F-Train
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008I’m sitting on the Manhattan bound F Train from Brooklyn. In the winter, the tunnels are a warm welcome from the cold wintery wind, but in the summer, they exaggerate the heat and I half expect to walk out of the tunnels into a Florida swamp. Needless to say, I celebrate when I can see the lights of the approaching train with its wonderful air conditioning …Wait, the Roosevelt Island stop. I’ve been meaning to get here for years now! And there it goes…well, anyway, just to give you an idea of how much I appreciate the A/C right now, choose whichever one of these is most gratifying to you:
1) The first taste of food after the Yom Kippur fast
2) The first taste of food after the Passover fast (I don’t care what you say,…for us poor American Ashkenazim it IS a fast)
3) The first few breaths when your nose clears up after a cold
4) Waking up halfway through the night and realizing you still have many more hours to sleep before you have to get up
5) First waterbreak when two-a-day training starts in St. Louis August heat
Anyway, you get the idea. Oh great! My “e” key just broke on my laptop. I better get to the point.
The point is that I’m sitting on the F-train going into Manhattan. I’m on my way home from Capital Camps in Waynesboro, PA where I spent three days with a really incredible group of future songleaders, and their awesome songleader Shimon Smith. Together we spent three intense days working on songleader skills culminating in a song session led entirely by the songleaders. If it wasn’t impressive enough that everyone in the group was giving up menucha to work, after just three days (albeit intense work days), they had the whole camp on their feet, dancing and singing along. It was fantastic.
(By the way, you have no idea how many e’s you use until your “e” key breaks. I type all of the letters in a regular fashion but every time I want to type an “e”, I have to slam the spot on my keyboard where the “e” used to be with my middle finger. It’s like juggling with 2 feathers and one bowling ball…)
At any rate, Capital Camps is set in the mountains of Southeastern Pennsylvania. The camp literally takes up a significant part of a mountain and the scenery is breathtaking. In fact, this whole summer tour hasn’t had any shortages of scenic views. On our way to the Apache Day Camps a few weeks ago we passed through a storm that ended with a double rainbow that lasted over 15 minutes. I watched the lake during dusk sitting in the tayatron at Kutz. I’m a sucker for this type of natural beauty.
Now I’m back in the city of cities which I call home. It’s such a rapid dichotomy but I love it. Manhattan is all about instant gratification and it can be easy to get caught up in the hassles of everyday life. At camp, there’s little or no phone service, personal computers, or anything else that can bother you. At camp, the only concern is that you spend as much time as humanly possible with your best friends ever. Camp, for me, helps me regain some perspective, remember what’s important, or as Adam Duritz says “Get right to the heart of matters, It’s the heart that matters more.” At camp you can literally stop and smell the roses. Living in the city makes you appreciate all of these things so much.
There is one thing, though, that camp doesn’t have, or at least that camp didn’t have when I was a camper. Something that camp helps me appreciate about living in civilization. One tiny little miracle that I will miss more than ever as I leave again tomorrow…my air conditioner.
