“If there’s no free will, as I more and more doubt there to be, we don’t need to go crazy with guilt and worry about our children. We’re not responsible for them. For their upbringing, yes, but not for their existence. Destiny wants them here. It uses us to put them here.” — John Jeremiah Sullivan, on a thought had while high
“I’ll be damned if a child of mine does any summer learning.” — A friend, on receiving her child’s summer bridge workbook in June
I was pedaling a pair of borrowed Y-fronts over the Manhattan Bridge toward summer camp in 90-degree heat when I got a second flat tire. The camp called me to check, once again, that I was on the way with spare pants. “I do have the underpants,” I yelled on speakerphone in downtown Brooklyn, because my phone only works on speakerphone, “but I have another flat.”
This was the first time the kids have done summer camp. Even if your kids have already gone to school, there’s something about sending them off to day camp that seems more like surrender the universe — perhaps the fact that the key safety mechanism is having the kids wear matching t-shirts, or that the camps seem to be run entirely by people who wear happy pants and tiger ears to work. Will the kids be indoctrinated into tribal warfare? Taught to skin a deer? You simply don’t know, because you’ve got work to do and seeyoulaterhavefun. I did hope they might learn some fun camp songs.
On the first day, Scout came home eager to teach us how to play “townspeople.” She sat us in a circle on the floor. “Now,” she announced with a tinkle of excitement, “close your eyes. I’m going to choose a guardian angel, a cop, and a killer.”
“I want to be the cop!” said Japhy, raising his hand so high his bum lifted off the ground.
“I thought this was the fancy camp,” Noodle Hubs said to me, believing he had raised our kids to hold a healthy amount of skepticism regarding the police. And it was the fancy camp — Scout had two weeks to enjoy a daily schedule, private jumping castles, and a counselor with long lilac hair before starting what I will call Camp Sticks and Rocks, based in Prospect Park — vastly cheaper due to the children going nowhere and reliant, absent any infrastructure, on the campers relieving themselves in the bushes for eight hours each day.
On her first day at Camp Sticks and Rocks, Scout’s camp counselor gave her a glowing review. “I love her!” Miss M. told me at pickup, Scout beaming at her side. “She is so responsible! I left her in charge while I had to run to the bathroom.” Cool! Scout is 6.
It is the first summer where all four of us are in our own spheres during the day. While his sister fossicked for beads on the floor of Prospect Park one day, Japhy took a bus with his best friend to go on the rides at Coney Island. Information is hard to come by, especially with COVID’s invisible fence ringing the goings-on — for a week, we only knew his counselor as “Mr. Glasses” — and so I have been left to imagine Japhy in his wide-brimmed camouflage-print hat clacking and screeching around an ancient metal track in a carriage with his friend. What did they make of it?
Japhy’s camp, the Fancy Camp, is quick pedal through the green innards of the park to the far side. One of the best parts about Brooklyn is the variety of landcraft. Families arrive to camp on scooters, or stacked into the rolling file cabinets of Uppababy, toddlers slotted one atop the other, or pedaling their offspring in wooden crates and on planks, as though we have all convened for a Tournament Of The Minds to solve the problem of family movement using only found materials. It allows you to feel every which way. One balmy day, we passed a baby flying by on a moped in the cove of its fathers legs while Scout stood hiking in her pedals with the wind in her face. Another day, and Scout screaming “MINION POP” with devastation over and over again as her chest caved in over her handlebars (also, with her last gasps, “You’re the worst mum!”). Early one morning, I ran out of space to stop on the sidewalk, and tipped slowly over, Japhy finding himself on the pavement still strapped into his yellow bike seat, like Romain Grosjean stranded on an F1 barrier and on fire, the chassis blasted off him. “Aaah!” he said, after a delay, but he was fine, back to singing by the time we reached the hill.
The celestial system of Prospect Park continued to spin: there went a man riding a seatless tinsel-trimmed unicycle with two enormous poles like ant legs; a runner pitching toward an invisible finish line; a older father trying to tow his tween behind his bicycle on a skateboard, each staring at the black tape lying slack in the dirt. And then there was me! Hammering home on the bike past men in Lycra pants, an empty child seat rattling on the back; a peloton for the briefly child-free.
🏕
Everyone is together but in their own orbit in To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s novel about the Ramsay family and hangers-on staying in a summer house on the Scottish coast (to refresh). The nexus of the universe, Mrs. Ramsay, is the kind of mother who might cause a hardened man of 80 to weep over a crochet blanket; very beautiful, very gentle with her kids, a painting, really. Her 6-year-old, James, wants to take a boat ride to the lighthouse the next day, and his dad stamps out the idea, suggesting the weather won’t allow it. Mrs. Ramsay says maybe. James and his mother sit together framed by a window in a moment that isn’t spoiled by the child throwing his head back into his mother’s teeth or knocking over his juice. Alongside a prolonged description of a beef casserole, here is life in a nutshell, from the POV of Lily Briscoe:
“she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”
The moment stays with James, too, who years later, still trying to reach the lighthouse, “began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold, softly, incessantly upon his brain.” Mostly, he remembers his mother.
Among my many impressions of summer:
a camp counselor flagging a pair of wet pants under the hand dryer in the public bathroom
Japhy waking up on “pajama day” having slept in his Yankees outfit, so that “these are my pajamas”
the dad and baby on the moped, who also had music tootling out of a stereo: Lovely Day by Bill Withers
Scout falling in love with her lavender-haired counselor in a single day
Scout falling in love with her top-bunned counselor in a single day
Japhy singing, giocoso, on loop, “I’m BRINGING HOME my baby bumblebee / won’t my mummy be so proud of me” (“… and I’m THROWING UP my ba-by bumble-bee / won’t my mummy be so proud of me…”)
🏕
At pickup on one of Japhy’s last days, the counselors at the fancy camp asked to speak with me privately. I had been invited to have a ~private~ chat with them weeks before after Japhy was bitten by another child. They told me that “the child” had been managed and “the child’s parents” duly informed, when Japhy ran out yelling, “Henry teethed me!” “So… you know the child’s name,” said the counselor, unsure of the protocol for that. What she didn’t know is sometimes you would rather your child be the bitten than be the biter.
This time the counselors told me they needed my help with some “key words” to get Japhy to listen in camp. Just keep singing, guys! That’s the only thing to distract him! At that moment, he emerged to charge at my thigh, mask on his chin, a grin stamped on. “Oh, sure. Sure,” I told the 18-year-olds, “we’ll have a talk about it,” then put the lunatic back into his yellow seat.
The next morning after pedaling him over, he latched onto the fence I had leaned the bike against. I had to tickle his armpits to get him to let go, carry him like a log of wood, then deposit him upright onto his feet at the dropoff and run away yelling “I love you, have fun!”
“Oh, but she never wanted James to grow a day older! Or Cam either. These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters. Nothing made up for the loss.” — Woolf
Bonus
Each week, we were emailed these still lives of the lost and found, which seemed to accidentally suggest a civilization of lost children, zapped from time.
Goodies
For The New Republic, I reviewed the new Emily Oster parenting book, in which she suggests you run your family like a Fortune 500.
Many people already know my feelings on THE BENCH —
— but here is a review from a man of letters.
In The Spectator, which I mostly read for bitchy takes on the royals, why the British love charity shops: “even in the age of shopping at the touch of a button, it turns out that the Great British Public still crave an element of surprise on a wet afternoon.”
Moneymoneymoney: The A.V. Club’s review of White Lotus ep 4, and actually it feels like the Tennyson poem applies to everything.
A look back at Victoria magazine by Dirt: ("Victoria magazine stopped publishing in 2003 after 16 years of articles about white lace bedding and romantic fireside dinners, along with inspiring profiles of women who started their own businesses selling handmade pillows and vintage bridal gowns,” wrote the Seattle Times.)
And a very worthwhile look at Karens through history by Ligaya Mishan!: “perhaps inevitably, the concept of the Karen has been co-opted by consumerism and turned into a product … guilt as commodity.”
And in other news, we moved!
Thanks for reading KAFKA’S BABY <3 Do share or say yallow!
"Cool! Scout is 6." I could hear it EXACTLY in your voice. This is one of my favorites of yours, J$!! <3