Kira Disapproves

I title this post with that, my favorite quote from Maureen, because this one is a bit emotional. Bear with me.

***

Yesterday when I was getting dressed, I noticed that both my underwear and my t-shirt had my name on them.

KIRA WALSH.

My mother must have been the one to order the iron-on tags, probably familiar to anyone who ever went to boarding school, gym class, or summer camp. Probably, I need to shop for new clothes. I was thirteen or fourteen years old when I went to the summer camp that necessitated tagging all my clothes. And I turned twenty-four last month.

But more than shopping, the name tags got me thinking about planning. I remember the planning and work that went in to putting my name on all my clothes. I remember shopping with Mom and with Margie for stuff to bring to camp. Laying out all my clothes all over the room. Opening the ironing board with a scream of metal against metal. Lying out each garment, determining the best place for the name tag, cutting the tags to size, holding the iron for just the right amount of time. The red t-shirt I inherited from my Mom still has a faint, triangular burn from where I held the tip of the iron in place a second too long.

That summer wasn’t the first time I went to summer camp. The year before, Katie and I went to camp together for a week and it was the best experience ever. Probably the closest thing to Clarion West in my life that wasn’t Clarion West.

But that next summer, I went to camp for three weeks instead of one. And I went without Katie who was on a cruise to Alaska with her family. And this time, the clothes needed name tags because we would send them out along with everyone else’s to the laundry during the second week.

All that tagging, packing, planning. But things didn’t go as I expected.

The very first day of camp, I arrived to find that I had been put in a cabin full of girls my age, which meant everyone was a grade below me. To make matter worse, I was the only girl in the cabin who hadn’t been at the first three-week session. The girls all missed their best friends who had left. The resented me for showing up to take their place.

The first morning I spilled fruit juice all over the most popular girl in the cabin during breakfast. There was no coming back from that. I was the weird girl. The replacement. The loser.

Things went from bad to worse. It was theater camp, and my audition didn’t go well. The camp brochure had painted a rosy picture of talented counselors who would help you prepare an audition song. Instead, we were given two hours notice to choose our own song to sing acapella and herded through a drafty camps building with only sixty seconds to sing. I got nervous and bombed the audition, and I got shuffled into the chorus of my least favorite show ever.

During the second week, I went to one of the enrichment activities I’d signed up for, “On Camera Acting,” and I was one of only two people who showed up. My instructor asked us if we had done and on-camera work, and learned that my companion had more credits than him in some soap opera. Insulted, he stood up and left, dumping his water bottle over our heads as he went. No joke. Later that week, I accidentally left my shampoo in the shower and my cabin mates used it to clean the showers. I was constantly walking into rooms only to hear my name being whispered in hushed tones.
The next week, I developed a 103 degree fever and went to the campus infirmary. Since I escaped my cabin, it was the best part of the trip. They sent me away when my fever went back to normal, and I walked back to the main campus. My cabin came into sight over the hill just in time for me to see the laundry van pulling away. My bunkmates had attempted to send some of my things along since I missed the van. Whether on purpose or not, they sent mostly my clean clothes. The name tags, the carefully placed, carefully planned name tags failed to save me from spending most of camp with dirty clothes. None of the rest of stuff ever did make it to the laundry. One of the counselors took pity on my during the third week and let me wash a single load in the coin-operated machine in the counselor’s activity room.

The last couple of weeks have been like camp. I planned and planned for this semester. I kept calendars. I got paperwork filled out so I could do a Directed Study and I applied for grants and conferences. Everything was set.

And nothing has quite gone right.

Every time I think I’m getting to the point where things will calm down or go right or get fun, things fall apart again. I’m not going to go into specifics. It’s been mostly little stuff, with a few big exceptions. And many of my friends are going through much worse. My prayers and thoughts are with them. Thinking of them and worrying about them has added to my unease.

I’m not writing about camp, or, vaguely, about what’s going on now because I need to share specifics. I’m writing because when I saw that name tag, I took a deep breath and reminded myself that camp seems far away now. That I survived it fine, and even got a tan. That I learned to love silk-screening and I swung on a trapeze one day. Things will get better.

Things will get better, but just now I’m needing some time to cope and to regroup, and that’s been hard because I like to take care of myself. I like to iron my own name tags into my clothes. I like to solve my own problems and nurse my own worries. But things have been so bumpy the past few weeks, that I haven’t quite been able to do that. I’ve had to ask for help and whine and complain, and that’s been really hard. But every single person I’ve had to lean on has stepped up without fanfare or I-told-you-so’s or any kind of judgment at all. You’ve all bent over backwards without letting me feel like I’m putting you out. You’ve all offered advice and help and held your tongue when I refused to listen or wasn’t ready to hear.

While I was at that horrible camp, I thought it would never end. I thought things would never get better, and they didn’t while I was there. But once I left, it didn’t linger too long. Katie came back from Alaska. I had good stories to tell. My parents took me to Denny’s on the drive home. I still get a newsletter from the camp every year and every now and then I write horrible reviews of it online. The only truly indelible part of the experience was those name tags.

I hope the only part of the last month or so that I’ll never be able to shake will be what I learned about being able to count on my friends and family.

Thanks.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 22:19 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.