The Rock in the Pavilion: Summer Camp Stories

By Lee S. Kessler

Youth is not wasted on the young so long as we have warm-hearted memoirs like this one. You may or may not have ridden horses, run free on unsupervised summers, or sang inappropriate campfire songs, but the universality of these tales of freedom on the cusp between childhood and teenhood will resonate and recall your own joyful tales. This book is a really nice place to go, and you’re invited.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781663251671

Lee S. Kessler

Lee S. Kessler is a writer whose work has spanned the fields of Motorcycling, Aviation, Music, Computers, Memoir, and Finance. This is because he seems to be incapable of making up his mind about where to focus.  Book credits include: co-author, with Simon Eichel, of The Family Whistle – A Holocaust Memoir of Loss and Survival - iUniverse co-author, with Eldon Mayer and Sam Kirschner of The Investor’s Guide to Hedge Funds - Wiley His novel Rescue Run is currently seeking an agent who is just plain tired of saying “No” all the time, especially when the agent learns that Kessler is currently at work on the prequel to that novel.

Book preview

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgment

1.     The Rock in the Pavilion

2.     The Place and the People

3.     Saddling Trigger

4.     The Campfire Songs

5.     The Girls

6.     Riding Trigger

7.     The Dorm

8.     The Pool

9.     The Bit Flip

10.   Pizarro

11.   The Snack Bar

12.   The Music

13.   The Peanut Imbroglio

14.   The French Kiss

15.   The Appalachian Trail

16.   The Trojan Horse

17.   The Rodeo

18.   The Horse Thief

                      My friend, judge not me

                      Thou seest I judge not thee.

                      Betwixt the stirrup and the ground

                      Mercy I asked, and mercy found.

- William Camden

Foreword

I should have seen this coming.

For years it was clear that Lee and I were going to be a pathetic pair of old men with grown-up kids who would roll their eyes as we insist on making sure that they appreciate the brilliance of the plan that we… well I… devised in order to capture the flag from under the nose of the opposing team’s counsellor. And did we tell you that instead of watching Armstrong and Aldrin hop around on the moon, we chose to stay in the Sandymount dining room and dance to Marvin Gaye?

Now both of us have actually done a few things with our lives over the past fifty some years, so what keeps us coming back to these stories?

Leave it to Lee to take this question seriously, write a book about it, and explain to me what keeps these memories alive. I should have known that he’d find the plots that could make anyone who experienced childhood stop and listen.

And even if no one else is listening, how cool to see these moments of my life documented so beautifully without being asked to do more than write this thank you note.

Thank you, Lee, for writing this and for so much more.

- Bob Mark

Acknowledgment

Thanks in abundance to my brother Doug who provided galactically great editing right here on earth, and to him and other brother Jason for being the first recipients of these tales when they were fresh baked by the elder one who went away in the summer and came back home again. The dog, I recall, gave me a hero’s welcome. The brothers were somewhat less demonstrative.

Thanks to Gabby and Joe for raising us right and for subtly engendering our competition over who gets to sit in the black back seat, the area inside a Volkswagen Beetle never intended to carry a person.

Thanks to Bob, his brother Rick, and parents Jerry and Trudy for providing a loving and enriching second home just a few doors down from the first one.

Thanks to William M. Gaines and the usual gang of idiots for a profoundly influential study of the nature, causes, and principles of reality, knowledge, and values, based on illogical, vacuous, and dim-witted reasoning.

1

The Rock in the Pavilion

Two fourteen-year-old boys sat in conversation at a picnic table under the roof of an airy pavilion by a swimming pool. It was August 1970. They might have been talking about the latest issue of Mad magazine, or the game Thurman Munson had for the Yankees, or the incomprehensible breakup of the Beatles. But instead, they were discussing the nature of memory.

They were attending a horseback riding summer camp in eastern Pennsylvania. Pool water dried in their hair. The tang of chlorine blended with the aroma of hay stacked in the barn. The sun seemed indecisive about its descent through the sky as if unwilling to hurry the deliberations of the boys or hasten the end of their summer. Bob used his pinky attempting to dislodge water from his ear. My saddle-sore posterior in damp swim trunks found no comfort on the hard bench.

I don’t know why we were discussing the nature of memory. The reason is lost in a past that is starkly contrasted with the past as we perceive it today, as I write fifty-two years later in August 2022. Today the past leaves ubiquitous breadcrumbs in the ubiquitous internet and nothing ever goes away. But Camp Sandymount, like Atlantis, flourished and faded in the pre-web world. It seems to have vanished without a digital trace.

I moved from the bench to sit on the tabletop. My trunks left a wet print that instantly began to evaporate.

We theorized that the most mundane, random, and meaningless things could be intentionally preserved in the museum of memory alongside their more meaningful cousins. In proclamation, Bob picked up a stone from the pebbled bed that had been poured as flooring for the pavilion. There was nothing distinctive about the rock he chose. He declared that, for the rest of our lives, we would remember The Rock in the Pavilion.