By the time you read this, you are likely finding whatever school supplies can be salvaged from last year. You’re plotting how to get your kid on a normal sleep schedule. You’re cleaning sunscreen out from the bottom of backpacks.
And your camp director is preparing for another spectacular week of camp. His summer is not over. Sure, it’s just one or two more weeks, but he knows that those last two weeks could count for everything. Those last two weeks are, for some kids, the first (and only) two weeks that matter. And (here I apply some superstitious spitting) anything can happen in two weeks.
I write this in honor of the camp director.
It is easy to love a good counselor. It is easy for the child to adore the smiling face, the cheering, the patience, the fun. It’s easy for parents to feel gratitude and respect when their campers are mostly well-sunscreened, incredibly happy and sleeping like a log.
But the good camp director is a person you only talk to a couple times all summer. He is calm and upbeat when we are harried and anxious. His success is measured by the trust of his staff (mostly teenagers), but also by our trust in his counselors (again, heaven help us — mostly teenagers).
A good director is one who comes up through the camp system because he loves it: the energy, the joy, the incredible challenge, and the immeasurable and indefinable gift that is working with children. And like any job we love: the reward for good work is more work.
I know because I did that myself, and frankly, I couldn’t hack it. Now I watch camp from the sidelines. I work in the same building as J Camp and, however much the hundreds of children might distract from the goings-on of daily business, I will never not love the smell of sunscreen and chlorine and the clomping of feet in the stairwell. Wherever my kids go in the summer, I will always have only the deepest respect and admiration for a J Camp director.
Cool as a cucumber with a walkie on his hip, he coaches a hundred teens to be the young adults that we — the parents — need them to be. He fields phone calls ranging from the vital to the absurd at all hours of the day and night. He loses sleep waiting for the morning that the state licensing department shows up. He reshuffles schedules at a moment’s notice to bring 500 children inside from outdoor programming when it rains. He works with HR to coordinate travel, paperwork and homesickness of counselors from overseas. He enforces rules that frustrate the majority while protecting the minority (hello, peanut-free peanut butter!). He shops at Walmart at 11:30 p.m. to make sure there’s enough lanyard cord for the 3rd and 4th grade girls.
And he does it all in the name of youth development and safe care disguised as fun and built on Jewish values. Few things are as good for the Jews as an outstanding Jewish day camp that welcomes children of all faiths. But that’s another article.
I’ve had my share of tough jobs. I operated a senior living community at the height of COVID, for one. But nothing has ever come close to the three summers I spent as the director of camps at The J.
Congratulations to The J on another spectacular summer (still a few weeks to go — repeat superstitious spitting here). And thank you, Barry Birkmeyer, for your tireless work, seen and unseen, to create outstanding experiences for our children. This community is stronger for it, and this parent in particular is grateful.
