Signs It's Almost Time For Camp

1. Song session with hundreds of other people reappears as a regular and predictable part of daily life.



2. Suddenly you start seeing more hippies with guitars.



3. You get a chance to meet up with friends you haven't seen since August.



4. There's lots of spontaneous embracing.



5. You start tying things to your body with hemp.



6. You trade your grown-up steel watch for your water-resistant, light-up rubber watch.



7. Instead of furniture in your bedroom you just have huge piles everywhere on top of what used to be your desk, your bookshelf, your chair...



8. Your bed itself looks like this and you're forced to pack because otherwise you can't go to sleep.


Sing it with me:
Take me home down country roads
To the place I belong--
Camp Tawonga, California!
Take me home down country roads...

Make New Friends (But Keep The Old...)

I am writing this on a Southwest flight from BWI to Oakland (the People’s Airport, as Nalini calls it, and I couldn’t agree more—sigh—SFO, I miss you…), heading home after a week at Capital Camps in Pennsylvania for the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s pre-season Cornerstone Fellowship conference.

On Thursday I woke up and packed half of what I have kept out of my storage space for the summer into my massive REI backpack. After working in Berkeley for a few hours I took the BART to OAK where I boarded a flight to Denver and then on to Baltimore, arriving at 12:30 a.m. I took a taxi to the hotel where I stayed up even later, having my very own bathtub and queen-sized bed all to myself after months of getting clean in stand-up shower stalls and sleeping on everything from a variety of futonim to a sofa permanently folded out into an extra-wide cot. I woke up and repacked, had breakfast, and took the hotel’s shuttle back to the airport with two people who I quickly learned were headed to the same conference I was. Back at BWI my airport shuttlemates Saul and Reuven (no hint there that they work for Jewish agencies) and I met up with the rest of the folks who had arrived just that morning from destinations much closer than the West Coast, and all of us together boarded a mini-bus headed for Pennsylvania.

Two hours later I disembarked on the grounds of a very beautiful camp and got registered for the week’s events. One of the staff handed me a key and a map, pointing out the dining hall’s doors at the building that would be my home for the next five nights. Lodge Alef, room 9 was my housing assignment and I shlepped my bags across the parking lot and up the stairs into the building where I found my room empty of people but filled with signs of life that my roommate had already arrived.

At the opening session I met Mara and our third roommate, Julie, who had been accidentally assigned to an upper bunk in another room and wanted to sleep closer to the ground so was moving in with us. After a few false starts in which I stole Mara’s conference materials without meaning to and boldly unpacked a week’s worth of Ziploc bags filled with pre-matched top-and-bottom combos for the next days (once again, I’m down with OCD—yeah you know me) into one entire dresser leaving Julie with nowhere to put her clothes we all fell promptly in love with one another.

I have gotten very little sleep this past week because of all the late-night pillow talk--with Julie participating fully until she would suddenly and completely without warning fall asleep, leaving Mara and I to visit until all hours of the early morning. We shared meals and acrostics and pre-presentation jitters and a bathroom, we learned about each other’s camps and professional backgrounds and love lives and plans for the summer. Yesterday morning when it was time to pack up our bags and unmake our beds, to say our farewells and go our separate ways I was surprisingly really sad. Never having been a camper myself, I hadn’t understood the overwhelming emotions I observed last summer at the end of every session as weepy campers would spend what seemed like hours hugging absolutely everyone from their own bunkmates and counselors to the kitchen staff goodbye before getting on the bus to go back home, but saying goodbye to Mara and Julie felt a lot like that had looked all those months ago in Yosemite. Now we’re Facebook friends and I’ve already sent them both mail for when they get back to their own camps next week, but it is just not the same as telling stories until two a.m. I’ll see Mara at CAJE in August and we’ve already made plans to be roommates again, and Julie offered to be my hostess anytime I am in DC, but the bittersweetness of saying farewell lingers and I will just need to console myself as the Tawongan campers do, by saying “There’s always next summer, there’s always next year…”

Messages Everywhere, Reprise

Tonight I was walking home from work, something I never do because I always ride my bike, but in this case I'd left my bike at my office since I will be out of town at this conference the next few days. This graffiti on 4th Street caught my eye and just as I was capturing the image with the use of my phone's camera, the phone rang and it was my dear, dear friend Jason whom I've known since 1999---almost a decade, practically an eternity. He had spotted my boarding pass here on my blog and he wanted to know if during my time in Baltimore I'd be able to make a 50-minute detour to see him and his family in Silver Spring, Maryland. YES, please. We were in grad school together for two years and taught together for three more after that and when he said it's been two and a half years since we said farewell to one another at the Ferry Building in San Francisco during their last trip here, about eighteen months after they moved away, I could not believe it.

The lesson: Making what might seem at the time like a random, self-indulgent blog posts such as the image of one's boarding pass for a business trip can sometimes be the catalyst for an amazing bi-coastal reunion. See you next week, Mr. O!

Leaving on a Jet Plane

This weekend I am going to teach at the Foundation for Jewish Camp (formerly, and much more sensibly I think, called the Foundation for Jewish CampING) conference in Pennsylvania.

One bad thing about this is that the sessions I am presenting are not yet fully prepared. Best to get on that. Another bad thing is that since I now live in Berkeley, my local airport is Oakland--the People's Airport, as Nalini calls it--and I just can't help but long for the off-on-an-adventure, world-traveler feel that seems so signature at SFO.

One GREAT thing is that when I get back I will be staying alone, peacefully and quietly alone, in the city for about a week before I move to the woods to live with hundreds of hippies all summer long. Such a huge gift. I cannot wait. But until then, I was the 20th person to check in online and print my boarding pass and I am leaving tomorrow and if the nineteen people who board before me somehow take up all the aisle seats in the plane before I get on, I will kick someone. You think I'm kidding? Oh, but I'm not.

In Storage

This weekend I borrowed Rebecca's car and put all the things I am not taking with me to camp back in storage. It has now been almost an entire year since I put it all there in the first place and I had a weird moment yesterday while I was standing on what used to be my desk reaching over the wall of boxes that divides the 10' x 15' space into the furniture section and the everything else section--something caught my eye that I did not recognize.

What is that big silver flower-shaped thing, I wondered as I reached over the box wall and probed it gently with my fingers, spinning it slowly around as I tried to understand what it was...oh! the rolling bottom of my IKEA desk chair, the seat pointing down towards the ground and the legs sticking straight up to the ceiling. Right. I have a desk chair, I have a desk. I have a kitchen table and an entire set of kitchen stuff including various appliances and some very nice knives that were a housewarming gift when I moved out of the House of Flowers into my own place on Judah Street. I have a bed that Renee found me on the street one thrift-shop field trip day, a brushed steel delight with a sign that said FREE but which she edited with Sharpie to say "$90!" because she thought that would prevent anyone from taking it until we came back from lunch and could summon the Subaru to come pick it up and take it to my house. I have a heinous eggplant-colored couch which is drenched in bad karma and needs to be burned at midnight on Ocean Beach once and for all. Clothes and books and fire extinguishers, lamps and towels and somewhere in there is a Swiffer.

As my plans for the fall are beginning to come together it is almost guaranteed that unless I want to subject myself to a completely nightmarish commute I will be living not in the city but here, in the East Bay. As I was walking up the stairs to Ben's apartment recently I thought about what it might be like to someday walk up the stairs to my own apartment again and I just can't even conceive of it right now but I know when it does happen, when I am seated on the floor of my own house again for the very first time surrounded by dozens of boxes of I don't even know what, clothes and books and fire extinguishers I suppose, I will be both stunned and grateful. It's been an amazing year and in some ways I don't want it to be over, I feel like there is so much more to see and do and learn but in other ways I just want to have a set of keys again that open my very own door...and not the door to a 10' x 15' storage space, either.

Bike To Work Day 2008!

Notice my new Chaco sandals, hipster canvas messenger bag, and super-fast ankle wings.





Yesterday Ben was making fun of how much I like stickers but I did not care. Today at BART I got this cool sticker. It's like the "I voted" sticker, but more sporty and eco-minded.




Yay! I bike to work every day, but today it felt like a party when I stopped by the North Berkeley BART on the way to the office. Dozens of cyclists were pulling up and grabbing muffins (mine was pumpkin) and coffee (I did not take any because hard to ride the bike with travel cup in hand) and canvas messenger bags emblazoned with a funky-modern image of people cycling past an urban landscape. I wore my special silver ankle wings that Kristine sent me--meant to clip your pants while riding to keep them from catching in your chain, but worn by me today with my skirt not for functionality but as a stylish accessory--and got a cool sticker and generally started my morning out right with my fellow cyclists.

Viva Bicycle!

New Swimsuit

This is not me in my new swimsuit. This is Marilyn Monroe.


Last year when shopping for camp I needed EVERYTHING: sleeping bag, hiking boots, bug spray, sunblock, wool socks, tent, biodegradable soap, backpack, lantern, knife, emergency whistle, you name it. This year I still have almost everything, or maybe if I've run out I just need to go buy more...but still I wanted one or two new things to take to Yosemite for the summer. It is, as Rebecca always says so rightly, all about the accessories.

So yesterday I rode my bike to Sports Basement in Walnut Creek (VERY different than the ones in the city, yes) and wandered from department to department stocking up on things I did need (socks, soap) and hoping to find just a little something new and fun to take along this summer too. In the TriYourBest! area of the store--they are so cheesy with the slogans, those folks at Sports Basement--I found a whole rack of swimsuits that caught my attention. Not in love with my orange lap suit from last spring and not in love with the reactions I get from campers when clad in my bikini I decided to poke around a bit to see what I could find. I unearthed about a half dozen in my size and headed for the fitting room.

I only learned how to really swim four years ago and since that time was, until very recently, allegiant to a full-coverage suit called the SuperFly made by Speedo. Unlike Todd or Sarah I am not a butterflyer myself, but who can argue with the name? I've done laps in three different versions since I graduated from the Starfish class at the USF swim school: the black, the blue, and the purple. Last spring, though, I was at Sports Basement's store in the Presidio and needed a swimsuit right that day since the spin dryer at the Koret Center had recently eaten my blue SuperFly alive after a particularly vigorous workout with the Masters team. I had grabbed a sale-priced suit without trying it, erroneously thinking it was my usual model, only to get home and find out it was no SuperFly at all but rather the TYR Diamondback. Since then I've been hooked and so my cardboard shopping box overflowed with various flavors of Diamondback as I found an empty "room" in the the mixed-gender try-on area.

"Whoa!" the woman trying on bike shorts in the stall next to me said in reaction to my first choice as I stepped out from behind the curtain and into the almost completely public fitting room to scope out the view in the mirror. "That is one of the best swimsuits I have ever seen! You look like a total movie star."

Really? I wasn't sure at first but upon closer inspection decided it was indeed quite an accessory and well worth the investment. My new identity as a supposed movie star might be a bit of a stretch but I feel it is definitely an impactful look since my new swimsuit is a fully-lined white TYR Diamondback that makes my truly milky skin appear mocha instead and in its double-layered-ness does wonders for, you know, those parts of one's body that sometimes look less than wonderful in a swimsuit.

Rest Hour Staff Lap Swim, here I come!

Me at Esalen

One interesting piece of feedback that I've gotten over the past months that I've been writing this blog: "Sarah! There are never any pictures of you! We've seen the images-only dials on the washer in your apartment in Jerusalem, we've seen the delicious treats your French housemate used to leave you for bedtime snack after you got back from Hebrew class, but we never get to see any pictures of YOU!" True, because I do not find photos of myself particularly interesting and this is my blog after all so I get to decide what I publish and what I do not, but also because many of the pictures I have taken do not have me in them since I am there seeing it for myself and do not need to record my presence for posterity.

However, the perfect combination of newly-repaired camera and newly-acquired laptop come together to make it possible to publish photos in a way that was nothing short of agonizing before, so now I offer you some recent pictures of me from my adventures in Big Sur.


The first day of our cooking class, everyone got aprons and mine and Heidi's just happened to be fancy while everyone else's were plain. Needless to say, that apron now hangs in my closet in Berkeley.






Adrianne and I made a delicious cake for dessert one day!






Can you see me? One night I went to the Art Barn to watch the sun set, then stayed and painted for an hour or so. I am wearing a different apron in this picture, but it is not nearly as cool as my black one so it got left behind in the Art Barn where it belonged so other people could use it too.






One of my favorite memories of my first trip to Esalen was standing on this random platform in the middle of the yard between the dining hall and the sea, hula hooping with one of the many that are lying about for anyone's pleasure. I loved it so much that the huge bruise I got on my hip was not souvenir enough and upon returning to San Francisco last spring ordered my own custom-made one and could be seen on many an occasion last May and early June hula hooping in Golden Gate Park. Alas, my hula hoop got left behind in my office at camp at the end of last summer and so I have been without one...until my return to Big Sur and the platform by the sea.






One day at rest hour I hiked down the cliffs to the beach, laid down on a big flat rock that was hot from the sun, and took a nap. Before hiking back up to class I took this picture.

Messages Everywhere

Elizabeth Gilbert describes one lesson that she learned from her year of travels: clues are all around us, and there are messages everywhere. During my time at Esalen I discovered a number of different messages tucked about, and share them here now. What clues do they reveal to you?

Taking the Long View

(standing in the garden at Esalen, looking out towards the sea)


The other night I was at dinner at Julie and Jhos' beautiful house up in the Berkeley hills. After saying my hellos and being introduced to their three kids and Tiger, the cat, Julie took me on the tour and our first stop was the sweeping deck that runs along the entire back of their first floor. Since the house is built into the hill one actually goes in at ground level in the front and then walks out onto the deck in the back and is about twenty-five feet off the ground with the slope of the hill unfolding below into an urban orchard with fruit trees and raised vegetable beds. Raising one's gaze from the intense, detailed beauty of the mini-farm below to the vastness of the Bay Area poured out across the horizon really helps to explain how the expression "as far as the eye can see" was coined.

To the far left, or south, I could see the San Mateo Bridge and to the far right, or north I could see Sonoma. Past the skyscrapers and hills and encroaching evening fog of the city I could see the Terrific Pacific, as we've called it in Third Grade. "Isn't it amazing?" Julie asked. Um, yes...

She told me a story of how she goes out there for her fifteen minutes of Sunset Therapy every evening, how she first learned when visiting her sister who lives nestled among the tall trees of Ukiah how profoundly restorative it is to allow your eye to be drawn so far away from your own location, how when taking the long view of things your lungs can't help but breathe more deeply and your heart will begin to beat more slowly. So I tried it. I looked out past the sharp rising beauty of Sutro Tower, a mere eight blocks from my old apartment in the city, and imagined myself standing on Ocean Beach looking out over the waves of the sea. I gazed at the ocean, not from close up with my feet in the sand but from high up in the air miles away on Julie's deck and I felt it in my lungs and heart, my mind and my spirit. The long view came to rest upon and within me in a way I had not expected at all.

So what does this mean, taking the long view? It can been done from high peaks and smooth beaches, it can be done from within one's self. It is not easy, for me at least. I am nearsighted both in body and in soul but unfortunately there are no contacts for my psyche, no way to bring into focus the things off in the distance and expand my sights beyond what is literally right in front of me. Lately as I have been thinking about the summer and weighing options for next year I've been considering everything from where to live and work, what kind of community in which I want to participate and whom I want in that community with me, and I have been overwhelmed. The short view of the present is crowded with images that compete for my attention, is hectic in design and difficult to interpret at times.

As an antidote to that chaos I have begun in the last few days to try and bring Julie's Sunset Therapy into practice in my own life, to see the long view from within my soul and, when all else fails, to lift my eyes from my computer or my studies or my dishes that I'm washing and look up, out the window, at the tops of the trees, towards the sea.

Going Back To Camp

Last summer I lived for eleven weeks in the mountains just west of Yosemite National Park. I moved everything out of my fabulous studio apartment in the city, shoved two huge bags of worn-out hot weather clothes into a borrowed-for-the-summer Subaru, and made a new home for myself in a tiny cabin next to the Tuolumne River on the grounds of the largest Jewish residential camp on the West Coast. While there I got two terrible infections, one thorn stuck in my foot, and a fabulous tan including some adorable freckles. I read from the Torah, ate food that had fallen on the ground, perfected my hora and even got touched on the leg by a (not very) large and (only somewhat) ominous-looking fish on the one and only brave trip I made down to the river to go swimming.

Last summer, showering in public and with hair as dry as hay from the wind and heat and high-altitude sun I swore there was no way I would go back again. No sirree Bob, not me. I am a grown-up and I am a city kid and I like to live INdoors. With a bathroom in the same building where I sleep at night. And consistent wireless. Is that too much to ask? I mean, I know there's all-you-can-drink Peet's, but still. A girl's gotta have standards, you know?

And now it is May, and here I find myself once again preparing to pack for camp. To say a lot has happened between then and now would be an understatement of the most epic proportion. It is a much easier task this time, with most of my things still in storage and only a few decisions to make about how many pairs of jeans to take with me and how many to leave behind here in Berkeley at Rebecca's house--as opposed to last year when I was putting my entire life away, locked in an Alameda warehouse, for the next fifteen months. I have learned a lot about myself, about what I need and what is extra, about what to take and what to leave behind.

Looking forward to another three months at camp this summer I looked back through my old journal to find a list I remember making one hot afternoon last August, sitting on the Dining Hall porch with Allie as she did hemp macrame and I chronicled my memories, as always, in not pixels and megabytes but pen and ink. Things I Wish I'd Had At Camp This Summer, the list was titled (excerpted here for length and for content):

•clothespins, since the staff clothesline by Arts and Crafts had none and just when I'd finally do my laundry and drape it over the cord strung between sagging metal supports that looked like tired aluminum trees drooping in the sun, the wind would blow and all my socks and my two pairs of jeans and my thirty versions of the exact same tank top from H&M that I wore every single day would fall down into the dust and get dirty again

•dryer sheets for the times I did laundry in the coolness of the night or when the clothesline was full and I actually needed to put my wash in the machine instead of out in the sunshine to dry, since the faux-floral industrial scent of the institutional-strength laundry detergent would always linger and make my clothes smell like they belonged to someone else

and...
•iron-on name tapes, since I cannot even tell you how many garments that I brought into the mountains in early June went home with other people at the end of August....seen my Stanford sweatshirt, anyone? Anyone? It's still missing :(

So this evening, with Kristine's encouragement, I got online and found a wide range of colors, styles, prices, and levels of cuteness in the realm of laundry identification. It didn't take long before I settled on the selection above, from the Pretty Colours collection (the website is Canadian, what can I say?) instead of the red and blue and yellow of the Cool Colours collection, heaven forbid. Now you would think the problem would be solved, since six dozen heat transfer nametags are headed my way to be pressed into my garments big and small, top and bottom and neither, and I should return with just as many if not more items of clothing than last year. But now a new problem remains: how will I know which of the color selections to match with each garment?!

I'm down with OCD, yeah you know me...but at least I'll have all my clothes when I come back in September.

Q

Just when I was at my most fog-chilled, cold-nosed, low-spirited, and ill-tempered today Rachel agreed to go to Q with me for dinner and I ordered the Vegan Grill, my total favorite...okay second favorite...because as an appetizer I had my ALL-TIME favorite Q menu item: tater tots!

"How did you ever find out about this place?" Rachel marvelled, trying to spell her name in magnetic letters on the wall while taking in the twinkle-bright holiday lights, the glitter-red vinyl booths, and the industrial-steel everything.

"I came on a really bad first date here one Valentine's Day," I replied by way of explanation. "SO bad, in the end. I had no way of even beginning to guess how bad it would become."

"Ah," she said, perhaps a little bit wishing she hadn't even asked in the first place. "I see..."

And with that we shared the last of the tater tots and were off to hear Mary Pipher lecture at the JCC.

Yum!