine, and what you describe is certainly magic. If only there were video at the time of Dave King's reign, but I'm sure video would never have done that "feeling" justice. My memories are most vivid from my earlier years there, the mid to late 80s. A lot of what I remember involves you and Rick in the Girls' Dining Hall, and by '87, the new Dining Hall. The way you describe Dave King? That's a lot how I remember you and Rick. You held court."
