Seemingly Impersonal World In Fact Very Small and Close

[jbg]

Tonight, I attended a "Sh'va" or condolensce call at the house of an old sleepaway camp acquaintance, Marc. R. His father passed away Sunday after a long battle with leukemia. That in itself is not extraordinary, but what led me there tells a lot about life.

Let's go back to the summers of 1970-72, when I attended a summer sleepaway camp in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains, hard against the New York border. During 1971, I bunked with about seven other people from similar backgrounds; moderately affluent, Jewish, from the suburbs ringing the New York area. The summer of 1971 was a promising time for me; I had gained some limited self-confidence at the end of eighth grade, some athletic ability, and was highly complemented, a few short months after no longer being baby-sat, to be hired as a baby sitter. The summer itself went well with this bunk; lots of games of "guess the song", etc. Even the rain didn't diminish the enjoyment.

The end of that summer was a different story. My sense of foreboding started with the lyrics of "Take Me Home, Country Roads", specifically, the line "driving down the road I get the feeling that I should have been home yesterday". The evening I got home from camp, a delightful, late summer evening in New York, I learned that my father was going in for surgery. My mother didn't tell me how serious, but I knew. I asked if the surgery was for cancer and my mother reluctantly said "yes".

That school year things did not go well. I knew in the pit of my stomache that the operation, just before Labor Day weekend 1971 was not successful, though the doctors didn't explain it that way. That, plus normal adolescent angst (I was 14) made for a miserable year. Poor relationships with teachers, lots of fights with other kids, and a near expulsion at the end of the year. When I returned to camp, I was in no mood to socialize.

That summer of 1972, in the space of a few months, two things happened:

1. I was removed from a sleepaway camp after an altercation (I was a bit embittered from my father's fatal illness and other factors), and one of my bunkmates was "Marc R.";
   
2. After the summer, I started a successful year at Scarsdale High School, and one of my classmates' names was "Rich".
   

I didn't know Marc R. well, during the abortive summer camping experience or from school. We did see each other briefly at a camp reunion weekend in 1983.

Don't worry, the story gets interesting as the world gets smaller.

One of my work colleagues name is "Jon", who I've worked with since 1990. He lives in a small, predominately Jewish and affluent town in Northern New Jersey. Jon is one of the partners at my office. I live about 45 kms away, in a different Jewish suburb of NYC, near the Connecticut border of New York. Marc R. lives in the same town as Jon is in, about 1 km from Jon.

Making the world even smaller is that Jon met my wife's first cousin Mark B. (not to be confused with Marc R.), who also lives in that town, at my son's first birthday party. Since then they have been close friends who talk almost every day on the phone and see each other often.

This past May, Jon and I figured out that we both knew Marc R. That rather upset me given what happened at camp. Through an exchange of e-mails, it developed that Marc had good memories of me. I remembered vividly that things did not go well; he remembered none of it.

In any event, a few weekends ago, I met Marc and Rich at Jon's daughter's Bat Mitzvah. I taked more to him last night, about more things, than I did when we first knew each other. I was amazed that I was still well thought of, despite the fact that I was not Mr. Popularity by any means in 1972.

Tonight, at the condolensce call, I mentioned that my father had passed away a few months after our last partial summer together at camp. He mentioned that he had "heard the story" from Jon, referring to the exchange of e-mailsl last spring. He seemed genuinely glad I was there. It was a weird, and wonderful feeling to leap across the chasm of more than thirty-six years, and reconnect to a time that most people remember as being simpler, their childhood. Memories of simplicity inevitably lie; the fact that the world is small is true. The valuable lesson is that even if one does not succeed in the popularity game, being well thought of for sincerity and honesty does seem to remain in people's memories.

This shows just how small the world is, and that the past comes back often, from very remote places and people, and with surprising results.