Wed Oct 3, 2007 — by Elayne Riggs

ELAYNE RIGGS: The Girls of Summer

It's All Good #33

The summer of 2007 is well and truly behind us now. The regular baseball season has wrapped, culminating in the promise of the playoffs and World Series, new network TV shows have debuted and returned, and October ushers in a new era for many of us. For ComicMix it means Phase II, the actual raison d'etre for this site (and I'm psyched to be sharing Wednesdays with EZ Street). For me it signals an imminent lifestyle change as the day job I've held for the last ten years is about to disappear, a part of my life destined to become an unpleasant memory in the very near future.

This job has taken much out of me emotionally this last decade, snipping away at little pieces of my soul and memory that I feared I'd never recover. But now that things are taking their course and I feel like I'm about to be paroled, I find many of those pieces are starting to return. Robin's remarked that I remind him once again of the person I was when we met, the last time I was between jobs -- healthier, happier, more energetic and optimistic, closer to my true self. And I'm having strange dreams that mix the past and present, where I can almost recall things that I'd thought gone forever.

The other night I dreamt I was back in college, only I was the person I am today. And for some reason, my roommate looked exactly like Sarah Silverman. (I often dream about celebs for whom I have no particular affinity in real life; the pheme of fame, as Stephen Fry calls it, seeps into my subconscious remarkably easily.) And I remarked to Sarah, in between trying to divvy up the laundry and other mundane chores, that I was impressed by all the youthful enthusiasm around me. "I remember when I used to have that kind of energy," I mused. "Heck, back when I was a day camp counselor I'd run around all the time…"

Then I woke up, thinking about day camp.

Which I haven't done in, like, forever. But it was a big part of my summers. I went through the Ashbrook Swim Club's day camp first as a camper, from the time my parents joined and my mom decided to be the camp nurse (made sense, as she was a school nurse the rest of the year) until 12 years old, the maximum age for campers. I learned how to play pinball in the swim club's pavilion, including how to toggle the machine from the back to get free games; to this day I'm convinced that the effects of pinball on my wrists led to my later susceptibility to carpal tunnel syndrome. The other thing I was really good at was tetherball. I was like a four-time tetherball champion in my teens. I whacked that sucker like nobody's business. Barehand or with a still played through. Damn, I loved tetherball.

At age 14 I got my first job, as a camp counselor in Ashbrook, caring for up to a dozen girls aged 5 or so. Through the years I took that same group of girls, more or less, every summer until they were 12. I can no longer remember any of their names. Except Elaine, for obvious reasons. She had an apple face that lit up the area, and she was lactose intolerant. But regardless of my inability to place names and faces back in my memory, I do recall that my girls were the best. The absolute best. They were joyful, energetic, strong, intelligent, musical, athletic, artistic… everything every girl could and should be. That last episode of Buffy, where all the girls suddenly found they had Slayer power? That's what it felt like every day with my girls.

Sometimes in the evenings we'd have programs, and Mr. Singer would sing. Mr. and Mrs. Singer ran the camp. He loved his ukulele. We learned Kumbaya, all the regular camp-type songs. I always found it amusing that Mr. Singer liked to sing so much.

I'm sure I'll start remembering more of my past as my present life changes. I want to recall camp. Ashbrook no longer exists, you see. The swim club, the pool, the cabanas, the scary woods with the path that just coincidentally led to a rival swim club -- all gone now. I think they turned it into a golf course, or apartment buildings, or something equally useless to middle class suburban kids looking for comradery and cooling off, for lanyards and laughter, for sports and sunshine. Oh, there are still places like that, but they're not like the place I almost remember. And they'll never have my girls of summer.

Elayne Riggs is ComicMix's news editor, and would love to hear from anyone who remembers Ashbrook Swim Club, especially one of her girls. She knows you're out there somewhere.

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