October 27, 2003

Today while driving home from the City, I heard on NPR a certain Dennis Dockstader of Arrowbear Music Camp explaining how he intends to stay and help stop the fires from hurting the camp.

Dennis, a grizzled-looking yet soft man, retains the gentleness of the hippie era without that fresh-from-outer-spaceness. He runs a camp in Running Springs, California near Arrowhead and Big Bear. At the camp, pre-high school kids attend one to two week sessions where they practice music, sing, eat, cavort, and try to hook up.

It�s a co-ed camp, though the boys and girls are separated. The boys, for some reason, get the crappier cabins. In either case, from when I was about 9 to about 15, I attended those sessions and malpracticed music, sang off-key, ate, hardly cavorted, and prayed I would hook up.

It was there that I had my first �slow dance� with a girl (her name was Heather), my first �lean� (she leaned against me at a campfire), and my first experience with backrubs (not with Heather, unfortunately).

In many ways it was a horrible experience, where I learned that I was too far behind the other kids to play the violin, yet I longed for those �firsts� to happen again.

Here's to hoping that Arrowbear, and Dennis, will stil be able to give some other kids their "firsts."