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Published: Sep 16, 2005 01:40 PM
Sat - January 17, 2004
My Big Fat Camp Wedding
Valentine's Day is just around the
corner. Will my wife forgive me for failing to mention that I've been married
before?
With
our first anniversary only a few months away, I'm asking myself important
questions: What will I give my wife? How will we celebrate? And how will I
explain to her that I wed another woman 30 years ago but never had the marriage
annulled?
A surprise like that can really strain a relationship.
Of course, I was young, impressionable, and foolish. My spur of the moment proposal, egged on by people close to me, showed reckless disregard for the consequences of our actions. But although I hardly knew the bride, had never even dated her before, perhaps my impetuousness can be distinguished from Britney's by the fact that I was nine years old at the time.
The story of how I got hitched in the single digits begins in an unlikely place—a sleep-over summer camp—and with an unlikely yenta, a childhood outcast with a thirst for vengeance. It is absolutely true. Only some names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Camp Beaverbrook, where I first married, was set in a beautiful wooded area, bordered by a shallow creek about 100 miles north of San Francisco. I shared a cabin there with nine other boys and two teenage counselors. Most of the campers had never been so far from home, and a few felt quite anxious about leaving family behind. David Kessler belonged to the latter group.
Thin, frail, and bespectacled, with a mop of curly, dark-brown hair sprouting from his freckled forehead, Kessler's anemic physical appearance mirrored his limited social skills. He seemed congenitally unable or unwilling to befriend fellow campers. Instead of joining activities, he moped and cried alone during his first few days in the cabin—qualities that won him little support. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. Absent heavenly intervention, he seemed fated to return home friendless and forgotten.
Kessler's miracle arrived the second week of camp in the form of a care package filled with home-baked chocolate chip cookies. Boys who received care packages of that kind instantly gained popularity with their cabin mates. Realizing the gold mine he had stumbled into, Kessler became a petty tyrant, a kind of junior Somali warlord with a list of favors we could do for him to earn rewards from his treasury of treats. He kept detailed records of account. No one got cookies before satisfying his whims. No one got cookies who offended his sense of justice. No one got cookies, period, without going through him. He kept his stash secured in a shoe box under his bunk.
Secured, that is, until someone stole one of the cookies.
[First of three parts, posted daily. Continue reading the second part here.]
A surprise like that can really strain a relationship.
Of course, I was young, impressionable, and foolish. My spur of the moment proposal, egged on by people close to me, showed reckless disregard for the consequences of our actions. But although I hardly knew the bride, had never even dated her before, perhaps my impetuousness can be distinguished from Britney's by the fact that I was nine years old at the time.
The story of how I got hitched in the single digits begins in an unlikely place—a sleep-over summer camp—and with an unlikely yenta, a childhood outcast with a thirst for vengeance. It is absolutely true. Only some names have been changed to protect the guilty.
Camp Beaverbrook, where I first married, was set in a beautiful wooded area, bordered by a shallow creek about 100 miles north of San Francisco. I shared a cabin there with nine other boys and two teenage counselors. Most of the campers had never been so far from home, and a few felt quite anxious about leaving family behind. David Kessler belonged to the latter group.
Thin, frail, and bespectacled, with a mop of curly, dark-brown hair sprouting from his freckled forehead, Kessler's anemic physical appearance mirrored his limited social skills. He seemed congenitally unable or unwilling to befriend fellow campers. Instead of joining activities, he moped and cried alone during his first few days in the cabin—qualities that won him little support. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. Absent heavenly intervention, he seemed fated to return home friendless and forgotten.
Kessler's miracle arrived the second week of camp in the form of a care package filled with home-baked chocolate chip cookies. Boys who received care packages of that kind instantly gained popularity with their cabin mates. Realizing the gold mine he had stumbled into, Kessler became a petty tyrant, a kind of junior Somali warlord with a list of favors we could do for him to earn rewards from his treasury of treats. He kept detailed records of account. No one got cookies before satisfying his whims. No one got cookies who offended his sense of justice. No one got cookies, period, without going through him. He kept his stash secured in a shoe box under his bunk.
Secured, that is, until someone stole one of the cookies.
[First of three parts, posted daily. Continue reading the second part here.]