While shaving in the shower the other day, it dawned on me that most men actually stand over a sink and use a mirror. When I thought about it I realized that I had learned to shave this way at Camp Massad, where using the sinks was difficult and unpleasant.
This led me to think about the many skills and talents large and small that I can attribute to my 13 summers at Camp Massad. The following is a list of the first ten that popped to mind:
1. How to design and run a program: I have had much occasion to create recreational and educational activities for groups from 3 to 300 people, and have never been at a loss for ideas. Some colleagues have suggested that I write a book of these activities, but I fear it would all be plagiarized from tochniot Massad.
2. How to write a song for any occasion: Recently a colleague of mine earned a promotion, and we threw a roast in his honor. I signed up to write one song for the event, then while walking the dog one morning came up with a second song idea. Naturally, I performed both. From the reaction of the audience you would have thought that Oscar Hammerstein had returned from the grave. By Camp Massad standards these songs were just okay, but they impressed a crowd of nonMassadniks who did not spend every summer writing dozens of songs.
3. Hebrew Grammar: No, I did not learn Hebrew grammar from the songs and shticks that we ourselves wrote, which featured such lovely Heblish inventions as la asot skiing and le hityajog, but we did spend a lot of time singing real Israeli songs (mostly archaic), and to this day, if I am trying to remember if a noun is zachar or nekeva I try to find a line in a shira song that contains it.
4. How to lose: Note that I did not say that I learned how to lose graciously. Now I never threw a bench, or cursed the shoftim in PineSol on the Ulam floor, but you still would not want to be anywhere near me after I lost Maccabia or Televisia. Still, I learned that sometimes you work really hard, and you lose, and after five or six years you actually get over it.
5. How to win: Thankfully, I won often enough. It is better than losing.
6. How to stomach wretched coffee: If you started your coffee drinking career with Instant of Arabia made with beach water, you can drink anything.
7. How to get along with people of all ages: I have good friends ranging in age from 25 to 70, and I realize that Camp Massad was the first place where I learned to treat people much younger and older than myself as peers. When you were writing a hatzaga with someone it made no difference how old they were.
8. The joys of being up before everyone else: I realize that this may be my personal quirk, but I always found it amazing to wake up a half an hour before the rest of the camp and have the entire shetach to myself. One year I was listening to the radio in the refet, and heard that Elvis Presley had died, making me the first person at Massad to hear that news. Another year I saw a moose at the edge of the soccer field. I never did make it to see sunrise on Lake Winnipeg, mind you (was not there a tochnit where we were supposed to do that?)
9. The joys of putting the camp to bed: Ever fearful of missing something (who knows what that something might have been), I was often the last person to leave the moadon and turn off the camp lights. If you combine this with item 8, you have a recipe for serious sleep deprivation, which would have been unbearable without item 6.
10. How to say goodbye: As I was compiling this list the song Sealed with a Kiss came onto the radio. It felt appropriate, but sad too, as the song with which we marked the end of a summer reminded me that my days at camp are part of a distant era. And yet, it is some consolation when I think about all of the ways that I carry camp with me.
I am sure that everyone reading this could add items to this very partial list, and I know I could go on and on if time and space allowed. Suffice it to say that in trivial and fundamental ways, Camp Massad made me the person I am today, and thatis good, I think…
