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What My Childhood Camp Crush Foreshadowed About Modern Dating
Lessons in Connection and Disconnection Across the Years
How do fleeting connections shape our understanding of love and relationships as adults?
The year was 2001, and my cabin-mates and I were finishing our lunches at a summer camp in California’s Sierra Nevadas. Counselors passed around a hat filled with tiny pieces of paper. Each contained a different camper’s name.
Whoever’s name we drew would become our secret buddy. Throughout the week, we’d give the person gifts, delivered by our choice of designated “secret messenger.” At the closing campfire, campers would reveal their identities, bestowing one final gift and a “buddy hug” to be witnessed by all.
My eleven-year-old boy-crazy self loved the idea of secret buddying a person she was crushing on. She hoped the name on her paper would belong to a dimpled cutie. The bucket made the rounds, arriving at our table as my cabin-mates and I finished our coleslaw salads. In went my hand. Out came a name.
Curtis Simon.
“Do you know who this is?” I asked my cabin-mate Denise. She pointed to a table of pre-teen boys, past the counselors to our right.
